That said, the protests I've been a part of have had the majority of people wearing masks. Can that cut down how many people the virus spreads to? Potentially, yes.

Our biggest challenge here is going to be parsing the noise from the signal. If there's a spike in cases, is it due to the protests, or due to states opening up? Teasing that apart will be hard. Made harder by the fact that we still do not have enough tests, or a national contact tracing policy to compare results across states.

But all those considerations aside, the protests these past two weeks have been more widespread, and involved way more people than the anti-shutdown nonsense from last month. I'd be shocked if we don't see a spike. If we don't see any increase at all, that's going to be a very fascinating thing that opens up a lot of questions about what we think we know about the coronavirus's transmission.

If the spike is small, we can begin to look at how mask wearing might be contributing to that, and the implications for a long term strategy to open the economy. We already have data from some Asian countries that prioritized public mask wearing and managed to contain the spread of the virus, so I think there's a chance for added data here to bolster the conclusions we have.

But no, if we don't see a spike, that will not necessarily mean the steps taken to now were an overreaction. One thing that will be keeping the extent of the spike down anyway is that the social distancing cut down the numbers of the infected. That is, fewer infected people are going to these protests that would have if we hadn't had any social distancing in the past 2 months. There are recent estimates that as many as 60 million new infections didn't happen due to the various stay at home orders. That doesn't just disappear because further spread is mitigated by those same orders or due to other measures like mask wearing, and people being a little more cautious about their personal space bubbles due to the educating on the spread of the virus that has happened these past few months.