This week in pandemic news, The Denver Post reveals it’s okay to ignore those pesky rules to prevent the spread of a deadly virus that’s killed hundreds of thousands of people, so long as it’s to protest racism.

Because racism is a pandemic, too.

Dr. Mark Shrime, a surgeon and professor at Harvard Medical School who founded the Center for Global Surgery Evaluations, told The Denver Post that racism is a pandemic in its own right.

“The role of professionals in medicine and public health is to focus on health and equity, in all its forms,” he said. “The world currently grapples with two pandemics: that of COVID-19 and that of structural racism. Both pandemics are lethal, and both disproportionately affect black Americans.”

And that’s why 1,300 health professionals quoted in the article refuse to acknowledge the protests are spreading the virus. 

In dueling top stories this week, the Post tells readers it’s okay to protest during COVID-19, but it’s not safe to go on vacation.

While states, including Colorado, are beginning to reopen restaurants and parks, there’s still a global respiratory pandemic underway, and several regions across the nation are experiencing an uptick in cases of COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus.

So public health officials are encouraging Coloradans, especially those at risk for complications from the novel coronavirus, to turn their summer holidays into staycations. This is because each time a person leaves their home they risk exposure to — and potentially further spreading of — the coronavirus.

And in a bizarre turn of events, proving yet again that up is down and down is up in the year 2020, Boulder turns out to be the voice of reason.

The Boulder County Health Department reports they have the third-highest case increase in the state among 16 new outbreaks.

And where does Boulder say their patients contracted the virus? Some traveled out of state, others attended “large events.”

 According to Chana Goussetis, a spokesperson for the Boulder Health Department, those events included both protests of racism and police brutality and large parties.

The Denver Post quoted 1,300 so-called “health professionals” who claim those weeks of demonstrations by thousands of protestors were not risky gatherings for coronavirus transmission, but “vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of black people in the United States.”

But the coronavirus is indeed color-blind and immune to politics, standing ready to infect everyone in the wake of its deadly, airborne droplets. 

Ironically, that’s what the media was reporting when conservatives protested the closing of our economy by Democrat leaders.