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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

We have a court system to decide if these decisions fall into the public health crisis prevention.

Would this pass the bar? Certainly. We have historical evidence that homelessness during a pandemic significantly increases death and spread of disease.

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> We have a court system to decide if these decisions fall into the public health crisis prevention.

Wait, is that the argument that the CDC should be given full authority to decide what needs to be done to protect against the disease, or that the courts should supervise not just on whether the action is authorized, but also effective at the stated goal?

Even if the CDC has authority to do what needs to be done to protect against the disease, it doesn't have the authority to do everything that it can stick an anti-Covid label on. It can't, for example, ban the eating of corn on the cob as part of the fight against Covid. Why? Because eating corn on the cob is not a known (or even suspected) to increase Covid transmission.

A court has to care at least a little bit about effectiveness of the measure... doesn't it?

> We have a court system to decide

Your confidence in the court system to properly constrain the reach of what is supposed to be a limited government is not well-founded.

> We have historical evidence that homelessness during a pandemic significantly increases death and spread of disease.

Again: The remedy isn't what's primarily in dispute here. It's the systemic repercussions of allowing such reckless overreach. These repercussions will almost certainly fall more on the poor and poorly-connected.

Our system of civil justice and liberty isn't meant to withstand such centralized decision-making.

Okay I'll let people getting evicted during this time know that at least we didn't have "authoritarianism."

What a ridiculous sentiment. This is literally one of the worst pandemics in a century with nearly a million dead officially and we're arguing in semantics.

If you think the court system can't stop authoritarianism then what's the point of our system? We literally have the president being able to do EO, how is this any different?

>Okay I'll let people getting evicted during this time know that at least we didn't have "authoritarianism."

So you assume that states wouldn't follow CDC recommendations? It seems to be for you it is not an issue of laws. It is just there is your tribe that you support and CDC is a part of it, and a tribe you don't support (those evil red states). And of course you would like CDC to take power away from them no matter how much people support their own state government.

>If you think the court system can't stop authoritarianism then what's the point of our system? We literally have the president being able to do EO, how is this any different?

It is not that different. The federal encroachment and the power creep of the executive branch are real issues.

Can you be more creative than having one single entity make the decision for every single person? How about we leverage multiple brains from many walks of life come up with ideas, you know, like in this forum

I'd be more than worried if the CDC was operating on just one brain. I'm confused about the uproar(should've known we have prop owners here), when the virus landed here, we all expected some Hollwood treatment from the CDC, having everything in working order, taking charge/leadership. Well these guys wake up with a deicision, now let's bash them because we are NOT being allowed to evict possible disease carriers/spreaders onto rest of society.

The CDC is OUR Center for Disease control, what does that mean to you? Shouldn't we listen to the guys specialising in disease control while trying to control the disease from spreading?

are you suggesting that the Hacker News commenters should be consulted on national governance?

or that leaders of the CDC make unilateral decisions without consulting anyone else?

Clearly Twitter and reddit should be consulted for the armchair experts to tell them how much money they're going to lose and how some extra people dying is worth it.

CDC isn't a single entity. CDC is made up by the world's best scientists who have an understanding of past pandemics and how homelessness significantly increased the deaths and infectivity. Someone commented with links about this as well.

Why do you think CDC is a single entity?

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