Rockland County finds subpoenas help compliance with contact tracing
Rockland County’s unique legal gambit to trace the spread of coronavirus appears to be working.
The county, just north of New York City, made headlines this week after issuing subpoenas to eight people Wednesday for withholding information from Covid-19 contact tracers, after a recent party was identified as the locus of an outbreak.
County spokesperson John Lyon said Thursday the individuals are now cooperating with authorities.
“This cluster has been attributed to a large party, one of the many gatherings that have been occurring here,” Commissioner of Health Patricia Schnabel Ruppert said Wednesday when announcing the threat of civil fines for those subpoenaed. “This one was held by someone who was ill at the time of the party, hence the spread to at least eight others so far. Large gatherings remain an issue.”
A woman in Clarkstown threw a party of 50 to 100 people for her daughter when she was experiencing symptoms consistent with Covid-19, officials said.
The individuals who were contacted by disease detectives, some of whom were adults in their 20s, handed the call to their parents, declined to speak with contact tracers, hung up the phone or denied they attended, county and state officials said. Others did not answer their phones and did not call the contact tracers back.
“It’s mind boggling,” Larry Schwartz, a fomer top aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and one of the key leaders behind the state’s Covid-19 response, told POLITICO on Thursday. “The bottom line is this is about the health and safety of not only them but of the other people who were at the party and the public at large.”
Because the individuals are cooperating, the county will not issue the $2,000-a-day fines they had threatened, Lyon said.
Rockland County used the threat of fines during the measles outbreak, which occurred within the Orthodox Jewish community and among residents opposed to vaccines — cohorts that challenged the county’s jurisdiction to keep their unvaccinated children out of schools and public areas.
That clash between the right to assemble and public health may continue during the Covid-19 pandemic, said James Hodge, director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University.
“What you’ve got here is a legitimate use of public health emergency powers,” he said. “If you don’t want to participate in contact tracing, you don’t have to. But resisting the mere effort … can lead authorities to use their subpoena powers, because they’ve got it.”
The First Amendment protects freedom of speech and religion, but those “are not winning interests when they come up against the fact when you may be harming others,” by withholding information in the interest of public health, Hodge said.
“[Localities are] using these powers because they’re available for one, and they’re lawful for another,” he said. “They take this really seriously.”