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WASHINGTON, D.C. - As the nation continues to address the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has resulted in nearly 160,000 deaths so far and a severe economic recession, 50 top national experts offer a new assessment of the U.S. policy response to the crisis.

The research details the widespread failure of the country’s leadership in planning and executing a cohesive, national response, and how the crisis exposed weaknesses in the nation’s health care and public health systems. In Assessing Legal Responses to COVID-19, the authors also offer recommendations on how federal, state and local leaders can better respond to COVID-19 and future pandemics. Their proposals include how to strengthen executive leadership for a stronger emergency response, expand access to public health, health care and telehealth; fortify protections for workers; and implement a fair and humane immigration policy. 

Nicolas P. Terry, Hall Render Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Hall Center for Law and Health at IU McKinney, served on the editorial committee and contributed an article, “Liability and Liability Shields,” to the report.

Professor Ross D. Silverman, Professor Public Health and Law at IU McKinney and Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI, also contributed an article “Contact Tracing, Intrastate, Intrastate and Interstate Quarantine, and Isolation.”

 “Judged by any metric the US response to COVID-19 has been a historic failure,” Professor Terry said. “Great attention has been justly paid to political failures and how science and public health have been politicized.”

Expert assessments in the report show that the country's failure in COVID-19 response in many ways has been a legal failure, Professor Terry said.

“The basic design of our health care system and its legal underpinnings have failed us in multiple ways,” he said. “And then there are the more detailed laws such as those dealing with housing and evictions, the protection of nursing home residents, worker protections, and so many more that have been revealed as inadequate or poorly implemented or both.”

Sponsored by the de Beaumont Foundation and the American Public Health Association, the report was produced by Public Health Law Watch in cooperation with the Hall Center, the Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University Beasley School of Law, the Center for Health Policy and Law at Northeastern University, Wayne State University Law School, the Network for Public Health Law and ChangeLab Solutions.

Key findings in the report include:

• Ample legal authority has not been properly used in practice – evidence shows a massive failure of executive leadership and implementation at the federal level, and in many states and localities.
• Decades of pandemic preparation overemphasized documenting plans and failed to account for how severe budget cuts to public health, from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to state and local health departments, would drive outcomes. These budget cuts were combined with political interference that had a deleterious effect on the operational readiness of the nation’s local, state and federal health agencies. 
• Legal responses have failed to prevent racial and economic disparities in the pandemic’s toll, and in some cases aggravated them.

The report provides critical legal analysis and recommendations, rooted in empirical evidence and expert analysis. Each author wrote about how the law has been used, misused or under-used in the response to COVID-19. It addresses not just the legal doctrine, but also matters of implementation, including both the use of strategies and resources. The authors express concern with the efficacy of containing COVID-19, as well as protecting human and civil rights, equity and ethics.

The authors provide more than 100 recommendations for legal action in response to COVID-19. These include calls for urgent action now, as well as longer term changes that reflect the way the pandemic has exposed deeper problems in American law and policy. They include recommendations for federal, state and local levels. 

The recommendations focus on the following key objectives:

• Grounding legal measures in the best available science.
• Collecting and assessing accurate data.
• Improving and expanding access to health care, both now and post-pandemic.
• Increasing and maintaining funding for public health emergency preparedness through a dedicated public health emergency fund.
• Reforming the public health and health care systems to enable them to respond more effectively and equitably during a pandemic and reduce disparities.

• Addressing the affordability and availability of broadband service throughout the United States.

To view the full report, please visit COVID19PolicyPlaybook.org.