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Public health experts are calling on police to stop using tear gas on people protesting the death of George Floyd.

An online petition started at the University of Washington and created with Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at UC San Francisco, opposes the use of tear gas, suggesting it could “increase risk for COVID-19 by making the respiratory tract more susceptible to infection, exacerbating existing inflammation, and inducing coughing.”

Thousands of people have poured onto streets from Walnut Creek to San Jose in demonstrations sparked by Floyd’s death and video of Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. Those demonstrations have been met by tear gas, rubber bullets, batons and other measures from police.

While some health officials have worried the crowded demonstrations could spread COVID-19, the petition endorses the protests “as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States.”

Ayesha Appa is an infectious disease doctor at UCSF and one of nearly 1,000 people who had signed the petition by early Tuesday.

Doctors, she said, are asked to grapple with questions about how and why patients get diseases.

“Racism is a medical problem and has to be faced,” Appa said. “You just can’t face those questions without thinking about root causes. And then when facing root causes, structural racism rises to the top.”

As she spoke, Appa was on her way to a vigil for health care workers and others in honor of Floyd at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.

Using tear gas to disperse protesters “seems like a particularly cruel intervention at this time in which the country is facing a respiratory virus that is sweeping the country with unprecedented rates of disease,” Appa said.

The petition encourages protestors to wear face coverings and stay six feet apart if possible.

But it also calls on police to avoid arresting and holding protestors in confined spaces like jails and police vans, “which are some of the highest-risk areas for COVID-19 transmission.”

Santa Clara County is urging people who attend protests to get tested for the virus within a few days. The county has opened free testing sites available to anyone regardless of whether they have symptoms.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, prolonged exposure to a large dose of riot control agent like tear gas can have serious consequences, including respiratory failure possibly resulting in death. While police often have masks that protect them from the gas, the cloth or makeshift masks many protesters wear don’t offer the same protection.

Cat Brooks and Rebecca Ruiz of the Anti Police-Terror Project acknowledged the risk of protesters catching the virus.

But, they wrote, “the risk in the minds of many Black and Brown people is worth it. Rightly so, we feel enough is enough and post this pandemic, we want a world worth fighting for. One where there is a semblance of justice. One where our lives actually do matter. It’s a conundrum because we want to live but, also, we want to live.”

Echoing the petition, a UCLA professor of medicine and public health told LAist he was especially worried about the potential harm caused when law enforcement officers rely on the gas.

“During this time when we’re protesting police brutality, the use of tear gas is causing more harm in the way of spreading COVID,” the professor, David Eisenman, told the news outlet. “There is some culpability on the police for using this method, which increases the sneezing and increases the coughing and therefore increases the spread.”