Peter Pitts, president and co-founder of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, a nonpartisan research and educational organization, said he worries COVID-19 will take advantage of people gathering to protest police violence.
"Social distancing and social conflict are a very potent negative combination when it comes to spreading a virus," he said. "The timing is highly unfortunate."
Public health concerns, which are usually complicated, can easily be drowned out by other "sexier" stories, he said, citing the recent SpaceX launch. But the virus "doesn't cease to be a real threat because of other threats happening simultaneously," he said. "That means we have to twice as smart and twice as dedicated and twice as focused."
