No, masks aren’t part of modified quarantine; they are a form of modified quarantine. As in, one of the things a public health department can impose to try to control disease. But IL law also has checks on the health department’s quarantine power by explicitly giving citizens due process rights if they object to quarantine, meaning the health department cannot simply blanket order healthy people (like school children) into quarantine (including masks) without a specific court order.
Also, an important part of the Sangamon County judge’s ruling last month is they (IDPH) can’t try to delegate their quarantine power to another state agency (like the state board of education or local school boards) to try to get around rule-making laws or statutory due process. The judge said of their attempt, “This type of evil is exactly what the law was intended to constrain.”
You may take up your complaints with the IL General Assembly.
Just a nitpick. Quarantine is what you do if you are exposed but apparently healthy, while waiting to see if you might become sick. Isolation is the word that describes keeping a sick person away from others. The word quarantine comes from “40”, and refers to the period of time a ship was required to stay in harbor during outbreaks of the bubonic plague, before it would be allowed to dock.
Quarantines are routinely and properly imposed on the healthy.
Fair enough, that part was redundant. The important thing is they can’t do it without due process, & the state mandates were implemented in a way that tried to bypass that.
I am certainly not an expert on Illinois law, so i really don’t know what was or wasn’t legal there.
I will note that my state hasn’t had a mask requirement for most people for more than a year, and yet most of the shops i frequent have a sign on the door saying you must wear a mask. (for a while they had signs saying unvaccinated people should wear masks, but the shops have reimposed mask requirements.) I see this as falling under the same legal doctrine that allows them to require shoes, or to put any other non-discriminatory requirements on their customers.
There one strip mall i go to where two of the three places i frequent require masks, and I’m typically the only masked person in the third. So it’s not like every place makes the same choices. But i would think a school district ought to be allowed to require masks if it so chooses.
Yeah, the Chicago media is horrible. The article you posted gives a common misinterpretation of one of the paragraphs in the judge’s restraining order ruling. The misinterpretation only makes sense if you ignore the parts I’ve put in italics (not italicized in
original):
For a weaker analogy that might speak to an actuarial crowd…
[Details=…consider the Massachusetts auto insurance market…]
In 2008-ish, MA switched from a bureau system (all auto insurers required to use the state bureau’s rates) to a system of “managed competition,” in which insurers develop their own rates & factors (subject to regulatory approval). There are laws on the books about which rating variables are mandatory, which ones are permitted, & which variables are prohibited. When the bureau was dropped, it didn’t mean each insurer could now use whatever rating variables they wanted; they still needed to stay within the law.
Similarly, IL school districts have independent authority to make their own covid rules, but they never had authority to force-mask students or staff as a health measure, and still don’t. They need to color inside the lines.
[/Details]
I hope you can see the difference between a private business making its own rules (I don’t really have a problem with this & expect the market, if allowed to function freely, will guide how that turns out) vs a public school district.
Same here, our son’s school dropped mask mandates here this week, just a few days after the county mandate expired.
Masks are not required in the office. But everyone is vaxxed and boosted and we have to take rapid tests daily to be admitted in. Seeing as I’m fully remote and the office is a thousand miles from me it’s not a big deal.
I found out my kid’s old school was closed for 3 days last week because just about everyone had covid. I’m not sure how they were able to open, then, after 3 days. That would seem to break their old policy.