“With protests, there is a high risk of spread in the sense that people are in close quarters with each other, they're screaming and yelling,” said Abraar Karan, a public health expert and internist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. .

The California Department of Public Health published recommendations for protesting while maintaining social distance.

“I am concerned that people coming together in protest could lead to increased transmission of coronavirus,” said Rich Besser, a former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who now heads the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

“There's no question when you put hundreds or thousands of people together in close proximity when we've got this virus all over the streets, it's not healthy,” Hogan said.

The virus has already impacted brown and black people at far greater rates than whites, for a host of reasons: Minorities are more likely to live in densely populated areas where air pollution that leads to underlying conditions is worse.

Black workers are disproportionately represented in grocery stores, convenience and drug stores, public transit, health care, child care, and the social services sector, the report found.

That people of color would take the risk to protest even in the face of the outbreak underscores just how much the double assault of a virus that disproportionately impacts their communities and a killing so brazenly and wantonly carried out on camera has set off long-simmering tensions