The more we hear about the state Health Department’s new isolation and quarantine rules, the more the whole situation stinks.

It was bad enough that the state Health Department was taking the idea behind a failed legislative proposal (A.416, sponsored by Assemblyman Nick Perry) and turning it into state regulation. It was bad enough that the regulations went ahead despite opposition from several state lawmakers.

But a lawsuit filed earlier this week by state Sen. George Borrello and two Republican Assembly members shows the proposed regulation goes further than Perry’s proposal while stepping far beyond prior emergency regulations regarding isolation and quarantine. It is the epitome of back-room lawmaking at its worst.

Attorney Bobbi Ann Cox argues several small language changes in the proposed Health Department create significant additional power for the state. Prior regulations required a physician to isolate a person with a highly communicable disease. The new regulation states a physician must not only isolate a person who has a highly communicable disease, but someone suspected of having a highly communicable disease. Prior regulations included pre-set timelines for isolation; those set timeframes are not included in the new proposed regulation with the power left to the state health commissioner to determine on a case-by-case basis. Prior regulations spelled out that local health officials had the power to isolate patients who are actually ill. That power shifts to the state health commissioner under the proposed regulation. The regulation changes the definition of the words contact, isolation, quarantine, home quarantine or isolation, congregate quarantine, highly contagious communicable disease, monitor, mandatory quarantine, voluntary quarantine and confinement –and not in ways that make it easier for the public to navigate their day-to-day lives during a disease outbreak. Including the use of law enforcement to enforce confinement is particularly troubling.

Suspected cases used to mean someone diagnosed as likely to have a particular disease. Now, it means possibly having a particular disease — words that carry a lot of weight for dealt with children being sent home because they were possibly in contact with another child who had COVID-19 but who never actually contracted the virus.

Changes in definitions mean the regulation would potentially affect far more state residents than prior regulations used over the past couple of years. And we have seen how those more narrowly constructed regulations upended many peoples’ lives.

To put all this in context, these regulations could be used for the new BA.2 subvariant of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 — but the new strain hasn’t been shown to spread thus far in the United States as quickly as it did in Europe. As the New York Times noted in a recent newsletter, only the original Omicron variant was so contagious to spread predictably. Other versions of COVID-19 have surged and receded with no predictable pattern.

That hardly seems like a worthy justification to concentrate more power in the hands of New York state over our day-to-day lives.