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Mass protests against police brutality that have brought thousands of people out of their homes and onto the streets in cities across America are raising the specter of new coronavirus outbreaks, prompting political leaders, physicians and public health experts to warn that the crowds could cause a surge in cases. While many political leaders affirmed the right of protesters to express themselves, they urged the demonstrators to wear face masks and maintain social distancing, both to protect themselves and to prevent further community spread of the virus. More than 100,000 Americans have already died of Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. People of color have been particularly hard hit, with rates of hospitalizations and deaths among black Americans far exceeding those of whites. (Rabin, 5/31)

Outside Brooklyn's Barclays Center, thousands of protesters churned this weekend in tightly packed crowds, casting aside social distancing to express their rage and grief. In Minneapolis, ungloved demonstrators held hands as they marched. In Las Vegas, demonstrators roared their anger into the faces of police lined up just a few feet away. And in nearly two dozen U.S. cities, police grappled physically with more than 2,500 people arrested during often-violent protests over the death of a black man, George Floyd, in the custody of Minneapolis police on Memorial Day. (Bernstein, 5/31)

“It’s a triple whammy of protests, plus raging pandemic, plus economic instability. Those three things together make for a perfect storm of viral transmission,” said Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. He said he expects there will be a spike in cases due to protests. That would mirror patterns seen around the world after governments started lifting lockdown restrictions, but this time on a larger scale, he said, because the protests are happening across the country, often in hot spots of transmission, like the South and West. (Hernandez and Abbott, 5/31)

Protests erupting across the nation over the past week — and law enforcement’s response to them — are threatening to upend efforts by health officials to track and contain the spread of coronavirus just as those efforts were finally getting underway. Health experts need newly infected people to remember and recount everyone they’ve interacted with over several days in order to alert others who may have been exposed, and prevent them from spreading the disease further. But that process, known as contact tracing, relies on people knowing who they’ve been in contact with — a daunting task if they’ve been to a mass gathering. (Stobbe, 6/1)

With cities wounded by days of violent unrest, America headed into a new week with neighborhoods in shambles, urban streets on lockdown and shaken confidence about when leaders would find the answers to control the mayhem amid unrelenting raw emotion over police killings of black people. All of it smashed into a nation already bludgeoned by a death toll from the coronavirus pandemic surging past 100,000 and unemployment that soared to levels not seen since the Great Depression. (Khalil, Morrison and Vertuno, 6/1)

Within the last few days, careful social distancing has been overturned by demonstrations against social injustice — as thousands of Americans congregate in cities across the country protesting the death of George Floyd. The large gatherings, infectious disease experts said, could cause a catastrophic setback for controlling COVID-19 in the U.S. as cities and states try to reopen. (Edwards, 5/31)

The whole city still smelled like fire, but Yvonne Passmore wanted to survey the damage wrought by days of violent protests. So she stood beside three neighbors in South Minneapolis, all of them black, all of them trying to process what had happened the past few days, and months, and years.“ First, we had the coronavirus, which is wiping us out,” said Passmore, 65, pushing down her mask so she could breathe a little better. “And now it’s this.” (Bailey, Gowen, Williams and Del Real, 5/31)

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said the “underlying problems” of racial inequity in the U.S. need to be addressed in order to stop the coronavirus pandemic which is impacting communities of color at disproportionate rates. “I think it's a symptom of broader racial inequities in our country that we need to work to resolve,” he said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Gottlieb said the issue needs to be addressed at two levels: why there are higher rates of COVID-19 and higher death rates from the coronavirus among black Americans. (Klar, 5/31)

"There's going to be a lot of issues coming out of what's happened in the last week, but one of them is going to be that chains of transmission will have become lit from these gatherings," Gottlieb said on "Face the Nation," adding that Minnesota, the epicenter of the protests, was already experiencing an uptick in coronavirus infections. "This country isn't through this epidemic," Gottlieb said. "This is continuing to expand but at a much slower rate. But it's still expanding, and we still have pockets of spread in communities that aren't under good control." (Quinn, 5/31)

In Huntington Beach, California, on Sunday, hundreds demonstrated over the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old unarmed black man who died at the hands of police in Minneapolis. Protesters held signs that read "End Racism" and "Black Lives Matter," according to CNN affiliate KTLA. Police deemed the gathering an unlawful assembly, and asked the hundreds of protesters to disperse, police officials said in a statement. One month ago, a different protest in the same Orange County community, which has a large Republican community, was left mostly alone. (Hamedy and Meeks, 6/1)

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said Sunday he is a “little bit concerned” about protests sparked by the death of George Floyd potentially leading to a spike in coronavirus cases. “Well, we're a little bit concerned about that,” Hogan said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” when asked if he’s worried the protests could be spreading the coronavirus. “Right now, the immediate concern is to lower the temperature, stop the looting, and potentially keep our citizens safe from the riots that are going on,” he added. (Klar, 5/31)

Washington-area leaders on Sunday raised alarms that widespread protests against police brutality could lead to a new wave of coronavirus infections, wiping out progress as the region began reopening over the weekend. “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,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “There’s about a 14-day incubation period, so, two weeks from now, across America, we’re going to find out whether this gives us a spike and drives the numbers back up or not.” (Nirappil, 5/31)

Target Corp and Walmart said on Sunday they shuttered stores across the United States as retailers already reeling from closures because of the coronavirus pandemic shut outlets amid protests that included looting in many U.S. cities. (Resnick-Ault, 5/31)

The last few weeks have been filled with devastating news — stories about the police killing black people. At this point, these calamities feel familiar — so familiar, in fact, that their details have begun to echo each other. In July 2014, a cellphone video captured some of Eric Garner's final words as New York City police officers sat on his head and pinned him to the ground on a sidewalk: "I can't breathe." On May 25 of this year, the same words were spoken by George Floyd, who pleaded for release as an officer knelt on his neck and pinned him to the ground on a Minneapolis street. (5/31)