Mass protests are happening around the nation for extremely good reasons—not just the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor but generations of racist policing—but they have an added element of danger during a pandemic. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti warned that the protests could become “super-spreader events,” and some public health experts echoed that concern. “All things considered, there’s little doubt that these protests will translate into increased risk of transmission for COVID-19,” Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School computational epidemiologist Maimuna Majumder told The Atlantic.
And yet. “I personally believe that these particular protests—which demand justice for black and brown bodies that have been brutalized by the police—are a necessary action,” she said. “Structural racism has been a public-health crisis for much longer than the pandemic has.”
The good news as far as coronavirus transmission and the protests goes is that they are outside, which means the virus spreads out in lots of fresh air rather than being gathered up in an enclosed space. And, unlike anti-shutdown protests a few weeks ago, many protesters are masked. The bad news, though, is a lot of things, starting with the frequency of COVID-19 transmission by asymptomatic carriers.
Protesters can help reduce the risk of transmission by making noise through drumming or playing music, public health experts said, rather than chanting and shouting, which involve exhaling lots of virus and inhaling lots of other people’s air. Majumder also recommended that protesters wear goggles and carry saline spritz, because if they are pepper sprayed: “Soothing the irritant with a sterile solution can reduce coughing and sneezing, which are some of the major pathways through which the novel coronavirus is spread.”
But as with so many of the physical dangers of these protests, the actions of police are dramatically increasing the likelihood that protests will become super-spreader events.
”If they are channeling crowds into tight spaces for security and control; if they’re removing their masks; if they’re preventing protesters from using drums or amplified music instead of using their voices, which we know are a vector for transmission; or if they’re arresting protesters and holding them in jail […] these potential activities that police are using for security and control of a protest might in themselves increase the risk of transmission of COVID,” Alexandra Phelan, a global health law professor at Georgetown, told The Atlantic.
Like Majumder, she saw the protests as important despite the pandemic—and, from a legal standpoint, said forcing them to shut down would be legally and constitutionally questionable. “Public health is about minimizing risks, and there are other risks we are thinking about minimizing with these protests, beyond COVID.”
It’s also important to remember that many states may well have had coronavirus spikes coming not because of protests but because they started reopening before it was safe to do so. If and when those spikes come, it’s important not to reflexively blame the most recent thing to happen—the protests—without thinking also of all the other bad decisions coming from state and local governments (and, heaven knows, the federal government).