Why protest in a pandemic? Black, Latino families weigh COVID-19 risks, joining the cause
At first, Christina Martinez-Setzer hesitated to attend a rally Monday in Sacramento’s Cesar E. Chavez Plaza where hundreds of people gathered to protest police use of force against people of color. She worried about COVID-19, and feared someone in her family would contract the virus that has killed more than 100,000 Americans.
But Martinez-Setzer, 40, wanted her three children — ages 10, 14 and 18 — to see “first-hand what have been peaceful gatherings ... that haven’t been fraught with chaos,” she said.
A teacher in the Sacramento City Unified School District, Martinez-Setzer weighed the risks, talked to a relative who is a nurse and decided the moment was too important to miss. Her family joined the rally, one of several in Sacramento sparked by the killing of George Floyd, a black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer.
Her choice to attend a demonstration in the midst of a pandemic is one that countless black and Latino families are faced with in the aftermath of Floyd’s death, leading some health advocates to urge them to take precautions to reduce the spread of the new coronavirus.
“My heart is just broken because, one, the fact that we still have those (police brutality) issues, but the other thing I’m looking at is young people without masks,” said Sandra Poole, interim director of California Black Health Network. “They’re not social distancing, and those kids are going to go home. They’re going to go home to mothers and grandmothers, and it’s not just the impact it’s going to have on them but their families.”
Poole said she’s concerned that infection rates will surge among African Americans, a racial group already showing disproportionately high death rates from COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the new coronavirus.
Many of the protesters say they’re aware of the virus. They brought sanitizer and face masks to give them some protection. They say they couldn’t stay home.
“This is a very touchy time. It’s a tense time and when something sits on your heart for a long time and you know what ... is right — COVID or no COVID — you go and do what’s right,” said Robert Losenicky, 26, who identifies as black, white and Latino.
COVID-19 is spread when people release virus-laden droplets as they talk, cough or sneeze. Those droplets land on other people’s faces or on surfaces they may touch. When hands touch the droplets and then the nose or mouth, the virus has an entry point.
Murray Cohen, an infectious disease epidemiologist who worked for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 21 years, said the the large masses of shouting crowds are an arena of contagion, and the nation should expect to see a spike in cases of COVID-19.
Usually, in the course of talking or breathing, exhaling, the droplets will travel maybe 2 to 3 feet, Cohen said. They’re relatively heavy, compared with other things that are in the air like the dust you see in a sunbeam, for example, he explained, and so effectively, because of gravity, they just fall.
That’s where public health officials get the scientific basis for frequent hand-washing and social distancing, Cohen said.
“When you cough or sneeze or sing or yell, you’re basically creating projectile droplets,” he said. “They’re just going to travel farther.“
Why black Americans are so vulnerable
The virus has taken a greater toll in the African American community and among some other ethnic minorities, Cohen said, not because of any genetic differences in African Americans or other people of color but because of socioeconomic differences.
David Williams, a professor at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, noted during a media teleconference that national data for the United States in 2015 revealed that, for every dollar of household income white households receive, black households receive 59 cents; Latino households, 79 cents; and Native American households, 60 cents.
He said those statistics alone do not capture the differences in economic circumstances. If you look at Federal Reserve Board data for 2016, for every dollar of wealth that white households have in the United States, black households have 10 pennies and Latino households have 12 pennies.
What that means is that they often have less access to health care because they do not have the means to pay for it, he said, but it also means that African Americans and other people of color likely will be the essential employees working outside their homes during a pandemic and thereby increasing their risk of exposure.
Because their wealth and income are lower, people of color also tend to live in denser households and denser communities, said Chet Hewitt, the chief executive officer of the Sierra Health Foundation, which funds a number of health-equity programs around the Sacramento region, and that also increases their risk of exposure.
Then add to this the fact that research has documented that racial inequalities have long existed for practically every disease for black people in America, Williams said.
Cohen echoed this point and added that the immune systems of African Americans already are often working hard because other underlying conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma already have left the body vulnerable to infections.
Minorities also experience higher levels of stress and greater clustering of stressors, Williams said. If they have one, they have another. Stress, as it turns out, has been shown to be an underlying factor in getting disease.
“In addition to the traditional stressors, minorities experience the stress of racial discrimination that has been shown to have negative effects on physical and mental health,” Williams said.
Why protest amid pandemic?
Hewitt, the health foundation leader, said that perhaps it isn’t wise or smart to go out and protest amid a pandemic but that when it has been demonstrated to you visually that your life is not worth much at all by those systems that are supposed to protect and serve us all, you will make a calculated bet on what risks you’re willing to take.
“I want people to be safe,” Hewitt said. “I want people to be mindful of the pandemic. I do not want people spreading it to more vulnerable populations in their households or beyond. But I don’t know that I would put on them the cause of the reason why black people are in the streets because, if not for that social injustice, we would not be here today.”
What’s interesting, said criminologist Alex Del Carmen, a professor at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas, is that the socioeconomic conditions that cause poor health conditions also often result in African Americans receiving harsher treatment by law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
“If you’re black or you’re a minority, you’re more likely to have parents who don’t have a college education, you are more likely to have a higher drop-out rate than nonminority, you are more likely to have less health care or access to health care than a nonminority,” Del Carmen said.
When a minority member of the community is subjected to the criminal justice system, Del Carmen said, that person is more likely to face imprisonment, is more likely to be prosecuted, is more likely to receive a longer sentence just by the mere fact that they are less likely to have the money to hire a private attorney.
That is why so many people are choosing to protest despite the risks of illness, crippling health setbacks and perhaps even death for themselves and people they love, Hewitt said.
“I’m very scared, but I’m willing to take the risk for my people,” said Jamie Lopez, 19, who identifies as Latina. She held a cardboard “Black Lives Matter” sign outside the Capitol on Monday. She wore a face mask and toted sanitizer in her backpack.
Ways to prevent spreading COVID-19
Cohen said there are some things protesters can do to reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19. Wear a bandanna, cloth or some other type of face mask, he said, to prevent your own saliva from hitting others.
“Masks protect other people from you when you’re infected, even if you’re asymptomatic and you don’t know you’re infected,” he said. “To me, they’re an important statement that ‘I care about you,’ which is why it’s an important selfish statement when people refuse to wear them.”
When protesters go home, he said, they should continue to wear the bandanna or other face cover in their homes and as they go about their lives. COVID-19 can incubate for 14 days before it manifests symptoms.
Also, institute rigorous hand-washing protocols in your household, he said, and if you develop muscle pain or body aches, do not treat with either steroids or ibuprofen and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs because they can actually produce more of the immune proteins that the coronavirus uses to replicate.
“I’m not going to tell anybody they shouldn’t be out there on the ramparts, that this is not ‘Les Mis,’” he said. “They have their own reasons, and that’s terrific for them. I would just say, ‘Once you go home, be vigilant about all your loved ones around you.”
Often, young people show no symptoms from the disease, research has shown, and so they can spread it to their relatives without knowing it. Many of the protesters are teens and 20-somethings.
Health care experts also recommend getting tested for the virus. The sooner you know you’re infected, they say, the better chance you can get the resources needed to protect yourself and your family. In a recent study of its patients, Sutter Health found that African Americans in its health system often didn’t get tested for COVID-19 until it had progressed into the late stages.
Martinez-Setzer, the teacher, did her best to keep social distance at the rally this week. When that wasn’t possible, she took heart in seeing many people wearing face masks.
She was glad she and her family were able to participate.
“If we’re not out, where does that leave us right now?” she said.
This story was originally published June 3, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Why protest in a pandemic? Black, Latino families weigh COVID-19 risks, joining the cause."
