Amid the coronavirus pandemic, masses of people are taking to the streets to protest police brutality after the death of George Floyd in Minnesota and other victims of racial violence.

“The same broad-sweeping structural racism that enables police brutality against black Americans is also responsible for higher mortality among black Americans with Covid-19,” Maimuna Majumder, a Harvard epidemiologist working on the Covid-19 response, tells Vox.

As the Covid-19 crisis continues, it’s also become clear that black communities, and other communities of color, have suffered a disproportionate burden.

African Americans make up just 12% of the population in Washtenaw County, Michigan but have suffered a staggering 46% of COVID-19 infections.

In Chicago, Illinois, African Americans account for 29% of population, but have suffered 70% of COVID-19 related deaths of those whose ethnicity is known.

The African American COVID-19 death rates are higher than their percentage of the population in racially segregated cities and states including Milwaukee, Wisconsin (66% of deaths, 41% of population), Illinois (43% of deaths, 28% of infections, 15% of population), and Louisiana (46% of deaths, 36% of population).

These racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 infections and deaths are a result of historical and current practices of racism that cause disparities in exposure, susceptibility and treatment.

They live in denser housing and more often polluted communities than whites — a result of years of racist housing policy that puts them at greater risk during a pandemic?

Many other epidemiologists, doctors, and infectious disease researchers have also defended the current protests, highlighting the inextricable link between the heavy toll of Covid-19 on black communities and the history of racism:.

Current and intergenerational trauma, which stems from police violence, or risk related to Covid-19?” Jaime Slaughter-Acey, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, says.

“The fact that people are out there protesting, despite the risks of Covid-19, tells you that the fear of police brutality, racism, is much more terrifying.” That said, Slaughter-Acey does worry about Covid-19 spreading at protests, and that it “would disproportionately affect the black community again.”.

The forces that put many minority communities at risk during a pandemic have also put them at risk of police violence.

“In almost any way you measure it, the American criminal justice system is prejudiced against black Americans, and black people are much more likely to be subjected to state-sanctioned violence in the US compared to white Americans,” Vox’s Dylan Scott writes.

But that concern can exist alongside the concern of violence and death that black communities face, pandemic or not

Confronting the racism that puts black Americans at higher risk of dying at the hands of police means confronting the racism that puts black Americans at higher risk of dying from Covid-19