She urged people to get tested right away if they have symptoms. If they don’t, she said, they should wait five to seven days after they participated in a protest or cleanup effort to get tested.

And if their test result is negative, but they suspect they were exposed, Malcolm encouraged people to get retested around 12 days after they think they were exposed.

The demonstrations are “a recipe for spread” of the disease, Malcolm said Wednesday. “The mitigating factor is that it was outdoors.”

Malcolm said that in addition to expanding guidance on who should get tested to protesters, the state is looking into opening testing sites in the areas where the gatherings have happened and are happening. State health officials have a goal of processing 20,000 tests daily in the coming weeks.

Malcolm said the most recent statistics suggest smaller waves of the virus making their way through the population, but there’s nothing definitive.

“We’re still at a fairly high degree of community spread in Minnesota,” she said.

Still, Malcolm said that there are some signs the state’s cases are stabilizing. For instance, the number of overall hospitalizations for COVID-19 is on a downward trend, and the number of people in intensive care unit beds has been holding steady at around 250.

Malcolm added that the state should start to see the impact of the state’s efforts to reopen in about a week.

The fact that people without symptoms of the illness can still be spreading the virus continues to be among the biggest challenges, said Kris Ehresmann, the state’s infectious disease director.

“There is a big role for asymptomatic transmission,” and it’s hard to identify who those people are, she said.