Protests stir fear of virus’s spread
Crowds aren’t socially distancing, using masks, Minnesota official says
LOS ANGELES — The protests sweeping across U.S. cities after a black man died in police custody in Minnesota have sent shudders through the health community and elevated fears that the crowds will lead to a new surge in cases of the coronavirus.
Some leaders appealing for calm in places where crowds smashed storefronts and destroyed police cars in recent nights have been handing out masks and warning demonstrators that they are putting themselves at risk.
Minnesota’s governor said Saturday that too many protesters weren’t socially distancing or wearing masks after heeding the call earlier in the week.
The demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd, who died after a white Minneapolis officer is seen on video pressing a knee in
to his neck, are coming at a time when many cities were beginning to relax stay-athome orders.
That’s especially worrisome for health experts who fear that silent carriers of the virus who have no symptoms could unwittingly infect others at gatherings where people are packed in and not wearing masks.
“Whether they’re fired up or not that doesn’t prevent them from getting the virus,” said Bradley Pollock, chairman of the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of California, Davis.
Even for the many protesters who have been wearing masks, masks don’t guarantee protection from the coronavirus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends cloth masks because they can make it more difficult for infected people to spread the virus — but they are not designed to protect the person wearing the mask from getting it.
The U.S. has been the worst-hit nation in the coronavirus outbreak, with more than 1.7 million cases and more 103,000 deaths, according to a tally kept by Johns Hopkins University.
PANDEMIC REMINDER
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said after another night of unrest in Minneapolis that many protesters wearing masks were simply trying to hide their identities and “cause confusion and take advantage of this situation.”
“I will continue to stress, because it seems like a lifetime ago: We are still in the middle of a pandemic and passed 1,000 deaths yesterday. We still have hospitals on the verge of being overrun with covid-19,” he said.
The state’s health commissioner had warned just days earlier that the large protests were almost certain to fuel new cases of the virus. Minnesota reported 35 deaths Thursday, a single-day high since the start of the outbreak, and 29 more on Friday.
But it wasn’t just protesters at risk — unmasked police officers stood within arm’s reach of shouting demonstrators. In Atlanta, Police Chief Erika Shields, not wearing a mask, waded into a crowd while she listened to people air frustrations.
When Los Angeles officials announced earlier in the week that the city was relaxing stay-at-home orders and reopening stores, they said political protests could resume but with a cap of 100 people.
Several hundred people showed up for a protest organized by Black Lives Matter-LA and later shut down a freeway. Most wore masks, but many did not observe a buffer zone.
Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said Friday that was an ongoing concern.
“Show respect for each other by putting on that face covering so that your respiratory droplets aren’t unintentionally getting into somebody else’s mouth, nose or eyes,” she said.
Those same concerns surfaced Saturday in Paris when unions flaunted a ban on large gatherings at a march to protest conditions against undocumented workers and migrants. Police used tear gas to disperse the crowds and said they had banned the march because of the “health risks that such an event is likely to generate.”
EU URGES RETHINK
Meanwhile, the European Union on Saturday urged President Donald Trump to rethink his decision to terminate the U.S. relationship with the World Health Organization as spiking infection rates in India and elsewhere reinforced that the pandemic is far from contained.
Trump on Friday charged that the WHO didn’t respond adequately to the pandemic and accused the U.N. agency of being under China’s “total control.” The U.S. is the largest source of financial support for the WHO, and its exit is expected to significantly weaken the organization.
In a joint statement, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said that “as the world continues to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, the main task for everyone is to save lives, and contain and mitigate this pandemic.”
“Now is the time for enhanced cooperation and common solutions,” the statement added. “Actions that weaken international results must be avoided. We urge the U.S. to reconsider its announced decision.”
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told Germany’s Funke media group that Trump’s decision was the “wrong signal at the wrong time.”
Jens Spahn, Germany’s health minister, tweeted Saturday that Trump’s decision to sever ties with the organization was “a disappointing backlash for International Health.”
Spahn added that the WHO “needs reform” if it is to make “any difference for the future.” Germany will take over the rotating EU presidency in July, and the minister said finding a way for the EU to “take a leading role and engage more financially” with the U.N. agency would be prioritized.
South Africa’s health minister, Zweli Mkhize, called Trump’s move “unfortunate.”
“Certainly, when faced with a serious pandemic, you want all nations in the world to be particularly focused … on one common enemy,” he told reporters, according to The Associated Press.
NYC RAISES BENEFITS
In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill Saturday granting death benefits to the families of police officers, public health workers and other front-line workers who have died of covid-19.
“You gave your lives for us, we will be there for your families going forward,” Cuomo said as he signed the legislation at his daily briefing on the virus.
The bill passed by state lawmakers last week provides an accidental death benefit that is more substantial than the regular death benefit that public workers’ families receive. Dozens of police officers, public health workers, transit workers and paramedics have died of covid-19 in the months since New York became the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States.
Cuomo said 67 people died of covid-19 in the state Friday, the same number as Thursday and a steep drop from the height of New York’s outbreak in April when more than 700 people were dying daily.
In China, where the virus outbreak began, only four new confirmed cases were reported Saturday, all stemming from outside the country.
More than 6 million coronavirus infections have been reported worldwide, with more than 367,000 deaths and more than 2.5 million recoveries, according to the Johns Hopkins tally. The true death toll is widely believed to be significantly higher, with experts saying many victims died of the virus without ever being tested for it.
Elite sporting events will be allowed to resume in England starting Monday, but without spectators, paving the way for the planned June 17 return of the Premier League, the world’s richest soccer competition.
England’s deputy chief medical officer Jonathan VanTam warned that the situation overall remained precarious. “I believe this is also a very dangerous moment,” he said. “We have to get this right.”
India registered another record single-day jump of 7,964 cases and 265 deaths. The government had been expected to end a 2-monthold nationwide lockdown but instead extended measures in some areas because of the coronavirus outbreaks. The nation of 1.3 billion people now has the highest number of fatalities in Asia, excluding Iran, despite the largest lockdown in the world.
The country’s death toll quadrupled in less than a month, accelerating by more than 1,000 over the past week, while infections have been soaring at a similar pace. Government experts have begun to acknowledge the outbreak won’t peak until June or July.
ITALY CASES DOWN
Italy added 111 new victims to its death toll and nearly 420 new infections, in line with its recent daily tallies, suggesting that the virus is under control nearly four weeks after the country began carefully loosening a strict lockdown in the onetime European epicenter of the pandemic.
Pope Francis prayed Saturday for an end to the coronavirus pandemic and the development of a vaccine as he presided over an outdoor gathering that signaled a semblance of normalcy returning to the Vatican.
He prayed that doctors and nurses are protected from becoming infected themselves and for God to “illuminate the minds of the men and women of science, so that they find the right solutions to beat this illness.”
He begged world leaders to act wisely and generously to provide social and economic relief for the many workers who have lost jobs. And he called for the “enormous sums of money used to grow and perfect armaments be instead used to fund research to prevent similar catastrophes in the future.”
Francis was joined in the Vatican Gardens by a representative sampling of people on the front lines of the emergency: a doctor, a nurse, a hospital chaplain, a pharmacist, a journalist and a civil protection official.
South Korea closed hundreds of schools that had reopened days earlier — and postponed the opening of many others — after a spike in cases of the coronavirus.
The country had started to stage the opening of schools in the past week, instituting social distancing and prevention measures to prevent spread of the virus.
But according to the Korea Times, hundreds of schools were closed again because of high infection rates in their communities. It cited the Ministry of Education as saying that 838 schools of the 20,902 nationwide that were supposed to reopen Wednesday did not, including in Seoul, and hundreds closed Thursday in Seoul, Bucheon and other cities.
School districts in the United States that have been closed for months are now trying to figure out when and how they can reopen safely. Some are watching how other countries are handling the reopening of schools, including South Korea.
Information for this article was contributed by Brian Melley, John Seewer, Karen Matthews and Nicole Winfield of The Associated Press; by Karla Adam and Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post; and by Bibhudatta Pradhan and Sudhi Ranjan Sen of Bloomberg News.