What We Know About Protests and New Coronavirus Cases
There doesn’t appear to be a spike in cases in cities that held protests
It’s been about four weeks since demonstrators began protesting the murder of George Floyd and the racist police brutality that has killed countless Black people across the country. During that time, concerns were raised that the protests would lead to a spike in cases. That data took a while to surface because it takes roughly three to 14 days after infection for symptoms to show up. Now, the numbers and early analyses are beginning to trickle in, and so far they suggest that protests have not been a major factor in case increases.
Experts have made it clear that it will be extremely difficult to peg any spike in cases to protests because the protests began around the same time that the country began reopening. The protests also began soon after Memorial Day, when many people relaxed their social distancing efforts. New research that broadly compares the number of positive cases in cities that did and didn’t host protests, however, is revealing some interesting patterns.
This month, researchers with the National Bureau of Economic Research published a working paper showing that the Black Lives Matters protests didn’t cause a spike in Covid-19 cases in the three weeks after they…
