What public health experts want critics to know about why they support the protests

As someone with asthma, Meredith Blake was very worried about getting sick in the pandemic. With Covid-19 spreading across America, she stayed inside her home in Boston for 12 weeks, isolating from others as much as possible.

Her self-quarantine ended on June 1. After George Floyd’s killing at the hands of police in Minneapolis, she was compelled to march in the streets with a large crowd of other Bostonians, in close proximity. She wore a face mask and used lots of hand sanitizer wipes.

“I was definitely a little nervous,” about catching Covid-19 in the crowd, says Blake, a researcher at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. But showing up and speaking out was more important to her in this moment: “I have a vested interest in the protection of black and brown people, not only professionally, but personally,” she says. She felt like she could no longer prioritize her personal safety from the coronavirus.

Blake works with public health professionals and ER doctors every day, and knew joining a crowd was dangerous — for both herself and the community. But she made a careful calculation: Covid-19 is a huge risk, and to her, the protests were worth it.