was asymptomatic while his wife suffered mild symptoms. By the end of 2020, over 4,800 Virginians were confirmed dead due to the virus. Tenant protections The pandemic prompted Northam in March 2020 to request that the Supreme Court of Virginia issue a moratorium against evictions. One was subsequently issued but expired in June. Northam then requested that the moratorium be extended and the court agreed to do so in August. In July, after the initial moratorium had lapsed, eviction cases were opened throughout the state, and those cases continued to proceed even after the moratorium was extended in August. The extended moratorium expired September 7. The Supreme Court of Virginia denied Northam's request for a second extension of the moratorium but declared that a federal moratorium against evictions had to be recognized in Virginia. The federal moratorium – which was set to expire at the end of the year, but was later extended into 2021 – only applied to tenants earning less than a certain amount, who were struggling financially and at risk of exposure to COVID-19 if evicted. According to The Washington Post, thousands of evictions continued to be filed in Virginia under the federal moratorium "because of the state's loose interpretation of the order." Its limitations led Northam to consider the federal moratorium to be insufficient protection for those facing the possibility of eviction. Housing advocates pressed Northam throughout 2020 to issue an executive order banning evictions in Virginia for the duration of the pandemic. Northam demurred, suggesting that such an order would have been susceptible to legal challenges. On November 18, he instead amended the state budget to implement a temporary statewide ban on evictions in most circumstances; under the ban, which lasted through the end of 2020, tenants could only be evicted for failure to pay rent if they refused to pursue rent relief programs; the ban also required that landlords provide written notice of state and local rent relief programs to any tenants who failed to pay rent. Once the ban expired at the end of 2020, Northam's amended state budget provided for several new tenant protections to take its place at the start of 2021; these protections allow landlords to evict tenants for failure to pay rent only after the landlords have applied for rental assistance on behalf of the tenants, require landlords who own more than four rental units to offer payment plans