Every One of Them': California County Vows to Forcibly Quarantine People – Separating Families – Over COVID-19
YouTube screenshot of Robert Levin announcing a mandatory quarantine.UPDATE May 8, 3:43 p.m.: Following our story, Ventura County Public Health Director Dr. Robert Levin attempted to mollify critics and concerned citizens by apologizing and promising not to forcibly quarantine people with COVID-19. This should come as a relief to Ventura County residents and other Californians. It’s another case of journalism getting results.
We, of course, stand by our story considering it was based entirely on the public statements of California officials.
Original report:
As I reported at PJMedia, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday he was raising up an “army” of contact tracers – as many as 20,000 people – to track down everyone with COVID-19 and quarantine them.
The number of deaths has begun going down in the state, but Newsom has only doubled down, announcing Monday he was training as many as 20,000 people – “an army and a workforce” – to begin tracking down COVID-19 cases.
Newsom announced that the “army” – his word – will start with a deployment of 3,000 and grow to the 20,000 mark to chase down who, what, where, and with whom COVID positive people have had connections. To what end? Newsom said, “the tracing component requires workforce and to identify individuals who tested positive…to ID their contacts (with privacy) and maybe quarantine individuals to stop the spread of the disease.”
He means forcible quarantine.
On Wednesday, the soft voice of Ventura County Health Director Robert Levin confirmed that the forcible quarantines are underway. He announced a “pilot program that will grow into a larger program” and “we will find everyone with COVID-19 and we will isolate every one of them and we will make sure that they stay quarantined and we will check in with them every day. In other words, what this program means is we’re going to do a more complete job, we’re going to do a more meticulous job of making it less and less possible for others in the county to run into someone with COVID-19 infection.”
And it begins. Ventura county will start door to door testing and removing positive people from their homes to quarantine them in a facility.
FEMA CAMPS https://t.co/iPFttbJebN— Jesus is Lord (@Jesusis53688620) May 6, 2020
Ventura County has hardly been overwhelmed with the virus. Out of its 846,000-person population, Ventura County has had 19 deaths from COVID-19. Most of them occurred in hospitals.
Levin attempted to put a happy face on removing people from their homes because, after all, everybody’s doing it.
This is occurring in many, many other states as well and perhaps all the states in our country.
But other states aren’t doing this. There are 19 deaths in the county since this outbreak visited itself upon us from Wuhan.
Here’s your daily Covid-19 update:
18 new cases
595 total cases
416 recovered cases
22 hospitalized
11 in the ICU
160 under quarantine
19 deaths
11,854 people tested https://t.co/bHpomzKXX9 pic.twitter.com/cERpIOOQVc— Ventura County (@CountyVentura) May 6, 2020
But back to the contact “investigators,” as Levin called them.
Levin said that we also realize that as we get more contacts, “some of the people are going to have trouble with being isolated, for instance, if they live in a home where there’s only one bathroom, and there are three or four other people living there and those people don’t have COVID infection we’re not going to be able to keep the person in that home. Every person whom we’re isolating, for instance, needs to have, uh, their own bathroom. And so we’ll be moving people like this into other kinds of housing that we have available. They’ll also have other needs perhaps – food, whatever it’s going to be – the county will be there to back them up and to support them.”
They’re also being given “sensitivity” training to be able to respond to the understandable outrage one would feel if ripped from their mom, dad, and kids.
There is a legal basis for this according to the CDC, but, one must ask if this curve is flattened – as the mantra goes – why are we now resorting to locking people up?
Isolation and Quarantine
The Centers for Disease Control says there is precedent for forcibly removing people and locking them up in quarantine:
Isolation and quarantine help protect the public by preventing exposure to people who have or may have a contagious disease.
- Isolation separates sick people with a quarantinable communicable disease from people who are not sick.
- Quarantine separates and restricts the movement of people who were exposed to a contagious disease to see if they become sick.
In addition to serving as medical functions, isolation and quarantine also are “police power” functions, derived from the right of the state to take action affecting individuals for the benefit of society.
Federal Law
The federal government derives its authority for isolation and quarantine from the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Under section 361 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S. Code § 264), the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to take measures to prevent the entry and spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the United States and between states.
The authority for carrying out these functions on a daily basis has been delegated to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The path to destruction apparently isn’t paved with good intentions, but instead with the Commerce Clause.
Why is it that we’re freeing prisoners and locking up innocents?
The path to destruction apparently isn’t paved with good intentions, but instead with the Commerce Clause.
Why is it that we’re freeing prisoners and locking up innocents?
WHAT WOULD YOU DO if your six year old son or daughter tested positive for COVID19 and was taken from your home to a quarantine center by Ventura Health Authorities? This SHOCKING VIDEO demands that you plan ahead. #BeBrave #HistoryRepeating pic.twitter.com/e5RC7dCO7o
— Del Bigtree (@delbigtree) May 6, 2020
Where are all the Leftists who decry “family separation” with those dubious fake “families” at the border?
Now that governments are caging Americans, will any of them give a squat?
One more thing. Watch the sign language interpreter when Levin talks about locking people up.
Watch this for yourself. And then ask yourself, why is this happening now after the curve is flattened?
Editor’s Note: Want to support PJ Media so we can keep telling the truth about China and the virus they unleashed on the world? Join PJ Media VIP and use the promo code WUHAN to get 25% off your VIP membership.
What’s the Real Story Behind Continuing Lockdowns?
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Bobby Rush's coronavirus TRACE Act is a shocking threat to personal freedom
If you're not already horrified by the things liberals in Washington are saying about getting through the coronavirus pandemic, look at the bill filed in early May by Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois.
The bill is titled "H.R. 6666 — COVID-19 Testing, Reaching, And Contacting Everyone," or the TRACE Act. It aims to provide $100 billion in funding for the Health and Human Service Department for the purpose of "diagnostic testing for COVID–19, to trace and monitor the contacts of infected individuals, and to support the quarantine of such contacts ..."
The bill also says that it will provide, "as necessary, testing [for] individuals and ... services related to testing and quarantine at their residences."
There isn't much else to it, as of now, but the intention is clear, and that's to force every single person in the United States into a system that allows the government to monitor the physical contacts between every group and individual. Should anyone be determined to have been infected or come into contact with an infected person, the bill provides for "services" related to testing and quarantine at their residences. How robust would these "services" be? Ordering food for you, or keeping you inside your home? At the very least, the government will be closely tracking whom you've come into contact with.
This really is how a lot of our leaders want things to go starting now and continuing well into the future, perhaps even forever.
That's why New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is literally devising ways to "reimagine" his state.
All of the calls for testing and tracing are less and less about moving past the pandemic and almost now exclusively about the concentration of power and the fulfillment of whatever weird ideas liberals have for "social equality."
People are reasonably wary about the spread of the deadly virus, and, for a time, it made perfect sense to do as elected officials and health experts advised, so as not to see our healthcare system completely collapse. But that threat is over for the most part. Now we're seeing politicians look for a way to make the crisis an excuse for seizing personal freedoms.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this post incorrectly asserted that of the bill would "quarantine [people] by force." This version corrects that incorrect impressio
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/bobby-rushs-coronavirus-...
https://rush.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/rush-introduces-...