Medical-legal Challenges for Covid-19 Cases

• Publication year: 2021
• Author: Nachman Brautbar, M.D.

Medical-Legal Challenges for COVID-19 Cases

Nachman Brautbar, M.D.

Los Angeles, California

Over the last 18 months, California, the nation, and the world have been fighting a voracious serial killer: coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). COVID-19 is a viral infection that is caused by the coronavirus severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), which produces a flu-like respiratory illness.

Some suspect the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 originated in November 2019 in a laboratory in Wuhan, China and escaped by accident. Many scientists believe SARS-CoV-2 originated in horseshoe bats mutating to infect some yet-to-be-identified mammal and then mutating again to infect humans. Regardless of whether the origins of the COVID-19 virus are zoonotic, a scientific experiment gone awry, or a human-engineered project, the world was stunned by the virus's lighting-fast rise in infection rate and resulting mortality. By July 2021, the global case rate had reached 190 million and deaths were at 4.1 million. While SARS-CoV-1 caused an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2002, leading to the 2003 pandemic, it was quickly contained. With only 8,098 cases reported globally, 774 resulted in death; the case fatality rate of SARS-CoV-1 was 9.6 percent.

During the first several months of the 2020 pandemic of SARS-coV-2, the global spread was accelerated through infection on a cruise ship in Japan, at a religious mass gathering in South Korea, and at ski resorts in Italy and the Austrian Alps. During this time, there was considerable confusion and uncertainty about the mode of infection, and its spread was likened to exposure to nuclear radioactive materials. Misinformation abounded. COVID-19 protocols such as shutdowns, quarantine, and isolation, as well as the severity of cases, were quickly politicized, along with the issue of which precautions were or were not effective. Even today we struggle with these questions. Although vaccinations have since been developed, a large percentage of the American population lacks trust in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's emergency-approved medicine; many Americans are not convinced that they are susceptible to the virus, and many more are happily playing Nero's fiddle.

As many of us now know, the initial symptoms of COVID-19 can include a fever, a continuous cough, and/or the loss of the senses of taste and smell. The virus acts as a shapeshifter; it may also cause a sore throat, sinusitis, headache...