How to enforce physical distancing humanely

To protect public health during the COVID-19 pandemic, governments are imposing measures ranging from the mandatory wearing of masks to quarantines to curfews, and sometimes using tactics such as arrests, fines, and intimidation to enforce those measures. But Natalia Linos and Mary Bassett, executive director and director, respectively, of the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, argued against heavy-handed methods in an April 30, 2020 article in Foreign Affairs.

They noted that COVID-19 deaths and illness are concentrated among people of color and in neighborhoods where a majority of the people are poor—and that simply “policing bad behavior” will only exacerbate these disparities. They cited media reports suggesting that police have used excessive force to enforce physical-distancing measures, and have disproportionately singled out people of color. One video, for instance, “shows police dragging a black man off a bus in Philadelphia for failing to wear a mask,” they wrote. Such actions, which increase lack of trust in government agencies, could have the unintended consequence of reducing people’s compliance with physical-distancing measures, they said.

Linos and Bassett proposed an alternative to armed enforcement of public health measures — a civilian health workforce. They wrote, “Imagine that police are not patrolling streets to fine or arrest those breaking curfew or to pull people without masks from public buses — but that a civilian public health workforce instead distributes masks, food, and other essentials, while monitoring compliance with quarantine orders.”