Vouch For Pandemic Passports

Car pollution is an externality. Via pollution, the behavior of some hurts others, an effect that injurers may not take into account unless encouraged to by norm, contract, liability, or regulation. However, as the pollution from one vehicle mixes with that from many others, liability is poorly suited to discourage this; it is too hard to identify which cars hurt you, and there are too many of them. It seems to work better use regulations regarding car design and maintenance to limit the pollution emitted per mile driven, and to tax those miles driven.

Assault is also an externality; you can hurt someone by punching them. But in contrast to pollution, regulation is poorly suited to assault. We could require everyone to wear boxing globes and headgear, and we might ban insults and alcohol consumption, or perhaps even all socializing. But such regulations would go too far in restricting useful behavior. It works better to just hold liable those who punch others, via tort or criminal law. Yes, to discourage assault in this way, we must hold (or at least threaten to hold) expensive trials for each assault. But that still seems far cheaper than regulatory solutions.

These two examples illustrate a well-known tradeoff in choosing between (strict) liability and regulation. On the one hand, making people pay damages when they hurt others encourages them to take such harms into account, while also letting their behavior flexibly adapt to other context. On the other hand, regulation lets us avoid expensive court trials that require victims to prove who hurt who when where and how much. Though regulation induces more uniform behavior that is less well adapted to circumstances, it works acceptably well in many cases, like auto pollution, even if less well in others, like assault. (The mixed solution of negligence liability is discussed below.)

In our current pandemic, the main externality is infection, whereby one person exposes another to the virus. Conventional public health wisdom says to discourage infection via regulation: tell everyone when to get tested and isolated, and make them tell you who they met when and where. Tell them who can leave home when and for what reasons, and what they must wear out there. However, as we are all now experiencing first hand, not only are such changes to our usual behaviors quite expensive, such rules can also induce far from optimal behavior.

Recent pandemic rules have banned bike riding, but not cars or long walks. You can take only one exercise trip per day, but there’s no limit on how long. Members of a big home can all meet in their yard together, but members of two small adjacent homes may not meet in one of their yards. You can’t go meet distant friends, even if they only ever meet you. All parks are closed regardless of how densely people would be in there. The same rules were set in dense cities and in sparse rural areas. Alcohol store workers are deemed critical, even though alcohol can be mailed, but not auto repair, which cannot be mailed. Six feet is declared the safe distance, regardless of how long we stay near, if we wear masks, if we are outdoors, or which way the air is moving. Workplaces are closed regardless of the number of workers, how closely they interact, or how many other contacts each of them have. The same rules apply to all regardless of age or other illness. You may have to wear a mask, but it doesn’t have to be a good one.

Imagine that we instead used legal (strict) liability to make as many of us as possible expect to suffer personally and directly from infecting others, and to suffer more-so the worse their symptoms. In this scenario, such people would try to take all these factors and more into account in choosing their actions. For actions that risk infecting others, they would consider not only on how important such acts are to them, but also on how likely they are personally to be infected now, how vulnerable each other person they come near might be to suffering from an infection, how vigorously their activity moves the air near them, where such air currents are likely to go, how well different kinds of masks hinder infected air, and so on. If allowed, they might even choose variolation.

Of course, for the purpose of protecting ourselves from getting infected by others, we already have substantial incentives to attend to such factors. The problem is that simple regulations don’t give us good incentives to attend to these factors for the purpose of preventing us from infecting others. With regulations, we have incentives to follow the letter of the law, but not its spirit. So we don’t do enough in some ways, and yet do too much in others. But if liability could make us care about infecting others as well as ourselves, then it might simultaneously reduce both infections and the economic and social disruptions caused by lockdowns. With strong and clear enough liability incentives, we wouldn’t need regulations; we could just let people choose when and how to work, shop, travel, etc.

But is it feasible to use liability to discourage infections? Yes, if we can satisfy two conditions: (1) most people are actually able to pay for damages if they are successfully sued for infecting others, and (2) enough of those who infect others are actually and successfully sued, and so made to pay.

On the first condition, ensuring that people can pay damages if they are found guilty, it is sufficient to require people who mix with others to buy infection liability insurance, similar to how we now require car drivers to get accident liability insurance. That is, to get a “pandemic passport” to excuse you from a strong lockdown, you must get an insurance company to guarantee that you will pay damages if you are shown to have infected someone. In a sense they “vouch” for you, and so are your “voucher”. The more types of voucher-client contract terms we are willing to enforce, the more levers vouchers gain to reduce risks.

The premiums for such insurance will be low if you can convince a voucher that you have already recovered from the virus, and so are relatively immune, or that you will leave your lockdown only rarely, to safe destinations. Otherwise, a voucher may require you to install an app on your phone to track your movements, or they may spot check your claims that you have sufficient supply of good masks that you use reliably when you leave home.

Okay, but what about the second condition, that enough infectors are actually made to pay? For this we need enough data to be collected on both sides, the infector and the infected, so that one can frequently enough match the two, to conclude that this person likely infected that one at this location at this time.

Now, we don’t need to be always absolutely sure of who infected who. In ordinary civil trials, the standard is a “preponderance of the evidence”; courts need only be 51% or more sure to convict the defendant. And sometimes we add on extra “punitive” damages, up to four ties as large as basic damages, often to compensate for a lower chance of catching offenders. So if we can find evidence to convince a court at the 51% or better standard for only one fifth of offenders, but we can add four times punitive damages, then offenders who do not know if they will be caught still expect to on average to pay near the basic damage amount.

Okay, but we still need to collect enough info to see who infected who at least one fifth of the time. Is this feasible? Well it is clearly quite feasible early in a pandemic, when few have been infected. Early on, if the times and places, i.e., space-time path, consistent with you being infected then and there overlap with the space-time path when someone else was likely infectious, then it was most likely their fault. This is the “contact trace” process usually recommended by public health workers early in a pandemic.

The problem gets harder later in a pandemic, when your infected path may overlap with the infectious paths of many others. Here it might be possible to use info on which virus strain you and they had to narrow the field. But even so there may still be several consistent candidates. In this case it seems reasonable to divide the liability over all of them, perhaps in proportion to the size of the path overlap. For the purpose of creating incentives to avoid infecting others, it isn’t that important to know later who exactly infected who when.

But yes, we still need info on who was infected and infectious where and when, perhaps supplemented by data on who had what virus strains. How can we get this info? People who might get infected have incentives to collect info on their path, to help them sue if infected. But people who might infect others would seem to want to erase such info, to keep them from being sued. I’ve recently outlined a more general approach to induce the collection of info sufficiently likely to be useful in later lawsuits. But for this essay, I’ll just propose that collecting key info be another condition required to get a pandemic passport, with violations punished by fines also guaranteed by your voucher.

Let me also note that yes, legal liability doesn’t work to discourage harms if typical harms get so small that people wouldn’t bother to sue to recover damages. In this case we could use a random lottery approach to dramatically lower the average cost of suing.

So let’s put this all together. You must stay at home, locked down, unless you get a “pandemic passport”, in which case you can go where you want when, to meet anyone. To get such a passport, you must get someone to vouch for you. They guarantee that you will pay should someone successfully sue you for infecting them, if you agree to their terms of premiums, behavior, monitoring, punishment, and co-liability. Defendants who pay damages may have to pay extra, to compensate for most infectors not getting caught in this way. When several infector candidates are consistent with the data, they can divide the damages. And for low damage levels, a random lottery approach can lower court costs.

To get and keep a passport, your voucher also guarantees that you will collect info that can help others to show that you infected them, but which can also help you to sue others if they infect you, and win you bounties via showing that others did not collect required info. For example, perhaps you must track your movements in space and time, regularly record some symptoms like body temperature, and also save regular spit samples. This info is available to be subpoenaed by those who can show sufficient reason to suspect that you infected them. Such info seems sufficient to catch enough infectors.

And by catching a sufficient fraction of infectors who then actually pay on average for the harms that they cause by infecting, (strict) legal liability can give sufficient incentives to individuals to avoid infecting others. If so, we don’t need crude lockdown regulations telling people what to do when and how; individuals can instead more flexibly adapt to details of their context in deciding when and where to work, shop, travel etc. Yes, voucher rules would not let them do such things as freely as they would in the absence of a pandemic. But behavior would be more free and impose lower economic costs than under crude regulations which similarly suppress the pandemic spread.

Note that today the most common form of legal liability is actually negligence, which we can see as a mixed form between simple regulation and simple strict liability. With negligence, the court judges if your behavior has been consistent with good behavior standards, which are essentially behavior regulations. But you are only punished for violating these regulations in situations where your behavior contributed to the harm of a particular person. Today courts tend to limit strict liability to cases where courts find it hard to define or observe good behavior details, such as using explosives, keeping a pet tiger, or making complex product design choices. As courts find it harder to define and observe good behavior in a new pandemic, strict liability seems better suited to this case.

Note also that none of this requires employers to be liable for their infected employees. Someone who is sued for infecting others may turn around and blame their employer for pushing them into situations that cause them to infect others. Employer-employee contract could usefully address such issues.