Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelyoshika | Hacker News Reader

Unbelievable. Does Italian government have right to lock down a whole area? Will this happen in the US?

Of course, it is the government, it is all its right to manager border, let alone within its border.

Yes, and I think things are going to get bad here. It can become a police state, national guard deployed, etc. This the part in the movie where you should stock up on food, gas, and emergency supplies.

Also, at the bottom of the article is a list of 'in other developments'. The governor of new york declared a state of emergency on Friday.

> Does Italian government have right to lock down a whole area?

Rights do not really exist on extreme situations.

> Will this happen in the US?

Unless the virus can't spread on US territory then Yes.

Yup, Governments are sovereign over their territory.

Unbelievable??? The alternative is the complete collapse of the health system.

Of course they have.

It would be much harder to do this in the US because of the First Amendment enshrined right to assembly.

I mean, the CDC can try, but there will be an immediate stay on the rule by some court or another, and the Supreme Court is EXTREMELY unlikely to lift that stay, unless we're in an absolute apocalyptic crisis.

* upon further research, the main support for freedom of travel is under the Privileges and Immunities Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit..., but doesn't really matter, it's precedent either way.

Does the US not have any emergency clause? If it is truly needed, I think even the US would be able to do it.

It would; I'm not saying this is an immutable law of nature. But the threshold is going to be extremely high -- I really, really don't think a .5-1% death rate is going to sway the SC, unless they are convinced that existing measures are utterly incapable of dealing with this.

(And for good reason -- this disease could easily go on for months. If the CDC can call a mandatory quarantine, does that mean it's valid to cancel elections in the interim? For how long? These are real concerns.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_the_United_Stat...

We've been in a "state of emergency" for multiple Presidents...

It's really more the second amendment that makes it harder to do

There might be some question as to the Federal government's legal authority to impose a quarantine on people who are not actually diagnoses as sick, but it would be no problem for state or local governments to do so. The Supreme Court has ruled several times that states have that power.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com