8
Lending a Helping Hand?
Susan Block-Lieb, Cooper Family Professor in Urban Legal Issues, Fordham Law School
Scholar in Residence, American College of Bankruptcy
Since at least the beginning of March, fellows of the American College of Bankruptcy have struggled to confront a new reality – the presence of the coronavirus pandemic
and its effects on global health and the global economy.
Like many, I suppose, I was only vaguely aware of the extent to which COVID-19 could impact my life and the lives of hundreds of millions of U.S. residents – vaguely aware, that is, until I received an email jointly sent by Mark Bloom and Marc Levinson on March 8, the weekend before the scheduled Spring ACB meeting, cancelling the meetings we had spent months in planning because of what then was referred to as the coronavirus epidemic. Within days, my academic institution followed the ACB. Beginning March 11, Fordham University, like many universities, ceased teaching face to face for an indefinite period of time; at the law school, we commenced teaching law students “remotely” through something called Zoom, an Internet application I had never heard of until those early months in March. Zoom is now the portal through which many of us now observe the world – I have taught Zoom classes, participated in Zoom faculty meetings, attended and presented at Zoom conferences. As an extended family, we held a Zoom Passover Seder. As a member of an extended community of grieving friends, I cried at a Zoom Shiva.
Epidemiology classically defines a pandemic as “an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people.”1 The World Health Organization omits from this definition seasonal and regional epidemics and more narrowly applies the term only “when almost simultaneous transmission takes place worldwide.”2 A pandemic is both global and long lasting.
The scale of a pandemic may not feel difficult to comprehend conceptually, but the numbers – the exponential growth and multiplier effects – of those affected by COVID-19 are mind boggling. Today’s New York Times reports in excess of 3.2 million cases and 233,657 deaths from the coronavirus, globally, with more than 1 million of these cases and 63,109 of these deaths in the United States. The overwhelming bulk of these million cases are concentrated in 10 states: New York has borne the brunt of the virus, with 309,696 reported cases to date, but the other nine states with the highest rate of infections – New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, Texas and Louisiana – together account for another 463,000 cases.3
The scale of the impact of the pandemic is also evident from the figures describing the similarly mind-numbing economic side-effects of the pandemic: over the past 6 weeks, about 30.3 million Americans have
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1J.M. Last, ed, A dictionary of epidemiology (4th ed., Oxford University Press, 2001).
2Heath Kelly, The classical definition of a pandemic is not elusive, 89 Bull. World Health Org. 469 (July 2011), available at http://www9.who.int/bulletin/volumes/89/7/11-088815/en/.
3New York Times, Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count (May 1, 2020).