In the beginning…there were the texts. “My friend (cousin, aunt’s best friend) works at the Pentagon and he told me that the government is going to shut everything down in 2 days.” Perhaps you received texts like this too. Insider information. Scoop. It most likely drove you to drive very fast to the grocery store and buy $800 worth of groceries in a blizzard-prep mentality - each week - thus wiping out your savings before the actual pandemic was acknowledged, with the actual business shutdown requiring the $600/week Pandemic Insurance and a slippery PPP business loan. The physical lock down in one’s home never came, with soldiers patrolling the streets, but the business train wreck did.

Now with set to open, and botched roll-outs happening in other states, new quarantine fears are percolating: Quarantine Part 2. The new text thread includes a Facebook video of a woman at her home in New York, showing you how New York State, and the Governor specifically, wants to take your children, using the excuse of they might be infected with COVID-19, a disease which she says doesn’t exist. To prove it, she proceeds to show a video of her laptop screen reading the details of this bill - A99 - about how the Health Commissioner can and his or her opinion, remove you from your home and put you in detention until you are no longer contagious. For basically any amount of time.

The bill is a pretty freaky read, and at immediate first glance, was started in January 2019. But if you scroll down and dig in, it was really started in 2015 (which is just after an 2014 Ebola outbreak occurred in the United States) by Assembly Member Nick Perry, and has never seen the light of day. Nick’s Assembly District is 58, which is in Brooklyn. His office is at 903 Utica Avenue. You can read the 2015 version here.

A Change.org petition to fight the 2019 version of this bill started at least 4 months ago in April 2020 by Buffalonians Against Excessive Quarantine (716), to petition the NYS Assembly. So far, this bill is introduced every year, and it sits in a status called “In Committee,” is marked as “Active,” then seems to die.

The fear that the language of this bill has tapped into is not unfounded. It certainly describes what happens to illegal immigrants when they are caught coming into the United States seeking asylum. They are detained for legal amounts of time that get renewed, and their children are taken from them. Most recently, actions granted by the Trump administration, as reported on in a joint article from the Texas Tribune and ProPublica, and reported on by other news outlets like NBC.

Those who are concerned about quarantine law, could read an analysis of existing laws here. If you are a doubter of the pandemic, and don’t trust any data or science presented to you, one option is to look at the hospitals to see if they are full, and the funeral homes to see if they are wall to wall, and sometimes to the ceiling, with caskets. Like here in this New Yorker article, or here in Popular Mechanics. As is what happened in New York during the early months of this COVID-19 pandemic. Similar pictures exist for the 1917 flu pandemic.