New Orleans to allow live music indoors for first time since pandemic began

The mayor of New Orleans will relax COVID-19 restrictions across the city on Friday, bringing changes including the first reopening of live music venues since they were shut down last year.

At a press conference reported by Nola.com, Mayor LaToya Cantrell (D) said that while limits on indoor and outdoor gatherings were not increasing for now, the city was on the right track to begin reopening entertainment venues including bars and clubs.

Bars without food permits will be allowed to serve at 50 percent indoor capacity, up from 25 percent, according to the new guidelines, and live music can now be played indoors.

“We stand before you all to say that we are doing good,” the mayor said, according to Nola.com. “And we are doing well because people have demonstrated civic trust, and they have been doing the right thing to get us where we are today.”

“The numbers are what they are because people have been doing the right thing. we have been putting in the work,” she added, according to local news affiliate WWL-TV.

Health officials added at the press conference on Wednesday that the city’s positive test rate for COVID-19 has dropped below 2 percent.

The changes come just over a month after the city opted to allow live music concerts to resume at outdoor venues.

“We probably had one of the best live music scenes in the country — if not the world — and to see it just put on hold is heartbreaking, and I know it’s really a struggle for a lot of my fellow musicians,” Reid Wick, a local musician and member of the Recording Academy, told a local NBC affiliate last month.