For once I actually agree with you and in fact you could probably include the riots as another partial result from the virus; the riots were probably worse than they otherwise would have been because of the economic situation at the time and also because a lot of people, having been cooped up for weeks, understandably had a lot of steam to release. As bad as the Floyd death was, normally riots from something like that would have been mostly localized.
Valid point.
Would have happened regardless, and I still think it would have gone big nationally given the severity and callousness of the officers making the arrest (or at least the one that murdered Floyd).
Then once the police started acting like they had declared war on some middle eastern country and began committing what would be considered war crimes in an international conflict, I feel like that basically incited it to a huge national ordeal. People protesting police brutality and so your answer is to commit more police brutality is just genius-level decision making! But to be fair, the relative small portion of people who were rioting (or showing up to do nothing but agitate and incite rioting and violence) instead of just protesting didn’t help matters at all either. And yes, there is a difference between rioting and protesting.
But even with that considered, there is reason to believe that we wouldn’t have seen the crowds quite as large as they were outside of Minnesota or the metro area where it occurred if not for COVID having so many people stuck at home for various reasons (work from home, furloughed, laid off, reduced hours, schools closed/virtual classes, etc.).