The pandemic filtered its way into the courtroom Friday. First a federal judge said he is leaving the new eviction moratorium in place, while a judge in a second COVID-related case heard arguments in the battle between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and several school districts.

The battle is over DeSantis’ banning mandates requiring masks in school. Parents from several large school districts sued the governor, saying the mask mandate ban violates Florida’s constitution.

That constitution grants power solely to local school boards to operate, control, and supervise classes within their districts. DeSantis has repeatedly said it should be up to parents to decide whether their children will wear masks in classrooms.

The parents who brought the lawsuit are from Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Orange, Alachua, Hillsborough, and Pinellas counties. They want to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation for everyone to wear masks indoors in places where the risk of contagion is high.

That includes Broward County where three educators died of COVID-19 within a 24-hour period. The head of the local union reported all three were unvaccinated.

In Palm Beach County, officials said they ended the second day of classes with 440 students sent home to quarantine because of 51 cases detected among staff members and students. Orange County’s school system reported 333 total cases with 20 teachers and 39 students quarantined.

Meanwhile at the federal level, a judge denied a landlords’ request to put the eviction moratorium on hold due to a technicality.

U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich said the current moratorium is substantially similar to the version she ruled was illegal in May. However, she said her hands on the matter are tied by a ruling from the appeals court that sits above her.

A panel of three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled the moratorium falls within a 1944 law on public health emergencies.

The landlords are expected to seek Supreme Court involvement.

The high court refused to end the old moratorium in June. Justice Brett Kavanaugh said he agreed with Friedrich, but was voting to keep the moratorium in place because it was set to expire soon. He wrote he would reject any additional extension without a new, clear authorization from Congress. That has yet to happen.

It was partly Kavanaugh’s opinion why the Biden administration originally said it couldn’t extend the moratorium. However now officials argue the new moratorium is different enough from the old one. While the old one covered the whole country, the new one only covers places where there is significant transmission of COVID-19.

However, Friedrich noted the moratorium covers “roughly ninety-one percent of U.S. counties,” citing the CDC’s COVID-19 data tracker.