Here’s the status of COVID-19 policies, 5 years later
The COVID-19 pandemic happened “gradually and then suddenly,” to steal from Hemingway. In early 2020, the U.S. Commerce Secretary optimistically predicted that the coronavirus outbreak in China would “help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America.” New York City’s health commissioner encouraged New Yorkers “to go about their everyday lives.” A doctor wrote a Los Angeles Times op-ed discouraging masks. By mid-February, there were only 15 confirmed COVID cases in the U.S.
But everything changed in March. The (first) Trump administration declared a national emergency on March 13, 2020. Governors began ordering schools and certain businesses to close. On March 19, California became the first state to order all residents to stay home. Eviction moratoria followed, leaving some property owners with unpaying (and even destructive or dangerous) tenants.
Here’s a look back at three of the policies that came out of the early days of the pandemic—and an update on what’s happened in the five years since.
1. Eviction moratoria
If you were a landlord in March 2020, your legal rights quickly got complicated by a patchwork of federal, state, county, and local laws that allowed tenants to stay in rental properties without paying. Some eviction moratoria were short-lived: The CARES Act, passed by Congress in March 2020, banned evictions from properties with federally backed mortgages for a four-month period. Other eviction moratoria lasted years—during which you could be stuck with a nightmare tenant living rent-free in your house.
That’s what happened to Sheanna Rogers in Alameda County, California.
“I want you to take a step back and think about if this was your family,” Sheanna said in a recent call.
Sheanna and her husband Karl were forced to keep a troublesome tenant during Alameda County’s three-year eviction moratorium. The tenant didn’t pay rent. He harassed and threatened the Rogerses. He intentionally cut pipes and let water flood in the unit. He kicked holes in the wall. He moved dogs in and didn’t clean their feces.
PLF helped Sheanna and other Alameda County property owners file a lawsuit in 2022. It wasn’t until after the County ended its moratorium in April 2023—and after the tenant was given another 60 days to leave—that Sheanna and Karl finally got their property back. The tenant had left it an uninhabitable mess that took another year and a half (and a very large amount of money that they did not have) to restore.
Now, Sheanna says, the property is finally “beautiful” again. But it’s empty—because the Rogerses are scared to rent it out after being trapped with their last tenant.
Looking back, Sheanna said she wished everyone in government would “be a human.”
“They act like there aren’t people being affected on the other end of these laws,” she said. “It was completely crazy what they did.”
PLF filed an amended complaint earlier this month in Sheanna’s case. A federal judge ruled last September that the eviction moratorium didn’t constitute an illegal taking, but PLF continues to argue that it constituted a regulatory taking by depriving Sheanna and other owners of the economic use of their property.
The case is still pending at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
2. Emergency powers
During the early months of the pandemic, governors tested the boundaries of their emergency powers (the expanded powers granted to the executive branch during emergencies). Governors ordered businesses to close and millions of residents to stay home. (Watch PLF’s short documentary “Prohibition” to see how one Kentucky brewing company struggled under emergency orders.)
In an acute emergency, expanded executive powers make sense: There’s no time for legislators to write and pass bills. But as weeks of COVID-19 turned into months and years—giving legislatures time to legislate—too many governors maintained their one-man-rule over the pandemic response.
Five years later, America is still grappling with the after-effects of shutdowns. New York City schools remained closed for over a year, which Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical advisor to the president, later called a mistake. Some business owners say they never fully recovered after being ordered to shut down. PLF is currently asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case of Gym 24/7 Fitness in Michigan, where the governor’s executive order “took dominion and control of the use of Petitioner’s commercial property” by “barr[ing] all customers from the premises for six months.” The petition is pending at the Court.
The good news is some states learned from their pandemic mistakes. In Kentucky, after PLF helped Goodwood Brewing Company file a lawsuit, the state legislature restricted the governor’s ability to take unilateral action during emergencies. Other states passed similar reforms (some with the help of PLF model legislation):
These reforms are huge, not just because of what’ll happen in the next genuine emergency, but also because, as my colleague Molly Nixon recently pointed out, we’re living in a constant state of “emergency”—there are currently 51 declared national emergencies—so executives can easily find pretexts for executing their agendas without legislative input, if we let them.
3. Telehealth waivers
Here’s a small silver lining from the pandemic: States temporarily waived telehealth restrictions, giving patients across the country access to doctors and specialists licensed in other states. That didn’t just help COVID-19 patients; it also helped people like Jun Abell, a child in New Jersey recovering from a rare and aggressive brain tumor. During the pandemic, Jun was able to have regular telehealth check-ins with Dr. Shannon MacDonald, the radiation oncologist who treated Jun’s cancer in Boston.
Unfortunately, all telehealth waivers ended by December 2023. At least 30 states now have restrictions on telehealth with out-of-state doctors—including New Jersey, where a doctor can face criminal charges and hefty fines for treating patients without an in-state license.
PLF represents Jun, his father Mike, and Dr. MacDonald in a lawsuit challenging New Jersey’s telehealth restrictions. We also represent Dr. Sean McBride, a specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, in a similar lawsuit challenging California’s telehealth restrictions.
COVID-19 damaged America in countless ways. We shouldn’t lose the one thing we gained during the pandemic—telehealth freedom—to bureaucracy.
