12 ms·

There is currently no plan in place to penalize individuals for gathering socially Then people won't take the rules seriously. Lots of people in this country

There is currently no plan in place to penalize individuals for gathering socially Then people won't take the rules seriously. Lots of people in this country still don't believe or understand how much damage this virus can inflict.

ryanmccullagh 7y ago
Legally, does the state and federal goverment have the power to control the movement of people? Does the state have the power to control my movement from my own home to the end of the street for my daily walk?
- altcognito 7y ago
  The answer to this question is always yes regardless of the government in dire circumstances. That's why there are some of these laws on the books for quarantine in the first place from 1918. That being said, it's a big scary step and there are lots of little steps likely to be taken before we get that far. You can see this in action in Italy.
- philwelch 7y ago
  Yes, this is a long-recognized aspect of the states’ police power.
- nathanaldensr 7y ago
  Of course they have the power: they have the guns. That's not the real question; the real questions are 1) whether the populace will tolerate it, and how much; 2) whether the state's forces will willingly open fire on intolerant citizens; 3) whether the state chooses to use the power, whether legal or not.
  - draw_down 7y ago
    The first word in the post you're responding to is "legally". Obviously the state has guns. Come on!!
  - bananabreakfast 7y ago
    You mean like they did at Kent State?
- pgrote 7y ago
  >Legally, does the state and federal goverment have the power to control the movement of people? Yes and no. I was curious, too. https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/mass-quarantine-lockdown-explainer/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/mass-quarantine-lockdown...
- gdubs 7y ago
  Wouldn't this fall under 'martial law'? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_the_United_Stat... "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." I guess the legal argument comes down to a lack of a comma between 'invasion' and 'the public safety'. Or whether a virus constitutes 'invasion'.
  - klodolph 7y ago
    Habeas corpus isn’t the issue here. It’s 1st / 5th / 14th amendment issues: - 1st: Right to peacefully assemble - 14th “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” 5th has similar text to 14th. To be clear: I’m not arguing that the various govts. can’t impose quarantines or isolation orders, I’m just outlining which parts of the constitution are relevant to the legal questions.
    - gdubs 7y ago
      Thanks. And same – I'm not advocating one way or the other, simply wanting to understand the constitutionality.
- nsm 7y ago
  This is a good recent summary for non-lawyers https://thedispatch.com/p/the-police-power-of-the-states-to https://thedispatch.com/p/the-police-power-of-the-states-to
- mellavora 7y ago
  It is called quarantine, and yes they do, under certain circumstances.
citilife 7y ago
Even if people meet socially outside of work, they still aren't _required_ to go to work. Which means a lot of people can practice social distancing. People are scared, many will avoid groups (others may throw parties, but can't help that). I know in my neighborhood, everyone is outside but we are all maintaining 2 meter distance. Some neighbors even brought up their grills and stayed seperate but can talk (at a distance).
- lm28469 7y ago
  > but can't help that They're fining (~$140) and detaining people who don't follow the rules in France. https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lepoint.fr%2Fsociete%2Fconfinement-premieres-garde-a-vue-pour-mise-en-danger-de-la-vie-d-autrui-20-03-2020-2368043_23.php https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3...
  - whateveracct 7y ago
    Doing that in the US is a Supreme Court case waiting to happen.
    - vel0city 7y ago
      States have pretty broad police powers especially in times of crisis. It wouldn't surprise me to see the 10th Amendment apply to the state action of enforcing massive quarantines.
      - whateveracct 7y ago
        While that's definitely true, this is also inherently running up agains the Bill of Rights. Police powers are not unbounded so as this continues (and especially as it subsides), I expect legitimate unanswered questions of Constitutionality could come into play.
    - lm28469 7y ago
      Maybe, let's see how it works out. I have no skin in this game. Numbers will talk in the next weeks and months, in the meantime all I can say is that I'm glad I'm not in the US right now.
op03 7y ago
If the Post is to be believed they are just moving to the Hamptons and socializing - https://nypost.com/2020/03/19/we-should-blow-up-the-bridges-coronavirus-leads-to-class-warfare-in-hamptons/ https://nypost.com/2020/03/19/we-should-blow-up-the-bridges-...
vkou 7y ago
I've driven past a park yesterday, five miles away from the center of the outbreak in the US. It was packed to the grills with schoolchildren in the playground, and their parents watching. People aren't taking the rules seriously until you shut things down.
- jfk13 7y ago
  The more usual expression would be "packed to the gills", but in the context of American parks, perhaps "grills" is an appropriate word after all!
aaomidi 7y ago
Heck I saw people on HN say California is overreacting...
Spooky23 7y ago
Cuomo is a pragmatist above all else. The mission is flatten the curve. If some asshole decides to have a party and get people sick, that is awful, but the 10 other people who follow the rules will be at lower risk. Instead of the California approach, where you say "don't this, except for reasons 1 ... n", he's attacking the demand side. You can go out, but you don't have anywhere to go. All of the problems get worse if you make people panic. My buddy who lives in northern upstate NY was just telling me about all of the people "bugging out" and taking their RVs up to the Adirondacks. If you tell people it's martial law, people will flee NYC Metro for wherever. The other thing is that people will always be out. How do you deal with homeless people? Arrest them? How do you deal with people who claim to be medical people? How do you identify Trader Joe's employees? Are the police going to setup roadblocks? How do the police maintain a rosette stone of who is worthy of travel and who isnt?
- walterbell 7y ago
  It's a reasonable approach. Let's hope Cuomo retains the ability to block NYC full lockdown (which is physically unenforceable and would have at best a marginal impact). Facebook and Google sometimes use the expression "one in a million" to describe edge/exception cases which occur every day when you serve many users. The density of NYC is a real-world equivalent, there are continuous exceptions that cannot be centrally predicted and must be micro-locally responded. There has to be non-zero social interaction of young people who are least at risk, and can recover most quickly. Otherwise the only people being exposed will be essential workers. After recovery, these young people can volunteer to train/run errands for hospitals, reducing load on the system and keeping them active. In times of crisis, civilians working with each other can make a difference. Wish they had used the language "physical distancing" since people can still coordinate socially (including online).
munificent 7y ago
Man, I hate this take. I get where it's coming from. In times of significant stress, it's important that we all pull together and do work to benefit society as a whole. And part of the way we incentivize that is by calling out people who don't do their part. I get it. But we are already inundated by outrage journalism, cancel culture, and public shaming. The last thing we need is more of that. We've already got enough things to be stressed, worried, anxious, and angry about. The vast majority of people will respect the good advice coming from leadership, and those people are the ones who deserve our attention, in a positive way. Look at this like engineering. With a large enough system, you are always going to have some components that fail. When your network has a million machines, you don't get upset when a server goes down, you just engineer some tolerance into your network, define processes to handle them, and go on with your life. I have been constantly gratified by how many people are doing the right thing and those are the people that I want to focus my own attention on. I think we will all get through this with a little more sanity and emotional health if we can take a break from the perennial game of torches and pitchforks for a while.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  Man, I can tell you the amount of ignorance still prevalent out there. Not in some bushwhack undeveloped middle of nowhere, but in the biggest cities in Switzerland. So many people just don't give a nanofraction of a fuck. If you ignore those, things will get worse, much much much worse than they should. Just a look at China now, and then on Italy. Seriously, what.the.fuck
- josephorjoe 7y ago
  In my (normally very busy) neighborhood in nyc, I'd say this week vehicle traffic is down like 70-80% and pedestrian traffic had been down 50-60% earlier in the week and yesterday and today is looking more like 80-90% reduced -- and actually today vehicle traffic seems like it is almost gone. Just delivery and sanitation vehicles. People seem to be taking it seriously here, but I'm sure there are plenty of places where people are not.
pmoriarty 7y ago
> > There is currently no plan in place to penalize individuals for gathering socially > Then people won't take the rules seriously. What should the government do to these people? Arrest them? Already there are news headlines saying "US jails begin releasing prisoners to stem Covid-19 infections"[1][2] and from that article, specifically relating to New York: "New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Wednesday that city officials will this week identify individuals for release, including people who were arrested for minor crimes and those most vulnerable to infection due to underlying health problems. "His announcement came hours after a guard and a prisoner tested positive for coronavirus at Rikers Island prison.. "Other New York prisons, such as Sing Sing, have had inmates test positive for coronavirus and one employee for the state's corrections department has died from it." These prisons are breeding grounds for disease: "sinks often lack soap and hand sanitiser is considered contraband due to its alcohol content", and medical care in US prisons is often atrocious. So by imprisoning people in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions you might effectively be giving them a death sentence and possibly putting the other inmates at risk from the people that came in from the outside world. Another good article on the serious vulnerability of prisons during this outbreak: [3] [1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-51947802 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-51947802 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632901 [3] - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/17/21181515/coronavirus-covid-19-jails-prisons-mass-incarceration https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/17/21181515/c...
- senordevnyc 7y ago
  And these people's actions are a potential death sentence for many others.
- bosie 7y ago
  > Arrest them? Why not? Couldn't you postpone the prison time for a later point in time? Or make them pay fees right away (and a high fee).
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
    Homeless? Quarantine in a hotel. Not homeless and income or wealth <100k? $100 fine per occurrence. Plus $10 every week of non payment without proof of financial hardship. Not homeless and income or wealth > 100k? 1% annual gross income or net wealth (greater of both) per occurrence with a 1% daily compounding interest rate of the principal amount until paid in full. If third incident mandatory minimum of 5 years imprisonment and $1,000,000 fine or 50% wealth whichevers greater. Non payment prevents release.
onetimemanytime 7y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J60fQr0GWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J60fQr0GWo a top hospital in Italy's richest area overwhelmed by the virus.
virmundi 7y ago
Why is the damage bad? Why not thin the population? Think about the looming stress due to the boomers living longer. If they die, housing becomes affordable. Assets move to the younger generation. Debts get canceled because their is no one left in the estate to pay. Think of this as a fire that thins the forest. New growth will come up.
- dbbk 7y ago
  Young people die as well you know...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- lookdangerous 7y ago
  And all of these 'upsides' will occur regardless in a few years. Why hasten economic benefit at the cost of human life? Economic benefit is only of benefit to human being so it's not an arguable equation.
- techdreamer 7y ago
  So we start with your parents and grandparents? Think of all those lovely assets you will get.
fmajid 7y ago
It seems coronavirus denialism is widespread in the same demographics that espouse climate change denialism.
- hatchershoes 7y ago
  Wow, interesting fact! Where did your insight come from?

ryanmccullagh 7y ago

Legally, does the state and federal goverment have the power to control the movement of people? Does the state have the power to control my movement from my own home to the end of the street for my daily walk?

altcognito 7y ago
The answer to this question is always yes regardless of the government in dire circumstances. That's why there are some of these laws on the books for quarantine in the first place from 1918. That being said, it's a big scary step and there are lots of little steps likely to be taken before we get that far. You can see this in action in Italy.
philwelch 7y ago
Yes, this is a long-recognized aspect of the states’ police power.
nathanaldensr 7y ago
Of course they have the power: they have the guns. That's not the real question; the real questions are 1) whether the populace will tolerate it, and how much; 2) whether the state's forces will willingly open fire on intolerant citizens; 3) whether the state chooses to use the power, whether legal or not.
- draw_down 7y ago
  The first word in the post you're responding to is "legally". Obviously the state has guns. Come on!!
- bananabreakfast 7y ago
  You mean like they did at Kent State?
pgrote 7y ago
>Legally, does the state and federal goverment have the power to control the movement of people? Yes and no. I was curious, too. https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/mass-quarantine-lockdown-explainer/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/mass-quarantine-lockdown...
gdubs 7y ago
Wouldn't this fall under 'martial law'? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_the_United_Stat... "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." I guess the legal argument comes down to a lack of a comma between 'invasion' and 'the public safety'. Or whether a virus constitutes 'invasion'.
- klodolph 7y ago
  Habeas corpus isn’t the issue here. It’s 1st / 5th / 14th amendment issues: - 1st: Right to peacefully assemble - 14th “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” 5th has similar text to 14th. To be clear: I’m not arguing that the various govts. can’t impose quarantines or isolation orders, I’m just outlining which parts of the constitution are relevant to the legal questions.
  - gdubs 7y ago
    Thanks. And same – I'm not advocating one way or the other, simply wanting to understand the constitutionality.
nsm 7y ago
This is a good recent summary for non-lawyers https://thedispatch.com/p/the-police-power-of-the-states-to https://thedispatch.com/p/the-police-power-of-the-states-to
mellavora 7y ago
It is called quarantine, and yes they do, under certain circumstances.

citilife 7y ago

Even if people meet socially outside of work, they still aren't _required_ to go to work. Which means a lot of people can practice social distancing. People are scared, many will avoid groups (others may throw parties, but can't help that). I know in my neighborhood, everyone is outside but we are all maintaining 2 meter distance. Some neighbors even brought up their grills and stayed seperate but can talk (at a distance).

lm28469 7y ago
> but can't help that They're fining (~$140) and detaining people who don't follow the rules in France. https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lepoint.fr%2Fsociete%2Fconfinement-premieres-garde-a-vue-pour-mise-en-danger-de-la-vie-d-autrui-20-03-2020-2368043_23.php https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3...
- whateveracct 7y ago
  Doing that in the US is a Supreme Court case waiting to happen.
  - vel0city 7y ago
    States have pretty broad police powers especially in times of crisis. It wouldn't surprise me to see the 10th Amendment apply to the state action of enforcing massive quarantines.
    - whateveracct 7y ago
      While that's definitely true, this is also inherently running up agains the Bill of Rights. Police powers are not unbounded so as this continues (and especially as it subsides), I expect legitimate unanswered questions of Constitutionality could come into play.
  - lm28469 7y ago
    Maybe, let's see how it works out. I have no skin in this game. Numbers will talk in the next weeks and months, in the meantime all I can say is that I'm glad I'm not in the US right now.

op03 7y ago

If the Post is to be believed they are just moving to the Hamptons and socializing - https://nypost.com/2020/03/19/we-should-blow-up-the-bridges-coronavirus-leads-to-class-warfare-in-hamptons/ https://nypost.com/2020/03/19/we-should-blow-up-the-bridges-...

vkou 7y ago

I've driven past a park yesterday, five miles away from the center of the outbreak in the US. It was packed to the grills with schoolchildren in the playground, and their parents watching. People aren't taking the rules seriously until you shut things down.

jfk13 7y ago
The more usual expression would be "packed to the gills", but in the context of American parks, perhaps "grills" is an appropriate word after all!

aaomidi 7y ago

Heck I saw people on HN say California is overreacting...

Spooky23 7y ago

Cuomo is a pragmatist above all else. The mission is flatten the curve. If some asshole decides to have a party and get people sick, that is awful, but the 10 other people who follow the rules will be at lower risk. Instead of the California approach, where you say "don't this, except for reasons 1 ... n", he's attacking the demand side. You can go out, but you don't have anywhere to go. All of the problems get worse if you make people panic. My buddy who lives in northern upstate NY was just telling me about all of the people "bugging out" and taking their RVs up to the Adirondacks. If you tell people it's martial law, people will flee NYC Metro for wherever. The other thing is that people will always be out. How do you deal with homeless people? Arrest them? How do you deal with people who claim to be medical people? How do you identify Trader Joe's employees? Are the police going to setup roadblocks? How do the police maintain a rosette stone of who is worthy of travel and who isnt?

walterbell 7y ago
It's a reasonable approach. Let's hope Cuomo retains the ability to block NYC full lockdown (which is physically unenforceable and would have at best a marginal impact). Facebook and Google sometimes use the expression "one in a million" to describe edge/exception cases which occur every day when you serve many users. The density of NYC is a real-world equivalent, there are continuous exceptions that cannot be centrally predicted and must be micro-locally responded. There has to be non-zero social interaction of young people who are least at risk, and can recover most quickly. Otherwise the only people being exposed will be essential workers. After recovery, these young people can volunteer to train/run errands for hospitals, reducing load on the system and keeping them active. In times of crisis, civilians working with each other can make a difference. Wish they had used the language "physical distancing" since people can still coordinate socially (including online).

munificent 7y ago

Man, I hate this take. I get where it's coming from. In times of significant stress, it's important that we all pull together and do work to benefit society as a whole. And part of the way we incentivize that is by calling out people who don't do their part. I get it. But we are already inundated by outrage journalism, cancel culture, and public shaming. The last thing we need is more of that. We've already got enough things to be stressed, worried, anxious, and angry about. The vast majority of people will respect the good advice coming from leadership, and those people are the ones who deserve our attention, in a positive way. Look at this like engineering. With a large enough system, you are always going to have some components that fail. When your network has a million machines, you don't get upset when a server goes down, you just engineer some tolerance into your network, define processes to handle them, and go on with your life. I have been constantly gratified by how many people are doing the right thing and those are the people that I want to focus my own attention on. I think we will all get through this with a little more sanity and emotional health if we can take a break from the perennial game of torches and pitchforks for a while.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
saiya-jin 7y ago
Man, I can tell you the amount of ignorance still prevalent out there. Not in some bushwhack undeveloped middle of nowhere, but in the biggest cities in Switzerland. So many people just don't give a nanofraction of a fuck. If you ignore those, things will get worse, much much much worse than they should. Just a look at China now, and then on Italy. Seriously, what.the.fuck
josephorjoe 7y ago
In my (normally very busy) neighborhood in nyc, I'd say this week vehicle traffic is down like 70-80% and pedestrian traffic had been down 50-60% earlier in the week and yesterday and today is looking more like 80-90% reduced -- and actually today vehicle traffic seems like it is almost gone. Just delivery and sanitation vehicles. People seem to be taking it seriously here, but I'm sure there are plenty of places where people are not.

pmoriarty 7y ago

> > There is currently no plan in place to penalize individuals for gathering socially > Then people won't take the rules seriously. What should the government do to these people? Arrest them? Already there are news headlines saying "US jails begin releasing prisoners to stem Covid-19 infections"[1][2] and from that article, specifically relating to New York: "New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Wednesday that city officials will this week identify individuals for release, including people who were arrested for minor crimes and those most vulnerable to infection due to underlying health problems. "His announcement came hours after a guard and a prisoner tested positive for coronavirus at Rikers Island prison.. "Other New York prisons, such as Sing Sing, have had inmates test positive for coronavirus and one employee for the state's corrections department has died from it." These prisons are breeding grounds for disease: "sinks often lack soap and hand sanitiser is considered contraband due to its alcohol content", and medical care in US prisons is often atrocious. So by imprisoning people in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions you might effectively be giving them a death sentence and possibly putting the other inmates at risk from the people that came in from the outside world. Another good article on the serious vulnerability of prisons during this outbreak: [3] [1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-51947802 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-51947802 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632901 [3] - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/17/21181515/coronavirus-covid-19-jails-prisons-mass-incarceration https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/17/21181515/c...

senordevnyc 7y ago
And these people's actions are a potential death sentence for many others.
bosie 7y ago
> Arrest them? Why not? Couldn't you postpone the prison time for a later point in time? Or make them pay fees right away (and a high fee).
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
  Homeless? Quarantine in a hotel. Not homeless and income or wealth <100k? $100 fine per occurrence. Plus $10 every week of non payment without proof of financial hardship. Not homeless and income or wealth > 100k? 1% annual gross income or net wealth (greater of both) per occurrence with a 1% daily compounding interest rate of the principal amount until paid in full. If third incident mandatory minimum of 5 years imprisonment and $1,000,000 fine or 50% wealth whichevers greater. Non payment prevents release.

onetimemanytime 7y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J60fQr0GWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J60fQr0GWo a top hospital in Italy's richest area overwhelmed by the virus.

virmundi 7y ago

Why is the damage bad? Why not thin the population? Think about the looming stress due to the boomers living longer. If they die, housing becomes affordable. Assets move to the younger generation. Debts get canceled because their is no one left in the estate to pay. Think of this as a fire that thins the forest. New growth will come up.

dbbk 7y ago
Young people die as well you know...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
lookdangerous 7y ago
And all of these 'upsides' will occur regardless in a few years. Why hasten economic benefit at the cost of human life? Economic benefit is only of benefit to human being so it's not an arguable equation.
techdreamer 7y ago
So we start with your parents and grandparents? Think of all those lovely assets you will get.

fmajid 7y ago

It seems coronavirus denialism is widespread in the same demographics that espouse climate change denialism.

hatchershoes 7y ago
Wow, interesting fact! Where did your insight come from?