“As the memory of epidemics faded, individual rights became much more important than collective responsibility,” Professor Wendy Parmet, faculty director of Northeastern Law's Center for Health Policy and Law, tells The New York Times.
The courts and law enforcement are just a piece of this broader societal puzzle, and [in] that puzzle, the general theme is triage, Professor Daniel Medwed tells Insider.
Watch now: Joan Fortin ’96, Chief Executive Officer of Bernstein Shur, is featured on The Portland Press Herald’s Like a Boss webinar series and shares her tips managing, adapting and problem solving amid the COVID-19 crisis.
Listen back: Professor Daniel Medwed joined WGBHNews' Morning Edition to talk about how the coronavirus outbreak is affecting the Mass. court system: "It's a whole new world."
With a pandemic upon us, it doesn’t require compassion to ensure that our immigration policies don’t threaten public health, writes Professor Wendy Parmet. "It just requires common sense."
“Non-citizens make up a very significant proportion of the workforce in healthcare, and particularly in places like nursing homes, where patients are especially vulnerable,” Professor Wendy Parmet tells Mother Jones. “If we want to protect those patients, it’s really important that the people who are caring for them, many of whom are immigrants… are comfortable with getting health care, getting tested. Otherwise, there’s potential for exasperating the outbreak.”
“It’s mind-boggling that the United States could be at the bottom of the developed world in terms of getting testing kits out and issuing policies that mitigate the disease,” Professor Wendy Parmet tells The New Yorker. "We need a much more robust strategy to manage community transmission.”
To get people to comply with self-quarantine requests before legal orders come into play, officials should streamline their messaging about the virus and the purpose of staying away from other people, says Professor Wendy Parmet.
Northeastern University is closely tracking the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak and university leaders are making contingency plans and decisions in accordance with global public health authorities.
“The federal public health power is pretty awesome … awe-inspiring in its breadth,” Professor Wendy Parmet tells Politico. “But there’s also obviously a lot of danger.”