With coronavirus near Fort Worth, will Main Street Arts Festival, other events go on?

Now that North Texas has its first positive test for coronavirus, residents and visitors in the Dallas-Fort Worth region are likely to ask whether many upcoming public gatherings will go on as scheduled.

As of Monday, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram could find no festivals in the Tarrant County area that had been canceled.

Here are some of the big events coming up:

• Food and Wine Festival, April 2-5. This is the seventh year for the event, which caters to food and drink connoisseurs 21 and older. “While we have every reason to believe that the Festival will go on as planned and have no changes to announce, our team wants to assure attendees that we’re in close communication with the Tarrant County Health Department and other authorities who are monitoring local conversations around the coronavirus and its impact on DFW area events, Russell Kirkpatrick, festival co-founder and Reata restaurant general manager, said in an email.
• Main Street Arts Festival, April 16-19. The annual event, hosted by Downtown Fort Worth Inc., is one of the biggest in Tarrant County. Artists from all over the United States flock to downtown Fort Worth to display and sell their wares. “All lights are green at this point,” Andy Taft, president of organizer Downtown Fort Worth Inc., said in an interview. “We haven’t heard anything (about cancellations) from any artists at all. Unlike South By Southwest and some of these big conferences, ours is a very local and regional event.”
• Six Flags Over Texas. The park is a popular Spring Break destination. Six Flags officials did not return calls about how attendance is going so far at the Arlington amusement park, or whether the schedule might be altered.
  
  
• Mayfest, April 30-May 3. The event along the Trinity River near downtown Fort Worth features music, food, drinks and dancing for all ages. So far, all indications are that it will go on as planned. However, Mayfest was canceled in 2009 because of an outbreak of swine flu.

This story was originally published March 10, 2020 at 10:37 AM.

Gordon Dickson

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Gordon Dickson was a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram who covered transportation, growth, urban planning, aviation, real estate, jobs and business trends. He is originally from El Paso.