At this point, many people wouldn't hesitate to say they've contracted the virus. This social norm has unsettling ramifications for medical privacy.
First, some background. Privacy in medical matters has long been a part of law in the United States but took more official legal hold in the 1840s. Maybe it’s not the best pandemic parallel, but back then one man suggested that another was “who’d “been rotten with the clap this two or three years.” The mere mention of that sort of diagnosis was so secret and so scandalous that the rotten, clappy man could sue even if the information were true. Revelations about what was calledwere just as bad.
That’s language from an influential treatise of sorts called the Restatement of Torts and it offers several medical-related off-limits examples: A person sick in the hospital with a “rare disease” could keep an investigative reporter out of the hospital room; parents whose disabled baby died could sue a newspaper that published the baby’s photo and life story; a patient who underwent surgery could sue when video of the surgery was published without permission.
What that means is that if we tell people our secrets, they aren’t really all that secret anymore, at least in a legal sense. The more we talk about things with others, including private things that might be embarrassing to us if they were later revealed more publicly, the less privacy we have. Now, but also later.
But Covid is different from the common cold. Covid may be mild at times, but it kills people at times too and leaves others debilitated and devastated for months, if not longer. And, even more important here, we ultimately have no idea what the future holds for those who’ve had it.
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