Welcome to GPPR’s first blog on the coronavirus pandemic. As students everywhere transition to virtual learning and move off campus, we, especially us policy students, are now perhaps more than ever reflecting on the world’s ills. Here, you’ll find our insights based on our experiences and policy interests. Enjoy, and submit your post here.
How might terrorists exploit the pandemic? Ido Levy
Responding to recessions through a breach percentage, Nathan Witkin
Connectivity issues and privilege in the time of online learning, Hannah Friedman
Prison and COVID-19, Daniel Lee
HOW MIGHT TERRORISTS EXPLOIT THE PANDEMIC?
By Ido Levy
Writing from New York, N.Y.
Something that has been on my mind lately is bioterrorism. As the coronavirus pandemic spreads around the planet, terrorist groups are certainly looking on to see how they can emulate the effects. Indeed, this pandemic, though not itself a bioweapon, has many of the consequences terrorists seek to produce in their attacks: high casualties, mass disruption of daily life, costly damage to target governments, and widespread panic. Terrorists may use these outcomes strategically to exact concessions and excite target audiences.
Already, hate and terrorist groups are promoting intentionally spreading the virus. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists have encouraged their supporters to infect Jews and police officers, with some extremists even suggesting to use spray bottles filled with bodily fluids from an infected person. The Islamic State group has praised the spread of the disease in China.
Terrorists have sought and used biological weapons in the past. Several days after the 9/11 attacks, terrorists circulated anthrax-laced letters around the United States, killing five people and infecting another 17. Authorities in Italy and Japan found rudimentary biological weapons laboratories in safehouses of the Red Army Brigade and Aum Shinrikyo, respectively, the latter responsible for the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system. In 1984, a Rajneeshee cult in Oregon contaminated multiple salad bars with salmonella, sickening 751 people.
Although to date, terrorist efforts to achieve mass casualties with bioweapons have been relatively unsuccessful, a deadly enough agent and far enough spread could cause thousands of deaths. One 2004 National Center for Biotechnology Information report estimates an anthrax attack on a major city released at high enough quantities over a 2 km area can kill as many as 95,000 people and injure many more.
Still, anyone seeking to use these weapons faces serious obstacles. First, these weapons are difficult and costly to acquire, and low availability even through illicit means most likely necessitates independent development. For example, Aum Shinrikyo had to invest substantially in chemical and biological weapons production to acquire sarin gas. Second, development and deployment require organizational capital and specialized know-how, including both knowledgeable engineers and savvy field operatives. And even with the proper expertise, it may be difficult to control a deliberate outbreak or ensure a bioweapon does not backfire. Third, bioweapon attacks may garner less media attention because of the difficulty in differentiating between accidental outbreaks and deliberate infections. Because the success of terrorist tactics depends on media attention, this last point is particularly important.
The coronavirus pandemic, while not a bioweapon, presents several characteristics that may be attractive to people seeking to create one. The virus is fairly lethal, having so far killed over 20% of the almost 280,000 people who have either recovered or died from it. At the same time, it is highly contagious, making it easier to deliberately spread by malicious actors. Finally, while development of a similar virus would most likely prove difficult, its apparent source of transmission through exotic animals in ordinary daily-life encounters shows it might be possible create a new virus through relatively low-cost efforts. At any rate, for an existing malicious actor, the current outbreak entirely foregoes the need to create a new virus; people can deliberately contract and spread the current virus easily enough.
Governments should take this threat seriously and develop countermeasures. Extremist groups are already encouraging their supporters to exploit the current pandemic. While spray bottles and coughing rampages may not be very effective, we might imagine groups contaminating mailboxes, doorknobs, and other objects we use daily, even under quarantine. Groups may mobilize their members to swarm targets, or conduct attacks with firearms or explosives on now more crowded places, like hospitals.
RESPONDING TO RECESSIONS THROUGH A BREACH PERCENTAGE
Writing from Washington, DC
The coronavirus pandemic is inspiring creative policies attempting to avoid a deep recession. One idea is a mortgage holiday, a ban on foreclosure actions based on nonpayment during the pandemic. While originally a voluntary service offered by private banks in special circumstances, mortgage holidays are now being pushed on banks by governments in the United States, United Kingdom, and New Zealand. In terms of government interventions, policy options only range from complete freezes of payments and interest to freezes on payments while interest accrues.
Maybe this policy is being applied too broadly, but also not broadly enough. Instead of ordering banks to endure complete nonpayment, they could be ordered to only endure partial nonpayment. Also, rather than limiting this intervention to banks with home loans, more contracts could be affected.
This blog post presents the idea of a contract breach payment percentage (or “breach percentage”). The underlying idea is this: getting through recessions may require market participants to lower prices in order to kick-start demand. Because contracts are a reason prices cannot be lowered to respond to recession forces, states can create temporary flexibility by preventing legal action for breach of contract when buyers pay a set percentage of the regular payment amount. This proposal therefore offers a way governments can respond to the market forces occurring in recessions, clearing the path to quicker economic recoveries.
Recessions require a temporary drop in prices
Under popular macroeconomic thinking, recessions occur when confidence falls in certain markets. For example, when consumer confidence falls, consumers collectively determine the market to be overvalued and therefore become defensive about purchases and investments. To work through these economic downturns, recessions produce downward pressure on prices through reduced demand.
The reasons recessions tend to be prolonged and painful may be that prices do not adjust downward very quickly. And a key reason prices do not decline to respond to power demand may be the inflexibility of contracts. Not only do they lock participants into current prices, but they also create incentives against businesses cutting prices, for fear of being trapped in bad deals for longer periods of time.
It should be noted, however, that a rapid or self-reinforcing decrease in prices is extremely dangerous. Deflation occurring in a sustained downward spiral is bad, because consumers are paid less as workers and are therefore less able to buy as prices decline. Meanwhile, though recovery requires an increase in purchases, the rational reaction of buyers to runaway deflation is to not buy in anticipation of continually lowering prices.
What can government do: Reduce the contract breach payment percentage
An ideal reaction to recessions would appear to be a systematic and temporary reduction in prices, targeted to the part of the economy affected by overvaluation. The goal would be bidding down the price of overvalued goods and services. While governments can systematically lower price levels by reducing the money supply, this just causes transactions to require less money. Instead, the policy prescription should involve promoting flexibility in pricing certain transactions relative to others.
For example, if wages were so high that massive unemployment caused a recession, then employers should be able to bid down employment contracts. Or, if stock market investment becomes driven more by herd behavior and the anticipation of investment by others, rather than objective market value, then consumers should be able to bid down payments to businesses.
To facilitate a temporary and controlled downward movement in prices, state governments could order partially paid contracts not be subject to legal action for breach of contract. This is the contract breach payment percentage (or “breach percentage”).
Contract law in the United States is governed by individual states, with guidance by common law interpretation by courts. Because an allowance for across-the-board partial payments does not appear to be a component of current contract law regimes, the current breach percentage is 100%. This means a homeowner paying 99% of their monthly mortgage payment is subject to a foreclosure action. Though the legal doctrine of substantial performance enforces contracts partially performed, this doctrine applies to the more subjective aspect of performance (good faith attempts to provide what is paid for, despite unforeseen circumstances) rather than payment.
Thus, in order to stimulate demand, state governments can order a temporary ban on breach of contract actions for contracts paid past a certain percentage of the agreed-to payment amount. This could target certain areas of the economy where there is room to cut income to allow for another segment of the economy to catch up.
As a final note, this idea may not be most applicable to the current recession, which is more a product of reduced supply, though it will also bleed into reduced demand.
CONNECTIVITY ISSUES AND PRIVILEGE IN THE TIME OF ONLINE LEARNING
Writing from Newton, Mass.
If this pandemic has taught me anything, it’s how privileged I am. The transition to online learning has been tough. I feel like my workload has increased because professors aren’t able to cover as much material over Zoom as they are in person. That means putting in extra time outside of class completing supplemental material to catch up. I appreciate the professors’ commitment to ensuring that my peers and I are still getting as much as possible out of our classes. I can’t deny, however, that keeping up with this increased workload is more complicated for some of us than for others.
A week ago, I was cooped up in my small apartment in Capitol Hill, getting kicked out of Zoom sessions every ten minutes because my internet stopped working. The only way to get around this was to reset my network settings, but it was a fleeting fix. It was incredibly disruptive to my learning environment. After two weeks of online classes, I couldn’t take it anymore and made arrangements with my parents, who live in Boston, to get picked up. I’m now quarantined in my old bedroom, with my parents leaving meals on a tray outside my door, but I no longer have internet issues. I don’t mind the solitude, to be honest. What gets me is that lots of people don’t have the option to relocate like I did. For many students, connectivity issues are an unwavering reality – an incredibly disruptive one. In the age of online learning, a stable network connection is the difference between keeping up and falling behind.
I feel for my peers who aren’t as lucky as I am and hope the university will work to accommodate them. These times are stressful enough as it is.
By Daniel Lee
Writing from Kansas City, Mo.
As we think about all the different intersections of our lives which expose how underequipped governments around the world were in facing the COVID-19 pandemic – some subsets of our population tend to be overlooked amid these kinds of crises, and that overlooking could not only adversely affect millions within this population, but many more without. Incarcerated persons, of which 20% are imprisoned in American detention facilities, represent one such forgotten population amid the pandemic’s panic.
Epidemic and pandemic curves typically display exponential growth of both infection and mortality: as has been seen well-known examples like the 1905 plague in Bombay, the 1918 Spanish flu, the 1948 measles epidemic in London, and the 2014 Ebola epidemic – with novel coronavirus following a similar trend.
As we have all heard, it is crucial that we “flatten the curve” however circumstances in federal corrections facilities as well as state and local prisons and jails make it nearly impossible for incarcerated persons and staff at correctional facilities to observe the practices necessary to reduce their risk and the risk of those with whom they interact.
For example, as per the Bureau of Prisons, federal corrections facilities remain crowded with 9% overcrowding systemwide, 15% overcrowding in low security facilities, 19% overcrowding in medium security facilities, and 16% overcrowding in high security facilities. This overcrowding of federal and state correctional facilities make practices like social distancing nearly impossible to implement.
Prisons themselves are hotbeds for the spread of disease; compared to the public, inmates have an increased prevalence of immunodeficiency virus infection, as well as contraction rates for sexually transmitted diseases, and infections with airborne contraction methods. Further incarcerated peoples tend to have higher rates of certain at-risk populations than the general public.
As per the Center for Disease Control, high-risk populations in terms of contraction of COVID-19 include people aged 65 or older, people with preexisting conditions (namely pulmonary, cardiovascular, renal, and pancreatic conditions or those that render people immunocompromised or disabled), pregnant people, and severely obese people. Current estimates for these at-risk populations in federal and state prisons put for hundreds of thousands of people at risk of contraction. Almost 3% of federal inmates in 2020 are aged 65 and older and approximately 150,000 people over the age of 55 in U.S. correctional facilities in 2016. Further, 43% of inmates reported having a chronic condition, including 9% reporting to be diabetics, nearly 10% reporting to have a preexisting heart problem, almost 15% reporting to be asthmatic, 1.8% reporting to have liver cirrhosis, and 1.3% reporting to have HIV/AIDS. Of those reporting to have chronic conditions, only 66% of state and federal inmates and 40% of jail inmates reported taking prescription medication with 36.3% of them reporting the reasons they did not take medication or because the on-site healthcare provider did not find it necessary or the facility otherwise refused to provide the medication. In addition, 16% of HIV-positive state and federal prison inmates and 34.1% of jail inmates are not taking prescription medication. Finally, 2.4% of the prison population is considered morbidly/severely obese.
For perspective, one in every 47 Americans interacts with the incarceration system as an inmate, probationer, or parolee. This includes hundreds of thousands of people where the health risks posed by COVID-19 likely outweigh the probative value of continued incarceration; 555,000 people detained pretrial who have not been convicted or sentenced – most of whom are detained because they cannot afford bail, 350,000 incarcerated for drug offenses – including 117,000 who have not been convicted, and 168,000 incarcerated for technical violations of parole and probation (rather than a new crime).
If you include the 1.4 million law-enforcement supervisors of law-enforcement, the 900,000 probation officers, and 300,000 judges not adjudicating administrative law, at least one in 34 Americans interacts with the correctional and criminal justice system as a part of their everyday lives.
This number does not include food service providers, custodial workers, educators, chaplains, healthcare workers, counselors (for substance abuse, behavioral disorder, mental health, or rehabilitation), lawyers and legal support workers, or social workers – meaning potentially hundreds of thousands more people are at risk because of their interaction with correctional facilities since January.
This figure also does not include the 6.3 million people who are not in prison but have immediate family currently incarcerated. These people, whose visitation rights have now been suspended by the federal government and by most state authorities in response to COVID-19, have virtually no means of communication with inmates on the inside. As per the Bureau of Prisons, only 12% of federal facilities have any video conferencing available for prisoners to communicate with people not directly a part of the criminal justice process. Video conferencing and phone calls are expensive means of contacting incarcerated persons with charges of $1/minute or more – now likely to increase after the current administration ended the caps instituted by the Obama administration’s FCC. Now the situation looks even more dire for the 45% of federal prisoners that are parents, stepparents, or guardians of minors and their children; 21.4% of federal prisoners are married and their spouses, and the 44,000 youth prisoners and their guardians, are being affected.
As of March 31st, the National Commission on Correction Health Care identified 152 cases of COVID-19 among inmates and staff in the 312 jails and prisons surveyed – of which California and Georgia have over 20 cases and New Jersey has over 60.
While some jurisdictions are responding by halting arrests and detainments or releasing at-risk or vulnerable inmates, others refused such safety measures, vilified judges, and other practitioners who advocate or enact such measures or take half measures or steps that maintain institutional biases in incarceration.
Beyond the increased risk for incarcerated populations due to higher prevalence of at-risk populations, relative inability to practice spread reducing tactics like social distancing, issues concerning healthcare access and quality for incarcerated persons – these populations also face more severe consequences from the COVID-19 shutdowns: as social isolation, lack of access to medical care, potential reductions in essential goods as the economy comes to a standstill, and obligatory work for pennies an hour further marginalizes this population.
Established in 1995, the Georgetown Public Policy Review is the McCourt School of Public Policy’s nonpartisan, graduate student-run publication. Our mission is to provide an outlet for innovative new thinkers and established policymakers to offer perspectives on the politics and policies that shape our nation and our world.