Assessing the epidemic impact of protests during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

ABSTRACTProtests during the COVID-19 pandemic present a complex trade-off between democratic rights of freedom of assembly and an epidemic risk, and have created a need for careful assessment of protest-driven infections. Here, we build a coupled disease transmission model and assess the impact of protests on the COVID-19 spread in the continental US using a dataset of 4,121 protests and 1.66 million protesters between April and June of 2020. We find that protests in 2020 had limited effects, creating tens of additional daily cases country-wide, due to their small size. However, a simple scaling relation of protest-driven infections derived from our simulations reveals that very large protests with over millions of participants can significantly boost outbreaks and impact the healthcare system. In the worst-case scenario, very large protests can add over 20,000 daily cases and over 7,000 ICU admissions over the continental US. We hope our model can aid the policy rationale to maintain freedom of assembly in the current and future pandemics, while providing estimates for preparations for a healthcare surge in the worst-case setting.