Category: COVID and the Law

By Dessie Otachliska

1. 1. Why is traveling during COVID-19 a problem?

Whether by airplane, bus, train, or car, traveling increases a person’s chances of contracting and spreading COVID-19. Travelling inevitably puts people in close contact, often for prolonged periods of time, and exposes them to more and different pathogens. Imagine three different situations. First, a woman takes the train from Washington, D.C. to New York City for a business meeting. To get to the train station, she takes an Uber. While at Union Station, she stops for a cup of coffee. Then, during the three-hour train ride, she’s in a train car with multiple other people. When she finally gets to New York, she has to take the subway to get to her hotel. In a single trip, the woman has come in contact with numerous people — the Uber driver, the barista, the people waiting on the platform, the other passengers on the train, everyone on the subway, and all the people at the hotel. Second, a student from the Boston area decides to drive home to North Carolina for the holidays. Even if the student drives alone, he has to make multiple stops during the thirteen-hour drive for gas, food, and lodging. By the time he makes it home to North Carolina, he would have physically passed through nine states — all with different safety regulations — and come in contact with countless people. Finally, a family of four boards a flight in Albuquerque, New Mexico to go visit family in Tallahassee, Florida. There are no direct flights for this trip, so the family must — at minimum — take two separate flights and spend multiple hours at different airports.

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By Joseph William Singer

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light longstanding problems in housing law. This sudden emergency has exposed systemic deficiencies in our property law system. Those flaws have long left human beings vulnerable to deprivation and hardship, but now they leave millions more people susceptible to imminent catastrophic decline in their economic wellbeing. Worse still, these systemic problems have placed many people between a rock and a hard place; they must choose to work in conditions likely to make them deathly sick or to stay home without the resources necessary to sustain health or even life. And loss of income threatens our ability to stay in our homes; many face the possibility, in the near future, of eviction or foreclosure. Without a home, we are vulnerable in this time of Covid-19 to severe illness and death. And our homes are at risk partly because so many Americans lack the resources — the wealth — to sustain them in their hour of need. The extreme inequality of wealth we have created over the last several decades has turned out to be life threatening. And worse still, it places people in a position where they pose a risk to others, including loved ones in their own families. Property in a pandemic — or rather, the lack of property in a pandemic — can, quite literally, be a death sentence.

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October 15, 2020

By Seth Rubinstein, J.D.

In prior pandemics, manual contact tracing has been key to slow the spread. Contact tracing entails conducting interviews with infected patients to identify with whom they might have been in contact, so those individuals could be notified and quarantined. Smartphones make it technically possible to digitally trace contacts made with someone infected with coronavirus. Much of East Asia began implementing this technology from the early stages of the pandemic, and in the spring there was much hope that digital contact tracing could help the U.S. “return to normal” sooner. But is this more hype than hope?

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