New York police officers beating protesters with batons on May 30. | Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Protesting during a pandemic is a risk. But so is the status quo of police violence.

America’s crises are boiling over, one into another. 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.

These two stories are linked. They are both public health stories. The link is systemic racism.

“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.

“One in every 1,000 black men and boys can expect to be killed by police in this country,” she