Making Bob liable for giving you COVID is a simple matter of finding a court that wants to do just that. The prove-more-likely-than-not-that-X-caused-your-harm standard has been under attack by modern U.S. courts for a while now.
There is a series of cases where pregnant mothers were injured by a widely manufactured drug marketed to them, but couldn’t figure out which of the dozen or so drug companies manufactured the specific pills each particular woman took. The court in California wanted to make all the drug companies liable so it invented the concept of market share liability. [1][2] This doctrine was invented in California and New York in response to the scandal and has since grown across the country. The courts use this principle even in cases where the defendant drug company can prove that it didn’t manufacture the particular pills the plaintiff took.
I could see some very liberal courts inventing an “infection share liability” doctrine and hold defendant disease carriers liable for the percentage chance they infected the plaintiff. This is a weird time and nobody knows what stupid things policy-over-law courts are liable to do.
Making Bob liable for giving you COVID is a simple matter of finding a court that wants to do just that. The prove-more-likely-than-not-that-X-caused-your-harm standard has been under attack by modern U.S. courts for a while now.
There is a series of cases where pregnant mothers were injured by a widely manufactured drug marketed to them, but couldn’t figure out which of the dozen or so drug companies manufactured the specific pills each particular woman took. The court in California wanted to make all the drug companies liable so it invented the concept of market share liability. [1][2] This doctrine was invented in California and New York in response to the scandal and has since grown across the country. The courts use this principle even in cases where the defendant drug company can prove that it didn’t manufacture the particular pills the plaintiff took.
I could see some very liberal courts inventing an “infection share liability” doctrine and hold defendant disease carriers liable for the percentage chance they infected the plaintiff. This is a weird time and nobody knows what stupid things policy-over-law courts are liable to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_liability
Hymowitz v. Eli Lilly and Co., 539 N.E.2d 1069 (N.Y. 1989)