Scope of Pennsylvania's Disease Prevention and Control Act

A Facebook friend shared a post about the authority of the PA Secretary of Health to institute a mask mandate as allowed under Pennsylvania's Disease Prevention and Control Act. For convenience and searchability, I will provide the text and well as a screenshot below.

The original tweet from Rep. Seth Grove's twitter account, dated 31 Aug 2021 2:59 pm, says:

Ok people. Here is THE question.

What actual police powers does the Sec of Health have to compel her “universal mask mandate” under the Disease Prevention and Control Act?

(1) that act is not applicable to healthy people.
(2) see point 1.

Problem solved.

 The Facebook post by PA State Representative David Rowe [Facebook] [website] references the above tweet (via screenshot) and says this (dated 31 Aug 2021 4:49 pm):

My good friend and Chairman of the House State Government Committee makes the same great point I did when I asked the Departments of Health and Education how they plan to enforce this new mandate. They have not responded. Your local school boards still wield the power. We are a Commonwealth, not a monarchy. Local governments should be handling local issues.

Being the curious sort who can smell a fish and who thinks the posts were a bit flippant and dismissive coming from representatives (particularly the Grove tweet), I decided to look at what the act actually says. This is my analysis.

As far as I can tell from my reading of the PA Disease Prevention and Control Law of 1955 (PA Section 521) [text of the act], the applicability of this law is quite broad. Let's break it down.
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In Section 521.3, local boards and departments of health are given primary responsibility for disease control in their jurisdictions (521.3(a)), while the state has responsibility in non-governed jurisdictions and explicitly in public and private schools (521.3(b)). However, we see in 521.3(c) that the secretary may override local efforts if he finds the controls inadequate. The finding of inadequacy is left entirely to the secretary ("If the secretary finds....). Note that it also requires the local board to pay the state for these mandated measures. Thus, we have established the authority of the secretary of health in PA.
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Note also in section 521.3 and other sections that the language used if about "prevention and control of communicable and non-communicable disease" or some variation often. There is no indication here that the prevention and control is limited to the person carrying the disease. In fact, we see this wording a bit more specifically in 521.5 ("Control measures"), which states:

Upon the receipt by a local board or department of health or by the department, as the case may be, of a report of a disease which is subject to isolation, quarantine, or any other control measure, the local board or department of health or the department shall carry out the appropriate control measures in such manner and in such place as is provided by rule or regulation.

As we see, the trigger is the "report of a disease", not the report of a person with a disease. That is, the measures are not limited to the carrier of the disease, but rather they apply to anyone in order to control the disease.

And what controls are allowed? Also in 521.5, we see the authorities shall apply "appropriate control measures." Also, these are measures provided by "rule or regulation." Note that rules or regulations are not laws, and thus are the part of law that are left to be established by other government entities (departments or agencies). This is relationship between enacted law and rules/regulations that you find in building codes, traffic laws, and the like, which are also fully enforceable in courts by fines or jail time.

Section 521.7 allows for other restrictions on the carrier of a disease, such as forced isolation, quarantine, or treatment. I won't explore this because it is only discussing additional legal restrictions on a carrier, which is not the scope of the original post. However, it is useful to know there can be additional restrictions on the carrier of a disease.

Section 521.16 ("Rules and regulations") provides the scope of the rules and regulations that may be issued by the Board.

• Note in (a)(3) that the board determines "the communicable diseases which are to be subject to isolation, quarantine, or other control measures", so they decide the "what".
• Also, (a)(5) specifies the board to decide the enforcement of the rules and regulations.
• Immunization and vaccination requirements are also allowed in (a)(6).
  
• School jurisdiction is specifically called out in (a)(7).
• And the real power lies in (a)(12), which it establishes that the rules and regulations can apply to "any other matters it may deem advisable for the prevention and control of disease and for carrying out the provisions and purposes of this act." This gives very broad authority to stop spread of disease.
  
•  Also of note is 521.16(c), which prevents local measures from enacting less strict measures than the state in order to reduce their impact.
  

From the enforcement side, please see 521.20 ("Penalties, prosecutions and disposition of fines"), which clearly provides fines and jail time for violations.

Based on the above, what have we established from Pennsylvania's Disease Prevention and Control Act?

• The law applies to both healthy and unhealthy people.
• It allows the state to override local authority.
• It allows to enforcement via fines and jail.
• It allows for any control measures.
  
• It allows requirements for vaccines.

If I could google this act and find the relevant passages in 5 minutes, how can elected Pennsylvania representatives not to the same and avoid posted whatever made-up garbage they want to justify their own positions regardless of the facts stated in the law?

These people are supposed to be responsible for passing and understanding laws, but they (or even their staff) can't seem to take the time to actually read what is there. How can they ever be trusted to make good new laws if they can't be responsible enough to know what the existing laws are.

You may say that no one, even lawmakers, can know all the laws and remember them. I agree. But they went out of their way to make posts about the law. This was not some random Jeopardy! question that put them on the spot. At best, they claimed to know what they were talking about but didn't take the time to see if their claim was even true. At worst, they flat out lied to deceive anyone who wouldn't check if they were telling the truth. Either way, they are not living up to their responsibilities as representatives.

This is not acceptable.

 

Is overpopulation a myth?

Analysis of a FB post that says the following:

"Hidden Fact: Overpopulation is a myth. In fact, there is so much room on Earth that, if everyone lived as densely as New York City, the entire world population of 7.8 billion people could fit into into the state of Alaska and give them all an acre of land and everyone would fit nicely. Overpopulation is a lie just like everything else. The lie that we are overpopulated is spread to induce fear and scarcity over the masses, and to justify ways to 'lower' the population. It is a statistical fact that 50% of humans live on less than 1% of the land, and if a fraction of lawns were turned into gardens, food scarcity would be non-existent." [sic]

My radar pings hard when I read such broad and unsubstantiated claims, so I did some digging.

The original post by Grace Brown: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10158025981507772&set=a.10150181997392772

Fact checks

Claim: Everyone in the world can get an acre of land in Alaska.

The land area of Alaska is 571,951 square miles. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska] And 1 acre is 0.0015625 square miles. Thus, Alaska is 366,048,640 acres. That is significantly less that 7.8 billion. In fact, that would be 21 people per acre, so we could not "give them all an acre of land" as claimed.

Conclusion: This claim is false by an order of magnitude.

Claim: The world population can live in Alaska if population density matches NYC.

The population density of New York City is 27,013 people per square mile, which is 42.2 people per acre. [https://www.topviewnyc.com/packages/the-population-density-of-new-york-city] Compared to the 21 people per acre required to fit everyone, the 42 people per acre is about twice as dense as needed, leaving half of Alaska unpopulated. Of course, this doesn't consider how much of Alaska is habitable, but since that isn't the point of the post, we'll ignore that.

Conclusion: This claim is true.

Claim: Turning lawns into gardens would eliminate food scarcity.

In the US, which is the most lawn-loving country, there is 128,000 square kilometers of lawn, which is 31,629,489 acres. [https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Lawn/lawn2.php] In the US for 2 August 2021, the planted acreage of crops is 644,269,947 acres. [download of zip file from https://www.fsa.usda.gov/news-room/efoia/electronic-reading-room/frequently-requested-information/crop-acreage-data/index] This means that there is about 20 times more acres of crops planted in the US that there is acres of lawns.

Note that this does not even address the land required to raise animals for food.

For convenience, I have converted the data download to a Google Sheet for easy reference here. The total planted acres can be found at the bottom of the county_summary tab (and some other tabs). Note that the first two tabs have lower acreage because they are looking only at the produce listed at the top, not all products.

Conclusion: This claim is false by an order of magnitude.

Claim: 50% of the population lives on 1% of the land.

I did not investigate this claim, and I'm not really sure exactly what point it is trying to make. Without making a claim about the other 50% of the population, this is meaningless. For example (an exaggeration), if the other 50% of the population lives on 99% of the land, who cares about the first 50%? And what is meant by "lives on the land" anyway?

I also am a little skeptical when a claim is made by stating that it is a "statistical fact". Generally, that kind of argument is a power move to reduce the likelihood of a factual challenge. It is used to take ground in the argument. Since the claim is meaningless, it appears to be used just to make a strong-sounding statement with no substance to win a point.

Conclusion: This statement doesn't really make a point (at best) and is nonsense (apparently).

Merits of the framing of the argument

The argument being made takes as an implicit assumption that overpopulation is only defined by land resource usage. The tactic of this post by making only land resource arguments is to frame the issue in an argument that can attempt to be won on this single issue while ignoring other constraints the create overpopulation concerns.

In this case, we see that even the claims above do not support the land-resource argument used to frame it.

The post completely ignores other resource constraints, which I will not explore here. These other constraints include but are not limited to:

• Water supply and drought

• Labor (including immigration limitations on labor)

• Transportation

• Usability of land

• Geopolitical issues (food hoarding, interception, etc.)

• Trade policy

• Income inequity (that limits ability to buy food)

These are just a quick list off the top of my head. There are surely many more constraints that make it clear that this is not and should not be treated as a one-dimensional argument.

Conclusion

Where does this leave us? First, this is a factually misleading post. No, actually, this is a post that intentionally lies about the facts to try to win an argument. The lies and appearance of truth of the post are designed to manipulate the reader into believing the point, when in fact the post presents no credible reason to be believed. It is purely an attempt to flood the reader with opinions that they don't have time to verify (due to sheer volume of these types of factually false posts) in order to plant doubt and shift the viewpoint of the reader in favor of an agenda supported mostly by lies.

Here are my questions and concerns:

• Who is using these lies to support this agenda?

• What is the end game?

• Is the agenda even the point?

• Is the poster just using manipulation to condition us?

• Is the goal to spread uncertainty and doubt about "facts" to leave us confused or apathetic?

• Why are people so willing to spread such lies so easily? Just because it sounds good or fits their opinion or fits the opinion of their political leaders?

Here's the deal for me: If a post, whether I support the position or not, uses lies to try to win an argument, then it is wrong. There can be no middle ground here. Lies to support anything should by themselves invalidate the argument. If you can't use truth to win the argument, then you lose the argument. Period.