May 14, 2020

Re-Opening the Nation:
Privacy, Surveillance, and Digital Tools for Contact Tracing

Register for a new Hastings Conversation, “Re-Opening the Nation: Privacy, Surveillance, and Digital Tools for Contact Tracing,” which will take place on Monday, May 18, at 11 am Eastern time. Testing and contact tracing are the keys to re-opening the nation safely. If done to scale, we can relax broad sheltering at home orders once the disease prevalence has diminished and switch to using targeted quarantine for the far smaller number of people exposed to known cases. Traditionally, contact tracing has been done person-to-person, but given the prevalence of Covid-19 and the size of the U.S. population there is growing interest in the development of digital apps to supplement contact tracing or warn people if they are exposed. How will these apps work? Will they preserve privacy? Will they lead to surveillance or raise other ethical issues? Should we embrace their development, offer recommendations for better design, or abandon the idea altogether?
Hastings Center president Mildred Solomon will discuss these and other pressing questions with two leading experts: Ed Felton, the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton University and former Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer, and Ryan Calo, co-director of the Tech Policy Lab and associate professor of the School of Law at the University of Washington. Learn more and register for the webinar.

Should New Mothers with Covid-19 Be Separated from Their Newborns? Ethics & the Pandemic in Bioethics Forum

There are many unknowns about controlling Covid-19, including whether mothers who are infected or suspected of being infected should be separated from their newborns after delivery. Guidance on this issue is conflicting. Experts review the evidence and offer recommendations in a new essay in Hastings Bioethics Forum. Other recent essays raise ethical concerns about immunity passports as a key to easing restrictions and argue that health care workers should receive priority in access to care for Covid-19 – breaking with standard practice in health crises. A widely-read piece asks if health care workers may unknowingly spread Covid-19 in their communities simply by wearing scrubs in public.
Read more essays.

In the Media: Avoiding a "Blitzkrieg of Lawsuits" Against Nursing Homes, Gaps in Home Care, Vaccine Challenges

Are nursing homes justified in seeking legal immunity during the coronavirus pandemic as it blazes through their facilities? Hastings Center president Mildred Solomon gives a qualified yes in an interview with The Guardian, warning against the “blitzkrieg of lawsuits” that immunity measures seek to avoid. “I think we need to hold our fire, not put our energy into finger-wagging and blaming. And put more emphasis on stronger regulations, with teeth,” she says. Read The Guardian article.
In an interview with Politico, Hastings Center research scholar Nancy Berlinger addresses the challenges that millions of elderly and disabled people face getting care at home. Some patients are afraid to let aides into their homes, and some aides are afraid to go into their homes. This fear is fueled by a lack of personal protective equipment–home care workers are excluded from the federal government’s efforts to distribute more equipment to the health industry. “It’s often called the invisible population—but it’s an overlooked population,” Berlinger says of home health workers. Read the Politico article.
Once a coronavirus vaccine is developed, hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. will need to be immunized to control the spread of infection. In an interview with the New York Times, Hastings Center research scholar Michael Gusmano says that it is unlikely that drug companies will be able to meet demand right away; medical device makers will have to slowly scale up vials and syringes. Given early estimates that at least 70% of the U.S. population would need to be vaccinated, Gusmano says, “That’s a remarkable high number” and envisions “a fairly massive vaccination campaign.” Read the New York Times article.

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