Are protests unsafe? What experts say may depend on who’s protesting what
and essential messier 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 argue for loosening the ground rules for the George Floyd marches risks sounding hypocritical.
“We allowed thousands of people to die alone,” he said. “We buried people by Zoom. Now all of a sudden we are saying, never mind?”
There are other conflicting imperatives. Lockdowns, and the shuttering of businesses and schools and enforcing social isolation, take a toll on the working class and poor, and the emotionally fraught who live on the economic margins.
The lockdown is justified, most epidemiologists say, even as it requires acknowledging a moral truth: To save many hundreds of thousands of lives, we risk wrecking the lives of a smaller number of Americans, as businesses fail and people lose jobs and grow desolate and depressed.
The pandemic has also brought an increase in deaths from heart attacks and diabetes during this period.
“Have people died because of the closed economy? No doubt,” said Lurie, the Brown University epidemiologist. “And that pain is real, and should not be dismissed. But you won’t have a healthy economy until you have healthy people.”
There is another epidemiological reality: No one quite understands the path of this idiosyncratic virus and how and when it strikes. The public health risks presented by the protests are not easily separated from the broader risks taken as governors, in fits and starts, 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.
“To separate out those causes, when we look, will be very difficult,” Lurie said.
Still, he admitted to some worries. He said he took his daughter to a protest early in June and felt a chaser of regret in its wake.
“We felt afterward that the risk we incurred probably exceeded the entire risk in the previous two months,” he said. “We undid some very hard work, and I don’t see how actions like that can help in battling this epidemic, honestly.” obscures a