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| "He might have the CORONOAVIRUS!!!" cartoon, from Malaka Gharib, Just For Kids: A Comic Exploring the New Coronavirus, NPR (Feb. 28, 2020) |
Here are some resources to help you keep up:
- UW's Novel Coronavirus Information - both general and specifically for the UW campus
- CDC's Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Situation Summary
- WHO's Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak page
- JAMA's Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) collection
- The New England Journal of Medicine's Coronavirus (Covid-19) page
- The Lancet's Covid-19 Resource Centre
Coronavirus isn't just a medical problem; it also raises policy and legal issues. How can a government order people to be quarantined or forbid travel to or from affected countries?
This particular virus might be "novel," but an infectious disease that has the potential to affect a large community is definitely not novel, and that's why there's a field of public health law.
In Pox: An American History (a book in our Good Reads collection), Michael Willrich discusses the challenges around smallpox. Could the disease be controlled by quarantine? And by what right could a government order one? When a vaccine became available, could people be compelled to have it? How would government efforts vary between white and black communities? The chapter on the American occupation of the Philippines is harrowing: the Army used brutal techniques in the name of disease control.
In 1996, the Washington Law Review held a symposium on tuberculosis, another infectious disease with legal issues.
If you're curious about public health law, you could get started with Public Health Law in a Nutshell (available through our subscription to West Academic Study Aids). Or browse The Oxford Handbook of Public Health Ethics (edited by Prof. Anna Mastroianni and others) (also available online). Section 8 is on communicable diseases.
Finally, if you want something quick and easy, see this comic about coronavirus, from NPR.
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