Arresting people for coughing wont keep communities safer

Over the weekend, a man in North Dakota was arrested for coughing at a local Walmart. The store, like all Walmart stores, was limiting the number of people allowed in at once. The man apparently wasn’t happy to hear that, and intentionally coughed on store employees, the police chief said.

He joins a growing list of people arrested in the US for intentionally coughing in public in the past few weeks, as the accelerating outbreaks of the novel coronavirus in states around the country put people on edge, alert for the slightest sign that they could be exposed to the illness. COVID-19 is a respiratory virus and spreads through tiny droplets of saliva produced when a sick person coughs, sneezes, or breathes.

Those people aren’t being...

Continue reading…