- Thanks to Brilliant for
keeping Legal Eagle in the air. Get 20% off your annual subscription by using the link in the description. The coronavirus is now officially killed more people than SARS, and
it shows no sign of stopping. And it's not clear that the US government is actually prepared for this. The Department of Homeland Security is falsely saying that the mortality rate of COVID-19 is comparable
to that of the flu. - Worldwide I believe it's under 2%. - What's the mortality rate for influenza, over the last say 10 years in America? - It's also right around
that percentage as well. - Actually the flu is
20 times less deadly, and recently Vice President Mike Pence was put in charge of the
government's response. Worse, there were reports of entire cities being quarantined in China
and across the globe. But that's not America, right? Have you ever had a nightmare about being permanently
confined to your house? Can you imagine one day waking
up to find police officers and soldiers right
outside your front door, refusing to let you leave? That could never happen in America, in response to a pandemic. Could it? (trumpet music) Hey Legal Eagles it's time
to think like a lawyer because the world is facing a pandemic. This is gonna be a bit more speculative than most of the normal
videos on this channel because we're going to
explore whether the US could legally quarantine
towns, cities and states, the way some other countries are. You might be surprised to learn that there is both US precedent,
and law on this subject. Now as of the time of this video there are at least 80,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus worldwide and almost 3000 deaths
attributable to the virus, and the numbers are steadily climbing. The question is how do you
stop the spread of a disease or a virus that is asymptomatic? This is the problem facing
China and the rest of the world. Now coronavirus is the name
for a large family of viruses that can cause mild or severe illnesses in humans and animals. There are seven different
strains of coronavirus known to infect humans, and
before this most recent outbreak only two of the coronaviruses were known to cause serious illness. You might recognize them MERS and SARS. So what the heck is
this newest coronavirus? Well officially it's called 2019-nCoV, and it hasn't been extensively studied. Doctors don't know where it came from, most coronaviruses are
transmitted to humans through an intermediate host. With SARS, the host was palm civets. For MERS, the host was
identified as camels. The host for the 2019 coronavirus has not yet been identified, but according to researchers
at Johns Hopkins, it may have come from bats. Doctors are still working to understand the 2019 coronavirus disease symptoms, course and severity. Traditional flu symptoms like runny nose, sore throat and vomiting
have only been reported by about 2% of infected patients. Common symptoms seem to
include shortness of breath, fever and cough. But the problem with the 2019 coronavirus is that people can spread the virus before they're even symptomatic. So far almost 80,000 cases of coronavirus have been reported in China with about 14% classified as severe. Now, the first known
patient developed symptoms as early as December, although China alerted the
World Health Organization by the end of 2019, China didn't act according
to lockdown the city of Wuhan until January 23. At first, every patient's blood test had to be transmitted to Beijing, which slowed diagnosis and analysis, and the hospitals quickly became overwhelmed and overcrowded. It appears the Chinese government didn't want people to panic, but withholding information
is rarely a good idea in situations like these. Chinese physician Li Wenliang
and his fellow doctors raced to warn the public of
the new coronavirus in 2019, but the Chinese government
immediately threatened Dr. Wenliang for spreading false rumors. Dr. Wenliang has now
died from the very virus he was working to contain. This situation has caused
some people to draw analogies between the way that the
Chinese are responding to the coronavirus outbreak, to the way that the Soviet
Union responded to Chernobyl. When the Soviet nuclear reactor broke down triggering explosions,
fires and radioactive smoke. The Soviet government denied
the severity of the accident, was slow to release
information to the public and generally screwed
up the entire situation into a historic tragedy. So before we talk about
the legality of isolation and quarantines in the United States, let's actually talk
about what that entails. Societies, traditionally
have dealt with pandemics by isolating people so
that they can prevent the spread of contagious
disease to other people. Isolation means separating people who have a contagious disease
from people who do not. Quarantine takes the
isolation one step further. Quarantine separates out people
with a contagious disease and restricts the movement of people who have been exposed
to contagious diseases, to see if they get sick. In either case, the goal is to stop person-to-person
transmission of a disease. So what gives the government the right to quarantine in the first place? Isolation and quarantine
are not just medical terms. The government has generally speaking, what's called police power
to sometimes in an emergency legally isolate and quarantine patients. Police power in this context
means that the government has a right to enforce laws, protect public welfare health and safety. If we're talking about
the federal government then many legal scholars believe that police power is implied
in the Commerce Clause to the Constitution. And in fact, by the time that
the constitution was drafted, the US had already used quarantine powers to deal with several public health crises. In the modern era the
federal law governing isolation and quarantine
is found in Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act. This law authorizes the
US Secretary of Health and Human Services to take
measures to prevent the entry and spread of communicable
diseases, into the United States and between the states. In fact, as is currently on the books, federal isolation and quarantine
is currently authorized for a list of contagious diseases including cholera, diphtheria,
infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, yellow fever,
viral hemorrhagic fevers, severe acute respiratory syndromes, and flu that can cause a pandemic. In order to keep this list flexible, the President has the
power to revise this list through executive order. But if quarantine and
isolation is necessary, how would the government
carry out that order? Well, under federal law the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention or CDC, has the right to issue an
isolation or a quarantine order. State and tribal governments
may issue their own orders and ask federal authorities
for help enforcing them. And if necessary, the US
Customs and Border Patrol and US Coast Guard may be
asked to enforce those orders. So the question is, is the US government using isolation and quarantine now? Well, you may be pleased
or terrified to know that the US has actually now issued its first quarantine order in 50 years. Recently health officials have quarantined the 195 Americans who
were evacuated from Wuhan. All 195 people must remain
at the March Air Reserve Base in California during the
incubation period of 14 days. 20 doctors and nurses at the base will monitor the passengers. If any of them starts to get sick they will be transferred to a hospital. And in fact patients in New
York, Los Angeles and Chicago are being monitored
for signs of the virus. And the Trump administration
recently announced they will be suspending the
entry of any foreign national who has traveled to China
over the last two weeks, unless they are immediate
family of a US citizen. In addition, any US citizen
who has been in China's Hubei province within the last 14 days of their return will be
subject to up to 14 days of mandatory quarantine to ensure that they are provided medical care and healthcare screening. According to the DHS order, air travelers without an nexus to China may also be routed to one of 11 airports if they discover mid-flight that someone on board has been
to China in the last 14 days. This might be completely necessary but the history of
isolation and quarantine in the United States
raises a lot of questions. But this is America, damn
it, and if there's one thing that Americans like to
do, it's to sue people. So the question is,
could you as an American sue the government over
a quarantine order, and if you did what kind of
rights do you have to challenge what happens to you during confinement? Well the answer to that question, depends on what kind of disease you have, whether the government
is acting arbitrarily, and what era you live in. So let's talk about the legal history of isolation and quarantine
in the United States. The first era of quarantine
law runs from the colonial days to the late 19th century, at
that time infectious diseases were a deadly serious
threat to public health, so it's probably not surprising that there are a few cases challenging the government's broad
authority to detain and restrain individuals who were infected or exposed to communicable diseases. In 1793, 5000 people died in Philadelphia from yellow fever alone. Philadelphia was the
nation's capital at the time and federal officials
evacuated and left the city to deal with the fallout. So many people died that the city lost a 10th of its population and the city government
effectively collapsed. The quarantine order sent
patients to a hospital in the country, but it
wasn't very effective since yellow fever is
spread through mosquitoes. The crisis ended finally
when the weather turned cold and killed off the mosquitoes. Similarly, the New York typhus
outbreak of 1892 started when certain immigrants
arrived in Ellis Island. Many of the passengers were
sick with typhus fever. By the time the illness developed most immigrants had already
settled on the Lower East Side in New York City. The government rounded up those immigrants and quarantine them on
North Brother Island. The incident provoked racist
and anti-semitic hysteria in the newspapers. And then there's of course, the famous eponymous Typhoid Mary, the nickname for a cook, Mary Mallon. Mary was an Irish immigrant
who carried the bacteria that causes typhus fever. Mallon was actually immune to the disease but that didn't stop the disease
from spreading to others. And by working as a cook,
Mary Mallon had spread a form of the salmonella disease to people all over the city. Police also sent her
to North Brother Island to avoid communicating it to other people. So Typhoid Mary's term of confinement was supposed to be three years as long as she agreed
never to work as a cook, however Mallon later
resumed her work as a cook and started another outbreak in 1915. Authorities again tracked her down and sent her back to the
island for 23 more years. During this period quarantine was seen as the ultimate public good. The Supreme Court said
that involuntary quarantine was constitutional in a case that involved quarantine of passengers from
eastern and southern Europe on the Britannia. American and Louisiana authorities stopped passengers from leaving the ship despite no evidence that anyone
had a contagious disease. The court said that the government could hold the passengers indefinitely because immigrants were on board and of course immigrants carry diseases. Not really the courts finest moment of constitutional analysis. During this period courts
reviewed a lot of quarantine cases but mostly they just checked
to see if the government was following its own rules. It helps that the diseases
that people were worried about were all highly communicable, like yellow fever, typhus and smallpox. Moreover, almost everyone living in the 18th and 19th centuries had lost someone to communicable disease, since there were few effective treatments. If a city like Philadelphia
could lose 10% of its population very quickly, then communicable diseases were seen as threats analogous to war. Americans would have to
wait until the second era of quarantine cases to
challenge the validity of involuntary separation and quarantine. In 1900, California federal court became the first appeals court
to reject a quarantine law on racial grounds. The city of San Francisco
issued an order requiring all Chinese residents to be vaccinated against bubonic plague. The inoculations turned out to be tainted. But the city argued that bubonic plague was a serious problem
and that Asians as a race were more likely to carry that disease. The California Court struck down that law because it violated the
Equal Protection Clause. It discriminated against Asian immigrants and the city also couldn't
back up its claims that the inoculation could stop the spread of the diseases it was targeting. Of course, that didn't stop the San Francisco health officials who tried it a second time. This time, claiming that nine people died from bubonic plague and that
the only way to contain it was by quarantining people who
lived in Asian neighborhoods. At the same time, the city gave exemptions to people who were not Asian but lived in those neighborhoods. Appropriately the angry
federal district court struck down this quarantine law as well. The key takeaway from these cases is that if the government is reacting to communicable diseases, the
threat had better be real. The government's action
can't just be an excuse for discrimination. In the 20th century though the government still found ways to take its quarantine and isolation
powers in new directions. The first target was prostitution. The idea was that prostitutes spread the sexually transmitted diseases and should be isolated and quarantined. The medical examinations
for venereal diseases were more invasive of personal privacy. Police took advantage
of this quarantine power and arrested and detained prostitutes for reasons unrelated to
communicable diseases. And of course, there was stigma towards anyone who was quarantined for having a venereal disease. This was a monumental shift
in how public health officials conceptualize power to
stop contagious diseases. But this new relationship
between public health and criminal law forced courts
to give personal freedom, a more serious look. The California Courts were
the first in the country to establish what the
government needed to prove to detain someone who had
a communicable disease. At a bare minimum the
government had to establish some reasonable ground to
believe that the targeted person had been exposed or infected with a contagious disease. Of course at the same time, people were facing real
risks from pandemics. The influenza pandemic of 1917 and 1919, killed around 50 million people. It resulted in mass quarantine orders in bands of public gatherings, and unfortunately the
isolation and quarantines did little to stop the spread of disease. Influenza was highly contagious with people becoming infected after exposure of just a few minutes. But given the danger
and the high death rate, no serious legal challenges seem to have been
brought during this time. People were really just
trying to survive a world war and global pandemic at the same time. So the question is can you challenge a quarantine order
today and could you stop a quarantine in the United States? Certainly modern medicine has progressed a long way since 1917. Well the answer is probably yes, you can challenge it depending
on the circumstances. The Constitution says, "The privilege of the
writ of habeas corpus "shall not be suspended, unless
when in cases of rebellion "or invasion the public
safety may require it." Generally this means that
a person has the right to petition the court if
they are illegally confined. This procedure is used most often to challenge a criminal conviction, but it also applies to quarantine cases. That being said, it's not often easy to win a habeas case. In 2014, Thomas Eric Duncan,
the first man in America to be diagnosed with Ebola died after Dallas hospital failed to recognize the signs of the disease. They sent him home with
a sinusitis diagnosis and his fiance Louise Troh, experienced the nightmare scenario I discussed at the beginning of the video. She woke up one day to a
court order and armed guards posted outside of her apartment. Troh and her family were
confined for 14 days and then sent into a Catholic Cottage for the remainder of a 21 day order. After Duncan's death, Troh's
apartment was fumigated and many of her
possessions were destroyed. Troh was left homeless
after several landlords denied her rental applications. Troh didn't actually
challenge the order in court but her case illustrates how
restrictive of personal freedom quarantine and isolation can be, limiting a person's
ability to travel, work and to find a place to live. And it's very difficult to
overturn one of these orders, you have to show that the government is acting in an arbitrary
and capricious manner. The Florida Supreme Court
set the state standard for reasonableness of a
state quarantine order in a 1956 case called Moore versus Draper. There the plaintiff had
challenged his quarantine for tuberculosis. The Florida court said that quote, "The constitutional
guarantees of life, liberty, "and property of which a
person cannot be deprived "without due process of law, "do not limit the exercise
of the police power "of the state to preserve
the public health, "so long as that power is
reasonably and fairly exercised "and not abused." Although federal courts are not bound by the Florida Supreme Court's decision, its statement of the law is regarded as the general standard for determining whether a person's due
process rights were violated. The decision gives great weight to the government's determination
that the public health, really is at stake. And to bring it back
to the current pandemic that we're faced with,
in our current scenario, this wouldn't be a hard standard
for the government to meet. Coronavirus 2019 is still spreading. People are still dying and researchers don't have a firm handle
on the disease yet. Though there are other issues about how far authorities
can push their quarantine and isolation orders, generally a person in a
civil confinement context like isolation or quarantine should be free from physical restraint. But if you were subject to
isolation showing no symptoms of infection and you tried to leave, could authorities actually restrain you? According to the Supreme Court, the answer is probably yes, if you are quote, "a dangerous patient." Again, it's pretty easy
for the state to prove that a person is dangerous
if they are contagious. Authorities only needs
to show that the reason for the restraint and
confinement is not arbitrary, but that's not to say
that there aren't cases where the government
has acted unreasonably. For example in 2007, the ACLU challenged a
dangerous patient determination on behalf of Robert Daniels, a quarantined tuberculosis patient who emigrated from Russia to Arizona. Daniels had been diagnosed
with dangerous TB and when Daniels defined a court order requiring him to wear
a face mask he refused, leading to his arrest and confinement in the Maricopa County Jail. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, you might remember that guy, kept Daniels in solitary
confinement for nearly a year. After the ACLU lawsuit the
county transferred Daniels to national Jewish hospital where physicians determined that he actually didn't have
dangerous and contagious TB. After which Daniel's returned to Russia, Arpaio was later convicted
of criminal contempt for ignoring a court order
in a separate matter. Donald Trump then pardoned Arpaio and they all live happily ever after. - I stand by my partner Sheriff Joe-- - And as for whether the US government could affect a nation
or statewide quarantine, well, the government has wide latitude to isolate and quarantine anyone who has been in the area of Wuhan over the last couple of months. But for better or worse, generally the isolation
and quarantine orders can't last longer than
the incubation period of the targeted disease. The CDC currently estimates
that the incubation period is about 14 days for the 2019 coronavirus based on previous iterations, like MERS. Of course, the reason
governments resort to quarantine is because the virus tends
to spread exponentially. If you want to follow in the footsteps of heroic doctors like Dr. Wenliang, today's sponsor Brilliant
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really helps out the channel. So, do you agree with my analysis, leave your objections in the comments and check out this playlist over here where I explore all of the
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and I'll see you in court.
Legal eagle should meetup with destiny to dunk on morons.
It annoyed me Destiny didn't push back on giving up our liberties in times of war like we've always done. The draft is sacrificing our freedoms. As is rationing... or any social program in times of war I'd bet
Oh shit I would love this crossover.
I don't understand how morons like LCTRFan are so attached to their civils liberties and the right to go out, like do they seriously believe that the small amount of well being restricted when confined is of higher value than the potential impact the virus could have on their lives ?