The civil liberties issues raised by the Covid-19 pandemic range from the basic, such as whether government can stop you from leaving your house or opening your business, to the ludicrous, such as whether Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer can say it’s OK for you to launch your rowboat but not your motorboat (an order she has since reversed). When a surfer in the ocean is arrested for violating stay-at-home orders in Southern California, or a father in Colorado is arrested for not social distancing while playing with his wife and child at a park, or two women in San Diego County are targeted for prosecution after organizing shutdown protests, it’s clear that something other than public health is at play.
The only reason these incidents didn’t receive sunlight commensurate with their indecency is that Covid-19-induced terror has hijacked the nation. This is a country whose deepest roots lie in the soil of liberty and freedom, values that have catalyzed the most important social and cultural movements in modern history. Epidemiologic studies of the population prevalence of novel coronavirus antibodies are pointing to much higher rates of infection than previously thought—with the corollary that mortality is much lower. Surely, as fear loosens its grip—and there is evidence from that same AP-NORC poll that this is happening—these overreaches, and those still to come, will reveal themselves as more about the exercise of power than about public health.
Planning for the next phase of the pandemic will also heighten concerns and conflict over civil liberties. Health policy leaders have outlined a way forward that relies on widespread testing and contact tracing as prerequisites for lifting state shutdowns. Many governors, including California’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Andrew Cuomo, have expressed similar sentiments.
But think hard about the details. Testing may be mandatory. Contact tracing may mean government tracking of cellphone data. How much privacy are individuals willing to forfeit for a virus that increasingly appears to pose little danger to a large percentage of the U.S. population? We will soon learn the answer.
As a strategy, this approach is probably most viable in the workplace, where employers can compel employees to undergo testing and antibody screening. Outside the workplace, compliance will likely be low, which will allow the virus to continue to spread. As infections increase after the lockdown is lifted, many will call for restrictions to be reinstated. This will further inflame disputes. It takes little more than a basic understanding of U.S. history and human nature to know that these battles over liberty will neither be trivial nor easily quieted.
The issue of mandating face masks deserves special attention. When Gov. Cuomo announced an executive order that all New Yorkers must wear masks in public, he argued, “You don’t have a right to infect me.” This isn’t a weak argument. The counterargument is also strong: Whose burden is it to show that a person is contagious in the first place? And if people aren’t contagious, on what grounds can the government force them to wear masks? Ultimately, we may not be able to escape the “immunity passports” that Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, cited as a possibility “under certain circumstances.”
Dismissing sincere concerns about civil liberties may have implications for effective coordination of future pandemic efforts. Social-distancing measures are good at slowing disease outbreaks, and the wisest course is to implement them in the least burdensome and most sustainable way possible. Unfortunately, many states have already veered sharply from this path. The coming second phase of the pandemic response affords leaders a chance to demonstrate wisdom and restraint.
The White House let its 2-week-old economic reopening guidelines expire on Thursday as half of all U.S. states forged ahead with their own strategies for easing restrictions on restaurants, retail and other businesses shuttered by the coronavirus crisis.
“We need to focus on facts, not fear,” DeSantis said of the phase-in, set to take effect Monday.
Just as he had labeled his April 1 shutdown a “safer-at-home” order, DeSantis christened the phased-in reopening a “Safe. Smart. Step-by-Step, Plan for Florida’s Recovery.”
Along with the restaurant changes, retail stores not considered essential services could now welcome customers inside, but also be limited to 25% capacity.
The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the economy into a deep recession. The crisis will also create lasting economic damage from the jump in debt as a result of higher federal spending and lower federal revenues.
Treasury Secretary Mnuchin said recently that “interest rates are incredibly low, so there’s very little cost of borrowing this money.” That statement is not correct. Mnuchin seems to have forgotten about loan principal. Every dollar borrowed causes damage down the road from the resulting higher taxes extracted from the private sector. Furthermore, interest rates may spike, which will increase federal borrowing costs as accumulated debt is rolled over.
How much debt will the crisis add? Perhaps $6 trillion, based on the rough spending and revenue scenario shown in the chart below.
I started with CBO’s pre‐crisis baseline projection to 2030 and adjusted annual spending and revenues to reflect the new realities.
The spending and tax cuts in the CARES Act will increase debt by $1.76 trillion. The prior relief package called Families First will increase debt by $192 billion. Add to that perhaps $450 billion for a further relief bill that Congress may soon pass. In total, spending increases and tax cuts in coronavirus legislation may increase debt about $2.4 trillion.
State and local governments are currently taking dramatic and sometimes unprecedented action in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including "shelter in place" orders, bans on public gatherings, and business shutdowns. What's the legal basis for such sweeping actions?
In the U.S. constitutional system, each state possesses a traditional authority to regulate in the name of public health, safety, and welfare. Known as the police powers, this authority has deep roots in Anglo-American law. In his landmark Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), the British legal theorist William Blackstone defined the police powers as "the due regulation and domestic order of the kingdom, whereby the inhabitants of a State, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighborhood, and good manners, and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations."
Citing Blackstone, the American legal theorist Thomas Cooley, in his influential Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union (1871), said the police powers of a state "embraces its system of internal regulation, by which it is sought not only to preserve the public order and to prevent offenses against the State, but also to establish for the intercourse of citizen with citizen those rules of good manners and good neighborhood which are calculated to prevent a conflict of rights, and to insure to each the uninterrupted enjoyment of his own, so far as is reasonably consistent with a like enjoyment of rights by others."
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is confident that January is a realistic deadline for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine to become widely available, if "things fall into place."
Speaking to Today's Savannah Guthrie on Thursday morning, Fauci said he was part of the team at the White House that was developing the vaccine plan. A Phase I trial is underway for a potential vaccine and the next step would be to do a Phase II trial to determine if it works and is safe.
If the vaccine proves to be a viable option in the Phase I trial, the administration won't wait for results from the Phase II trial to start producing the vaccine, according to Fauci.
While most of the mainstream media continued to hit Trump hard by second-guessing his decision-making early in the crisis, Cuomo’s decisions escaped close scrutiny.
Flexible work was made for times like these. Once seen solely as HR policy or perk, COVID-19 has finally revealed flexibility as both a business continuity and economic recovery strategy. It’s how we’ve kept most businesses and organizations running, creatively serving customers and clients while making sure people are safe and employed.
Flexible work is the way through and the way out of this crisis. It must be front and center of any comprehensive public health and economic recovery plan.
Narratives matter. The fact is, we have not shut down. We’ve slowed down. We don’t need to reopen the economy. We were never closed. Indeed, many businesses — including retailers, restaurants, gyms, movie theaters and other places where large crowds gather — had to shut their doors. But other industries remain open for business, albeit remotely and flexibly.
