Page - 546 - in VULNERABLE - The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19

VULNERABLE546 COVID-19 Public Health Response and Related Measures7 For ease of analysis, and not rigour, we can classify roughly four complementary sets of anti-COVID-19 public health and economic responses. The first are measures to regulate  social  and behavioural conduct. The second are measures targeting institutional  capacity  and  therapeutic  strategy. The third are measures in support  of  R&D  efforts aimed at development of a COVID-19 vaccine, production of pan- demic necessities, and scenario management—and associated policy interventions. Fourth are mostly financial  and  in-kind  reliefs  targeted at members of the public and businesses to cushion them, and the broader economy, against the disruptive effects of COVID-19. Regulation of Social and Behavioural Conduct A strain related to SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus in the Corona family of viruses. It is the cause of the COVID-19 disease. Human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 happens through trans- mission from an infected person’s respiratory droplets and through contact with fomites infected with viable COVID-19 RNA.8 Airborne transmission is possible in treatment settings where the COVID- 19 RNA particles are captured in aerosol-generating procedures or other pressurized devices.9 Outside of these settings, the detection of COVID-19 virus in air samples, and its viability for airborne trans- mission for the purposes of its classification as an airborne disease, remains, at the moment, an urgent matter of public health curiosity10 and part of COVID-19’s unclear transmission dynamic.11 Given the literal and figurative fluidity in the transmission of the disease, governments have implemented social and behavioural con- trol measures. They include human movement restrictions of intra- and international scope, the latter via total or partial closures of land, air, and sea borders. Some jurisdictions have implemented curfews, 7. The online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has a country-by-country list of mea- sures. See “National Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic” (last modified 11 May 2020), online: Wikipedia <https://bit.ly/2SXz1HF>. 8. See “Modes of Transmissions of Virus Containing COVID-19: Implications for IPC Precaution Recommendations” (29 March 2020), online: World  Health  Organization  <https://bit.ly/2YVsv86>. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. See Tao Liu et al, “Transmission Dynamics of 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019- nCoV)” [forthcoming 2020].