COVID 19 CASES? Not So Fast

These past few weeks there has been a lot of chatter on television and in the media in general about a potential flood of lawsuits arising out of the Covid 19 pandemic. The people who are not talking a lot about it is trial lawyers. The reason for that is the problem of proof. Suppose a person becomes infected with the disease and dies and the survivors believe that they caught it at a business or other establishment. How would you prove that? The disease has a certain latency period which varies from person to person. Even if the deceased person had tested negative the day before they went into this business establishment, the fact is that these tests have a false-negative rate of close to 40% according to some studies. Bearing in mind that the person bringing the lawsuit (or the survivors) have the burden of proving that the disease was contracted at the defendant's location, you quickly begin to see that the proof problems are extremely difficult even in the best of circumstances. So at least from this lawyer's perspective, I am not advertising for these kinds of cases and what's more, none of the good trial lawyers that I know or doing so either.