The Responsibility to Protect Principle and State Negligence in Disease Prevention of International Concern
In the context of the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 epidemic, over the course of the last several months, individual states and the World Health Organization expressed varying opinions about what constitutes good practice and responsible conduct in handling a pandemic of this kind. As World Health Organization (WHO) Secretary-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reiterated in his daily press briefing on March 16, 2020: “Countries must test. They can't fight this blindly. They need to find cases and isolate them. (...) They must be able to test all suspected cases.” That is exactly what many countries either fail to do or do not even strive to accomplish, even as they are already relaxing restrictive measures aimed at curbing the epidemic.