Focus Live: Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield has confirmed New Zealand's seventh and eighth positive Covid-19 coronavirus cases.
Two weeks of stage-building in preparation for Homegrown will now be dismantled, after the festival was postponed due to concerns over coronavirus.
Homegrown organisers today issued a statement confirming the music festival will not go ahead on Wellington's waterfront this weekend as scheduled, and has been postponed until later thisyear.
Wellington's Homegrown festival will not go ahead this weekend. Photo / Instagram.
"Homegrown will not be running as planned this weekend, 21st March, 2020," the statement reads.
"The decision has been made based on conversations with authorities and best practice advice given around COVID-19 and mass gatherings.
"Organisers will be postponing the festival for later in 2020 (date to be advised)."
A Government announcement is pending on mass gatherings leaving a question mark hanging over CubaDupa, which is scheduled for next weekend.
Homegrown organiser Andrew Tuck told the Herald he spoke to the Ministry of Health yesterday about basic guidelines around what potential new mass gathering protocols would look like.
About 23,000 people were expected to attend the festival from across the country.
"Obviously in a festival you could be standing next to somebody for an hour watching a show and in turn, you're less than a metre apart, you could be a couple of centimetres apart", Tuck said.
If someone was contagious, it would be difficult to trace who they had been in contact with, Tuck said.
The call was made to postpone the festival this morning ahead of any Government announcement on mass gathering restrictions.
"I don't see the situation or the rules becoming better they're only going to get tighter and more stringent and that's obviously because they're trying to stop any sort of outbreak or community effects", Tuck said.
Two weeks of stage building is being dismantled on Wellington's waterfront after the festival was cancelled. Photo / Facebook.
Suppliers would be paid but the 1250 staff scheduled to work on the day of the festival would no longer have that work, he said.
The current priority was dismantling two weeks worth of building work in preparation for the festival and then organisers would work on any refund process, Tuck said.
"We've got staging crews coming back in, scaffolders coming back in, marquee crews, they all start coming in now and pulling out their gear."
Events like Homegrown not going ahead would have a significant impact, he said.
"All events throughout the country bring a massive economic impact into whatever city or town they're in. I think the industry will struggle over this next period of time with the inability to be able to have these gatherings."
