June 8, 2020 | 11:15am | Updated June 8, 2020 | 12:09pm
Each day of protests across the US could kill up to 540 people from coronavirus, an expert said while blaming mass arrests and cops’ use of tear gas for “exacerbating” the spread of the virus.
“At the high end … we’d expect 54k downstream infections and 540 eventual deaths,” warned Trevor Bedford, who has been tracking the pandemic since January.
“I’d give a highly speculative ‘more than 50 and less than 500‘ estimate for the number of eventual deaths for each day of protests,” he added in a series of tweets Sunday night modeling the potential dangers of the mass protests.
“These deaths will likely be disproportionately among black individuals,” he also warned.
Bedford, a virus expert at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said the numbers do not represent “a massive spike in cases” given the US has had almost 2 million infections and more than 110,000 deaths as of Monday morning.
“But it’s still large in absolute numbers,” he said.
The scientist wrote that there is “no doubt that mass gatherings facilitate transmission,” with the concern so bad, New York is opening 15 testing centers solely for protesters.
“Wearing masks and protesting outdoors has to help,” Bedford wrote in a separate thread — while putting the onus on police.
“Current responses of tear gas, pepper spray and jailing after curfew are actively exacerbating it,” he wrote.
Bedford’s warning comes as other studies say tear gas could increase the chances of coronavirus infections — with asymptomatic carriers also likely to suffer worse from the chemicals, Discover magazine noted.
“Police must seek responses that minimize transmission potential … Deescalation is even more critical in light of COVID,” Bedford said of the controversy over heavy-handed tactics in some states.
Bedford fears the protests are just a general trend that “feels as though we’ve largely given up on controlling the epidemic.”
“Because of the pandemic, we’re in a terrible situation where addressing systemic racism and bringing economy back online carry health risks,” he tweeted.
“It is a cruel twist that the US’s inability to control the epidemic has made it dangerous to protest entrenched police brutality,” he said, calling the “harms of systemic racism … real and utterly pernicious.”
