The State of New York has recently come out with it’s Public Health Legal Manual. Sounds bland enough, but it’s a legal guide to what the government can legally do in the event of your worst disaster nightmare. As the New York Times put it in a story just posted on their website:
“Quarantines. The closing of businesses. Mass evacuations, warrantless searches of homes. The slaughter of infected animals and the seizing of property. When laws can be suspended and whether infectious people can be isolated against their will or subjected to mandatory treatment. It is all there, in dry legalese, in the manual, published by the state court system and the state bar association.”
Sound scary? Well, yes, but let’s not forget that New York has already lived through the attacks of September 11, and far from locking the city down, and quarantining parts of the population, most New Yorkers were told to go shopping.
