Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd may have been the largest in US history, attended by at least 15 million people in over 4000 events, as of early July.
The two aren't directly comparable on a per capita basis, for a number of reasons:
- Most obviously, mask-wearing and Covid awareness was much more widespread among the often left-leaning protestors than among more individualist bikers and enthusiasts
- With nationwide attendees, the Sturgis rally had far more potential to spread the virus around different communities than mostly locally-attended protests
- And less obviously (as the same authors suggest in a different paper) the high-risk behaviour of protestors may have been offset by lower-risk behaviour among non-participants, notably staying at home rather than using congested roads or facing the perceived risk of violence from protestors or police.
Nevertheless it's difficult to ignore the fact of a sharp uptick in Covid cases beginning a couple of weeks after the protests began. In their paper analysing data from those first weeks, Dave and co suggest that the higher-risk behaviour of protestors versus lower-risk sheltering behaviour of non-protestors "could hypothetically cause a redistribution of public health benefits (and costs) across demographic groups." But unless there was zero or very low transmission from carriers among non-protestors, it seems to me that the immediate offsetting effect of lower transmission among non-protestors would diminish as protests became less frequent or less emotionally charged/threatening; hence in the longer-term, higher rates of transmission among and from protestors would simply be added to the returning-to-normal rates of transmission among non-protestors.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
If the trend prior to that uptick had continued unchanged, it seems that the USA would have had fewer than 5 million Covid-19 cases at this point, or around 3 million less. We should note that other factors contributed to this uptick also; notably, a number of states were easing restrictions around this time... perhaps in some cases partly in response to the civil liberties challenge of permitting mass protest! But even if we were to (generously?) assume that only one-third of the increase in Covid cases following the first and biggest waves of protest were caused by those protests, that would still imply that perhaps 1 million or around one-eighth of the USA's Covid cases can be reasonably traced back to the BLM movement.
If so, that would imply in turn that somewhere in the order of 25,000 deaths have been a (fairly predictable) consequence of these mass protests, so far.
Was it or is it worth it?
