As the pandemic took hold, most epidemiologists have had clear prohibitions to combat it: no students in classrooms, no in-person religious services, no visits to sick relatives in hospitals, no large public gatherings.
So when conservative anti-blockade protesters gathered on the steps of the state capitol in places like Columbus, Ohio, and Lansing, Michigan, in April and May, epidemiologists scolded them and predicted growing infections. When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp relaxed the restrictions on businesses in late April as tests were delayed and infections increased, public health circles spoke of that state’s acceptance of human sacrifice. .
And then, the brutal murder of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis on May 25 changed everything.
Soon, the streets across the country were filled with tens of thousands of people in a mass protest movement that continues to this day, with protests and the collapse of statues. And instead of denouncing mass meetings, more than 1,300 public health officials signed a letter of support on May 30, and many joined the protests.
That reaction, and the contrast with epidemiologists’ previous fervent support for the shutdown, raised an awkward question: Did the public health council in a pandemic depend on whether people approved of the mass meeting in question? For many, the answer seemed to be “yes”.
“The way the coronavirus public health narrative was reversed overnight is a lot like … politicizing science,” essayist and journalist Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote in The Guardian last month. “What should we do with these types of whiplash-inducing messages?”
There are, of course, differences: A large majority of George Floyd protesters wore masks in many cities, even if they often overcrowded. Conversely, many anti-blockade protesters refused to wear masks, and their rallying cry was directly contrary to instructions from public health officials.
And in practical terms, no team of epidemiologists could have stopped the waves of passionate protesters, more than the protests against the blockade could have blocked.
Still, the divergence in their own reactions left some of the country’s prominent epidemiologists struggling with deeper questions of morality, responsibility, and risk.
Catherine Troisi, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston, studies Covid-19. When, wearing a mask and standing on the brink of a large wave of people, she attended a recent protest in Houston supporting Mr. Floyd, a sense of contradiction drew her.
“I certainly condemned the protests against the blockade at the time, and I am not condemning the protests now, and I am struggling with that,” he said. “I have a hard time articulating why that’s okay.”
Mark Lurie, a professor of epidemiology at Brown University, described a similar struggle.
“Instinctively, many of us in public health have a strong desire to act against accumulated generations of racial injustice,” said Professor Lurie. “But we must be honest: a few weeks earlier, we were criticizing protesters for arguing to open up the economy and saying it was dangerous behavior.”
“I’m still dealing with it.”
To which Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, added: “Am I concerned that mass protests will fuel more cases? Yes. But a dam broke, and that cannot be stopped. ”
Some public health scientists publicly rejected the conflicting feelings of their colleagues, saying the country now faces a stark moral choice. The letter signed by more than 1,300 epidemiologists and health workers urged Americans to take a “consciously anti-racist” stance and framed the difference between anti-lockdown protesters and protesters in moral, ideological and racial terms.
Those who protested the stay-at-home orders were “rooted in white nationalism and were contrary to respect for black lives,” the letter said.
On the contrary, he said, those who protest against systemic racism “must be supported.”
“As public health advocates,” they declared, “we do not condemn these meetings as risky for the transmission of Covid-19. We support them as vital to national public health.”
So far there is no firm evidence that protests against police violence led to notable spikes in infection rates. A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found no overall increase in infections, but could not rule out that infections may have increased in the demographic age of protesters. Health officials in Houston and Los Angeles have suggested that the protests there led to an increase in infections, but have provided no data. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has instructed contact trackers not to ask if infected people attended the protests.
The 10 epidemiologists interviewed for this article said that almost daily marches and demonstrations will almost certainly lead to some transmission. The police use of tear gas and pepper spray, and the concentration of protesters in police vans and buses, puts people even more at risk.
“In all likelihood, some infections occurred in the protests; the question is how much, “said Professor Lurie.” No major new evidence has emerged to suggest that the protests were super-spreading events. “
The coronavirus has infected 2.89 million Americans, and at least 129,800 have died.
The virus has affected African Americans and Latinos with a particular ferocity, hospitalizing those populations at more than four times the rate of white Americans. Many face underlying health problems and are more likely than most Americans to live in densely populated housing and to work on the front lines of this epidemic. As a result, Latinos and blacks are dying at rates much higher than those of white Americans.
African-American Mary Travis Bassett served as the New York City Commissioner of Health and now directs the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. She noted that even before Covid-19, black Americans were sicker and died more than two years earlier, on average, than white Americans.
And he noted that police violence has cast a long shadow on African Americans. From the auction block to the plantations and the centuries of lynchings carried out with the complicity of the local police, blacks have suffered the devastating effects of state power.
He acknowledged that the current protests are fraught with moral complications, including the possibility that a young person who is on the march for justice will come home and infect a mother, aunt or grandfather without realizing it. “If there is an elder in the home, that person should be protected as much as possible,” said Professor Bassett.
But he said the opportunity to make a breakthrough transcends such worries about the virus. “Racism has been killing people much longer than Covid-19,” he said. “The willingness to say that we all bear the burden of that deeply moves me.”
Others have a more cautious view of moral gambling. Nicholas A. Christakis, a professor of social and natural sciences at Yale, noted that public health is guided by two imperatives: comfort the bereaved and tell the truth about the risks to public health, no matter how unpleasant.
These often complementary values are now in conflict. Taking to the streets to protest against injustice is to risk opening doors and letting the virus endanger tens of thousands, he said. There is a danger, he said, in stating that one moral imperative dwarfs another.
“The left and the right want to want the virus,” said Professor Christakis. “We cannot want climate change, the epidemic, or other inconvenient scientific truths.”
He said framing anti-blockade protests as dangerous and white supremacists and George Floyd’s protests as anti-racist and essential obscures a more disordered reality.
When he was a hospice doctor in Chicago and Boston, he said, he saw up close how isolation deepened the despair of the dying, a fate now suffered by many in the pandemic, with hospital visits severely restricted. For epidemiologists to turn around and advocate loosening the ground rules for George Floyd’s marches, the risks sound hypocritical.
“We allowed thousands of people to die alone,” he said. “We buried people by Zoom. Now all of a sudden we’re saying, doesn’t it matter?
There are other conflicting imperatives. The blockades, and the closure of companies and schools and the imposition of social isolation, take their toll on the working class and the poor, and on the emotional burden that lives on the economic margins.
The blockade is justified, most epidemiologists say, even when it requires acknowledging a moral truth: To save hundreds of thousands of lives, we risk destroying the lives of fewer Americans as companies fail and companies fail. people lose jobs and become desolate. Depressed.
The pandemic has also caused an increase in deaths from heart attacks and diabetes during this period.
“Have people died due to the closed economy? Without a doubt, ”said Professor Lurie, an epidemiologist at Brown University. “And that pain is real and should not be ruled out. But you won’t have a healthy economy until you have healthy people. “
There is another epidemiological reality: no one fully understands the path of this idiosyncratic virus and how and when it attacks. The public health risks presented by the protests are not easily separated from the broader risks assumed as governors, in shape and form, move to reopen state economies. The protesters represent a small stream filled with 500,000 to perhaps 800,000 people, merging with a river of millions of Americans who have begun to reenter businesses and restaurants.
“Separating those causes, when you look at it, will be very difficult,” said Professor Lurie.
Still, he admitted some concerns. He said he took his daughter to a protest in early June and felt a hunter of regret in his wake.
“We feel afterwards that the risk we incurred probably exceeded all the risk in the previous two months,” he said. “We did a very hard job, and I honestly don’t see how actions like that can help combat this epidemic.”
