By all accounts, a Pennsylvania courthouse was thrown into a tizzy after local attorney Wendy Chan showed up in person after informing the court that her son had tested positive for COVID. The presiding judge ordered the area cleared by sheriff’s deputies and now the chief judge of the court has banned Chan from the courthouse until she can prove that her family is in the clear and that she’s self-quarantined the appropriate 14 days.
For her part, Chan said she’d gotten tested and come back negative and that her son hadn’t presented symptoms for some time. The story underscores the unique challenge of a disease that presents itself in such a variety of ways. Personally, I’ve seen someone get it and fail to spread it to anyone in their family while suffering through nagging flu-symptoms themselves and then David Lat nearly died. It’s easy to see how someone could see a mild case and, armed with their own negative test, assume that they’re good to go back to work. And they’re probably right, but the story of the American pandemic is built on people acting with 80 percent confidence when 100 percent is an entirely easy alternative.
A snapshot negative test doesn’t mean Chan hasn’t picked up the bug since the test was taken from someone else in her family who did pick it up from her son. Why take the risk when there’s videoconferencing available?
Which brings us to the firm backlash from the court that paints a more disturbing picture of Chan’s appearance. In a letter from President Judge David Ashworth:
A review of your emails demonstrate your complete failure to comprehend the serious nature of the coronavirus pandemic and the extent to which the Board of Judges has taken steps to protect the public and court personnel. Notwithstanding your personal beliefs regarding the “overly broad Dept. of Health guidance” or the fact that “there was no legal requirement” for you to disclose your COVID exposure, you blatantly chose to disregard Judge Stedman’s clear instructions. What is perhaps most alarming is your transparent manipulation of the circumstance to force a delay of the hearing because you disagreed with the court’s ruling regarding the use of LifeSize. You chose to use the pandemic as a weapon to achieve a tactical advantage.
That last sentence is talking about the fact that Chan asked to put off this hearing and the judge denied it, offering a videoconferencing option instead. There are plenty of arguments about the inability of videoconferencing to replace the in-person hearing experience, but since the client was in Louisiana and beaming in anyway, those are mostly blunted. Judge Ashworth’s saying that Chan decided to show up in person in a ploy to get the hearing put off, which would be a horrific — if pretty clever — way of treating the outbreak.
It’s probably reading too much into Chan’s intentions though. Generally speaking, people with negative test results feel they’re invincible. But Alyssa Milano, who tested negative but now has antibodies after a brutal bout with the disease, is here to remind us that it doesn’t really work that way.
And yet the only thing I can think after seeing a court deploy deputies to force an attorney with a negative test result out of the building for showing up to a half-hour hearing after having been in the presence of a COVID patient several days earlier is that there are state supreme courts around the country still hellbent on making 500 applicants sit in a conference center to take a bar exam for two full days. When we already know that someone who has no reason to think they’re contagious can easily take the exam.
If you think Chan’s response was irresponsible, consider that the supposed leaders of the profession in multiple states seem to have no problem raising the stakes far higher.
Local attorney banned from courthouse for suspected COVID-19 exposure [Lancaster Online]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.