NEW YORK - Roughly a hundred frontline heath care workers joined protesters in Times Square Tuesday night in a movement they call #frontlinesforfrontlines.

At 7 p.m., a time that has been reserved to applaud health care heroes, they stood together to cheer for protesters.

“Racism is a public health crisis,” said Dr. Hillary Dueñas, an organizer of the event. “It’s never a better time given the amount of respect that we have in society now as doctors fighting the coronavirus epidemic to say ‘take the respect you’re giving to us and give it to them.’”

Health care workers wearing scrubs, white coats, and masks chanted “I can’t breathe” and “No justice, no peace,” before taking a knee and observing five minutes of silence.

“COVID-19 is an opportunity to see that there’s one virus that affects all of the community and still some how there’s a disproportionate death rate among people of color so clearly there are injustices,” explained Dueñas.

In New York City, current data reveals that black, African American, Hispanic and Latino people die of COVID at roughly twice the rate of white people.

“We could not stop the coronavirus from suffocating too many of our patients of color,” Duenas and her co-organizers, Dr. Miao Hua and Dr. Rustin Zomorodi, said in a statement. “But the system of racial injustice that suffocates young black lives, most recently the life of George Floyd, can and needs to stop.”

“While we continue to treat those who cannot breathe inside the hospital, we also choose to stand alongside those in the streets struggling to breathe,” they wrote.