As mass protests and looting in cities throughout California gripped much of the public’s attention Sunday, the death toll from COVID-19 and the number of people infected with the virus continued to rise.
According to data compiled by this news organization, California had 111,904 confirmed coronavirus cases and 4,172 deaths as of Sunday evening.
The state recorded 2,039 new cases, a seven-day average of 2,527 per day — the highest daily average since the start of the pandemic. There also were 29 new deaths recorded, though the average number of daily fatalities has declined slowly since May 21, when there was an average of 78 new deaths.
In the Bay Area, the number of people with COVID-19 reached 14,156 Sunday, with 219 new reported cases. The seven-day average of new cases in the 10 counties also was 219, a notable increase from an average of 146 new cases from two weeks earlier.
The total number of fatalities also grew in the Bay Area to 445, with two deaths recorded Sunday. The deaths were in Alameda and San Francisco counties.
But the specter of COVID-19 didn’t stop thousands of people from spilling into the streets of cities throughout California to protest police brutality, following the Memorial Day death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. The state currently is under a state of emergency due to the pandemic.
In some cases, peaceful daytime protests Saturday and Sunday erupted into nighttime looting and violence. Chaos broke out, both in urban centers, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, and in the suburbs, such as San Leandro, Pleasant Hill and Walnut Creek, where a woman was shot in the arm. Much of California was placed under curfew by local authorities Sunday.
Many protesters paid some mind to COVID-19 by donning masks and by appearing to avoid clustering too closely. People involved in looting also wore masks, though that may also be because they didn’t want to be identified by police. The looters also tended to move in groups, with little apparent concern about social distancing.
In either case, crowds filling city and suburban centers has raised concerns among political leaders, physicians and public health officials about the possibility of new coronavirus outbreaks, just as the state begins reopening after weeks of stay-at-home orders, the New York Times reported.
In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti warned that the protests could become “super-spreader events,” referring to the types of gatherings that can lead to an explosion of secondary infections, the New York Times reported.
The weekend’s unrest appeared to reflect tensions arising from a number of sources. Certainly, there was outrage over decades of police-involved killings. But for some, this outrage could be combined with weariness with shelter-in-place orders that has resulted in social isolation and growing unemployment, along with despair about disparities in how the coronavirus affects people from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, according to a group of panelists who participated in a virtual town hall meeting Saturday organized by the Oscar Grant Foundation.
Some infectious disease experts told the New York Times that they at least were reassured that the protests took place outdoors, explaining that the open-air settings could mitigate the risk of transmission.
“The outdoor air dilutes the virus and reduces the infectious dose that might be out there, and if there are breezes blowing, that further dilutes the virus in the air,” Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, told the New York Times. “There was literally a lot of running around, which means they’re exhaling more profoundly, but also passing each other very quickly.”
But another expert, medical historian Howard Markel, told the Times that parades and other large gatherings that took place in the midst of the 1918 influenza pandemic were sometimes followed by spikes in influenza cases.
He also pointed out that people’s emotions tend to run high during protests, which means people will “get lost in the moment, and they lose awareness of who is close to them, who’s not, who’s wearing a mask, who’s not.”
Prior to the weekend’s protests, public health officials had begun to develop a picture of how the deadly virus was spreading in California. It was becoming clear that longterm care homes for the elderly, jails and prisons, food processing plants and social gatherings had become the main culprit for repeated outbreaks among Californians.
A Bay Area News Group review of known major outbreaks clusters in the state also showed that these locations accounted for a significant share of the state’s more than 100,000 cases, including an outbreak of more than 1,100 at a federal prison in Santa Barbara County and the more than 17,000 residents and workers infected at skilled-nursing facilities.
