Following on the heels of Sonoma County Tuesday and six other Bay Area counties on Monday, Napa County has issued its own shelter-in-place order for residents, despite there not yet being a confirmed case of COVID-19 in the county. And as of Wednesday, we're learning that BottleRock, the Memorial Day weekend music festival in downtown Napa, is being rescheduled to October.
The new dates for BottleRock will be October 2 to 4, and the organizers announced that all the headliners have confirmed they'll still be there.
They said in a statement:
We made this decision with the safety and best interests of our fans, musicians, partners, employees, and community being paramount. We are committed to putting on the festival to not only share great music and the incredible Napa Valley hospitality, but because it’s vitally important to the livelihood of all those who make BottleRock Napa Valley the festival it is.
It is with great pleasure we can announce that all our headliners, including Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stevie Nicks, Dave Matthews Band, Miley Cyrus, Khalid, Anderson .Paak & The Free Nationals, Zedd and more are confirmed for the rescheduled dates. Additional lineup updates will be announced as soon as possible.
This means that BottleRock will be happening one week before the newly rescheduled Coachella festival in Southern California, which will play over two weekends starting October 9.
The organizers said they planned to reach out to ticket holders in the coming weeks about exchanges and returns.
The postponement of BottleRock reflects the acknowledgement that the coronavirus threat will not have abated by late May — long after the current shelter-in-place orders have expired, though they are likely to be extended.
Napa County played host to two of the Bay Area's first coronavirus patients — two passengers evacuated from Japan who had been on the virus-stricken Diamond Princess cruise ship were hospitalized in isolation at Queen of the Valley Hospital in mid-February. But so far, no county resident has turned up as positive for COVID-19. It should be noted that the resident population of Napa County is estimated to be around 141,000 people, while the population of neighboring Sonoma County is over half a million.
The county issued its shelter-in-place order Wednesday afternoon, prohibiting all non-essential travel, non-essential business, and non-essential gatherings of "any number of individuals," and it's "punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both."
The order goes to great lengths to define what "essential business" is, and interestingly there is no specific exemption for the county's winemaking industry — though there is a vague exemption for farming that they may fall under.
Previously: Lockdown is Here: Bay Areawide ‘Shelter in Place’ Orders Go Into Effect at Midnight
