Public health officials are advising people who participated in protests to take precautions afterward to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. But there is some disagreement about whether some steps go too far.
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health advised anyone who attended a protest to self-quarantine at home for two weeks afterward and monitor themselves for symptoms.
That “seems to me to be kind of an extreme cost for exercising constitutional rights,” said George Rutherford, an infectious disease physician at UCSF.
It’s more important that people get tested, he says.
“That way we'll actually find people who are infected rather than having hundreds of thousands of people self quarantining on the chance that they may have been exposed and may become infected,” he said.