Vlog: Can You Sue Somebody for Giving You Covid-19?

Obviously during this crisis, the last thing we want to be doing is thinking about lawsuits. But it is important to know that if someone endangers you or your family by spreading the virus, and they do it knowingly or negligently, they can face legal liability for that.

Video Transcript

Hi guys. Matt Clendenin here with my dog, Boom. She's, almost an 11 year old boxer, so we love her. She's getting up there though. Anyways, hope everyone's staying safe and healthy. I'm sitting in my backyard right now trying to get some work done during the Covid virus. So hope everyone's staying safe with all this talk of transmitting viruses and transmitting diseases. I've heard a lot of people asking the question, can I get sued if I give someone a virus? Or on the flip side, somebody gave me the virus, can I sue them? California law is pretty clear that whether it's a kid who breaks a window when he's playing baseball or someone driving on the road and causing a crash, if you act negligently and you hurt somebody, you're responsible for the damages. And that applies whether it is a crash or whether it's a virus. In fact, when it comes to contagious diseases, most of the groundbreaking cases are actually, can you guess it, what do people transmit that causes a lot of problems? It's STDs.

So there's a lot of case law that shows that you can sue somebody if they knowingly or negligently gave you an STD. I hear these really sad stories in the news about companies that are forcing their employees to come to work and what they're doing is risking the lives of all of their employees. In fact, I saw on the news a bus driver recently passed away when someone who knew that they were infected with Covid-19 got on the bus anyways. This is just a really good reminder to please, please, please stay safe, stay at home if you have the virus, follow the quarantine order strictly. 

It's so sad that some folks are going out in public even though they know they have the virus. Obviously during this crisis, the last thing we want to be doing is thinking about lawsuits. But it is important to be careful and if someone endangers you or your family or God forbid, someone gives you the virus, and they do it knowingly or negligently, they can face legal liability for that. So I hope everyone stays safe and healthy out there. But I can tell you that there's going to be a whole lot of people asking the question, can I sue someone for giving me the virus? It's a complicated question that's going to depend on whether the person was negligent or whether they knew about it. Hopefully that gives everyone a little bit of information. I will link in some more of these cases down here about about sexually transmitted diseases or the law of contagion. It's actually pretty interesting. Folks are suing other folks or giving them herpes or whatnot and the same law is going to be applied to giving somebody a virus. It's exactly the same thing. So stay safe, stay healthy, and take care.