The pandemic that upended everyday life and killed more than 104,000 Americans no longer leads the newscasts as protests against police brutality roil major cities, sparking concern the public may let up its guard against the insidious disease.

Now, people marching or rioting in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis aren’t practicing social distancing, either, creating fears that protests will become “super-spreader” events.

We’re talking about reopening in one week in New York City and now we’re seeing these mass gatherings over the past several nights that could in fact exacerbate the COVID-19 spread,” New York Gov.

“We spent all this time closed down, locked down, masks, socially distanced — and then you turn on the TV and you see these mass gatherings that could potentially be infecting hundreds and hundreds of people, after everything that we have done.

“How many super-spreaders were in that crowd?” he said, before addressing the fact many protesters aren’t in the most vulnerable age group.

“How many young people went home and kissed their mother ‘hello’ or shook hands with their father or hugged their father or their grandfather or their grandmother or their brother or their sister and spread a virus?”.

“The single thing that I am most worried about is a lot of these folks aren’t wearing masks or have them down around their neck, and a lot of police aren’t wearing masks,” said Jordan Strauss, managing director for business intelligence and investigations at Kroll, a global risk consultancy.

We’re balancing economics against prevention of transmission — in this case, we’re balancing freedom of speech and freedom to protest against epidemic parameters around the infectious disease,” said Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H.

While some of the protesters are wearing face coverings that can slow transmission, many aren’t

Asymptomatic people can spread the disease, so they might have it and not know it when they hit the streets

“A mass gathering is a mass gathering,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security

“When people are socially interacting and unable to social distance, shouting, and being sprayed with agents that caused them to cough, it is a simple biological fact the transmission events are going to occur.”