Meanwhile, the jobs of millions of workers are being wiped out in what is rapidly developing into the deepest economic slump since the Great Depression.
As the coronavirus tolls soar worldwide
Deaths from COVID-19 in New York double in three days
The number of deaths caused by COVID-19 in New York state has doubled in the past three days, from 1,550 to more than 3,200, with more than 102,000 cases statewide. New York City alone accounts for about half of these, with 1,600 dead and 57,000 cases. The country as a whole now has, as of this writing, 277,161 cases and 7,392 deaths, including a record 32,284 new cases yesterday and 1,321 deaths.
New York is the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States and is rapidly becoming the epicenter of the pandemic worldwide. There are now just under 1.1 million confirmed cases of the disease internationally, and less than a quarter have so far recovered. An estimated 4 billion people around the world are under some form of stay-at-home order. To date, more than 56,000 men, women and children of all ages have died, placing the current average fatality rate at 5.4 percent.
Other countries with surging coronavirus cases include:
- Italy: 119,827 cases and 14,681 deaths
- Spain: 119,199 cases and 11,198 deaths
- Germany: 91,159 cases and 1,275 deaths
- France: 64,338 cases and 6,507 deaths
- Iran: 53,183 cases and 3,294 deaths
- Britain: 36,168 cases and 3,605 deaths
- Turkey: 20,921 cases and 425 deaths
This was the context in which President Donald Trump gave yet another press conference on Friday combining self-praise, bullying of the press, stonewalling and outright lies. In prepared remarks, Surgeon General Jerome Adams stated that, “We now know that a significant portion of individuals with coronavirus lack symptoms,” and that they “can transmit the virus to others before they show symptoms.”
What blatant falsifications! Health experts in China and the World Health Organization (WHO) warned in January that the novel coronavirus was spreading so fast because those who were contagious often did not show symptoms for up to 14 days. It is the primary reason that the WHO has for months stressed the need to “test, test, test” for the virus. The US itself recognized this fact in January when it began two-week quarantine periods for all people traveling from Wuhan, the first epicenter of the pandemic.
Trump again displayed his criminal indifference to the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people who are infected in the country, summed up in his response to a question about appeals from states and municipalities for desperately needed medical equipment. “We’re not a shipping clerk,” he snapped.
At the same time, he casually mentioned that the various oil executives with whom he had met earlier in the day, multimillionaires all, “were all given the [coronavirus] test before they came into the room.” Trump himself “had the test yesterday.” He seemed oblivious to the reality of millions of ordinary Americans, including those with symptoms, being denied testing, while the wealthy and well-connected have no problem getting access to the test.
He once again absolved himself of any responsibility for the dearth of masks, protective gear, ventilators and other critical medical supplies, blaming the Obama administration. After Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, a former pharmaceutical executive and lobbyist, asserted, falsely, “For fifteen years now, this country has had a massive effort at the federal, state and local level of preparedness for a pandemic,” Trump gave no indication why lifesaving equipment needed to fight a pandemic was not available. He silenced a reporter by stating, “You should speak to the previous administration, because the shelves were empty.”
Trump blamed New York for its lack of ventilators, declaring, “They should’ve had more ventilators at the time.” Despite warnings from Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio that they will be unable to care for new critical patients next week, Trump said, “We happen to think that [Cuomo] is well-served with ventilators.”
In the meantime, Trump’s much ballyhooed deployment of field and naval hospitals to New York City has proven to be a cruel deception. The hospital ship Comfort, which has been docked in the city’s harbor for a week, has only taken on a mere 20 out of a potential 1,000 patients.
Deborah Birx, the Coronavirus Task Force response coordinator, continued the whitewashing efforts by declaring that only “when we get through this” could there be any “questions about could we have done some piece of this better.”
This is a bipartisan position. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Thursday that she was establishing a bipartisan committee to monitor the federal response to the COVID-19 crisis. But she stressed that its mandate would be to oversee the “here and now” and not be “retrospective,” i.e., that the Democrats would oppose any serious investigation into the criminally negligent response of the government to the virus.
No mention was made by any member of the political establishment or media of the workers who are dying after being forced to stay on the job without adequate protective equipment. Five workers at Ford and eight at Fiat Chrysler have so far died after being exposed to the virus at work. Instacart, Amazon and Whole Foods workers have walked out to demand that the corporations—the latter two owned by multibillionaire Jeff Bezos—ensure that their employees are protected from the ravages of the disease.
While New York is the most seriously hit, many other regions in the country are facing a similarly catastrophic situation. New Jersey, Michigan, California, Massachusetts, Louisiana and Florida all have at least 10,000 cases and at least 170 deaths. Cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Seattle and New Orleans are particularly inundated. Their health care systems are likely a week behind the breakdown taking place in New York City.
One of the many reasons these and other areas are unable to cope with the crisis is the pervasive and massive price gouging on basic medical supplies. Gloves are often four times the regular price, while masks are marked up as much as 15 times. Hospitals in upstate New York owned by Arnot Health report that Blank Industries has tried to force them to buy N95 respirator masks for $4.92 each, and only if they order one million at a time. Such large orders of masks before the pandemic would have cost less than $50,000.
Such chaos and criminality are hallmarks of capitalism, which puts profit before human life.
With each passing day, it becomes ever clearer that the American ruling class has no intention of taking any measures that will prevent the pandemic from claiming hundreds of thousands and potentially millions of lives. Rather, all of the efforts of the entire political establishment and both corporate-controlled parties are devoted to protecting and even increasing the wealth of the financial oligarchy, as seen in the $6 trillion corporate bailout package passed last week with virtually unanimous support from both Democrats and Republicans—including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Meanwhile, the jobs of millions of workers are
being wiped out in what is rapidly developing
into the deepest economic slump since the
Great Depression.
The vital social resources needed to contain this pandemic and care for those infected must be seized by the working class from the capitalist owners and transformed into public utilities under the democratic control of the working people, as part of a centrally planned socialist economy based on the satisfaction of social needs, not private profit.
New York City is lying about Chinese virus death rates
The mass hysteria over COVID-19 in the U.S. is driven in large measure by misleading statistics and bad math about the disease’s body count.
Now that New York has become the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, we are now regularly inundated on cable TV news with the latest pandemic statistics from the city. The statistics grow gloomier by the hour.
These figures have frightened people into submission as state and local governments across America enact repressive measures they say are necessary to contain the virus or slow its proliferation.
After doing everything in their power to oust President Donald Trump, journalists and others are now calling him a weakling for supposedly not doing enough, while they demand an unprecedented nationwide crackdown.
The problem starts with the fact that the highly influential statistics from the Big Apple paint a false picture of what is actually happening.
In New York City, the death of anyone who dies who tests positive for COVID-19 is counted as a coronavirus death. This is the case even if the coronavirus failed to play a significant role in the person’s passing or illness.
This calculus violates established scientific standards.
Brit Hume of Fox News read about New York City’s unscientific methods in a Twitter thread initiated by a thoughtful user named Adam Townsend (@adamscrabble).
Hume tweeted April 1: “Very informative thread. Explains why NY’s Covid 19 fatality numbers are inflated. They don’t distinguish between those who die with the disease and those who die from it.”
A medical doctor once explained this critical distinction to me.
Arguing against ordering excessive tests for his patients, he said that plenty of old people die who have cancer present in their bodies. Sometimes they don’t even know the cancer is present because the growth is tiny and slow-growing and doesn’t affect them. As they age, they die of some other cause even though they do in fact have cancer. When they die, it is not counted as a cancer-caused death because the cancer cannot be said to have killed them.
New York City’s government isn’t the only one worldwide doing this.
In an open letter to Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, Professor Emeritus of Medical Microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, wrote:
"[T]he mistake is being made worldwide to report virus-related deaths as soon as it is established that the virus was present at the time of death – regardless of other factors. This violates a basic principle of infectiology: only when it is certain that an agent has played a significant role in the disease or death may a diagnosis be made.”
Infectiology, also known as infectology, is “a branch of medicine that deals with the diagnosis, management and treatment of various infectious or contagious diseases,” according to Medihub.
Why do the rules of infectiology not apply to the Chinese virus?
Matthew Vadum is an independent investigative reporter in Washington, D.C. and author of Team Jihad: How Sharia-Supremacists Collaborate with Leftists to Destroy the United States and Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.
Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of public domain images from Pixabay
US jobless numbers head toward Depression levels
US job-loss figures for March, which show employers cut the workforce by 710,000, are only the start of what is shaping up to be the deepest collapse of the labour market since the Great Depression—one, moreover, that is occurring at a much faster rate.
The official March data are a significant underestimation because they are based on surveys conducted in the first two weeks of the month, before widespread lockdowns were in place. Since then, some 6.6 million people filed for unemployment benefits this week on top of the 3.3 million who submitted claims two weeks ago.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said the report reflected “some of the early effects” of the pandemic and it was not possible to “precisely quantify” its full effects over the month.
But even though the latest data are an underestimation, they nevertheless express the speed of the crisis. More jobs were lost than in any month since the worst days of the 2007-2009 recession. The unemployment rate for March rose to 4.4 percent from 3.5 percent in February, the largest one-month increase since January 1975.
More than half the job losses, 417,000, were at restaurants and bars, among the first areas affected by shutdowns. The job losses exceed all the gains over the past two years.
Hotels and other hospitality areas recorded 42,000 job losses. Retailers cut 46,000 jobs, health care employment went down 43,000. Manufacturing lost 18,000 jobs and construction 29,000.
A report in the Wall Street Journal said the real situation was much worse than the headline figures indicated. It was likely that 3 million had lost their jobs, with the bad news only just beginning.
Even though understated, the article described the employment report as “stunningly grim.” It noted that economists, on average, had expected only a “modest loss of 10,000 jobs.”
The BLS report showed that the number of unemployed people increased by 1.35 million from February to March. But this may also be an underestimate, as those who have given up looking for work, because there are no jobs available, are not included in the unemployment rate. The number of people who consider themselves to be employed fell by 3 million.
Forecasts by Oxford Economics are that the US will have lost 27.9 million jobs by May and the unemployment rate will have shot up to 16 percent. This means that in the space of just a few weeks, all expansion of employment since 2010 will have been wiped out.
The Congressional Budget Office has said that the unemployment rate will go over 10 percent in the second quarter.
The rapidly rising US jobless numbers are only one expression of the plunge of the world economy into deep recession, if not depression. All talk of a V-shaped recovery and a sharp rebound, common just a month, ago has gone.
Today, the Financial Times reported: “The coronavirus pandemic and lockdown imposed on both sides of the Atlantic has pushed the global economy into the sharpest downturn since the Great Depression.”
It drew this conclusion on the back of the jobs data in the US and the latest purchasing managers’ index (PMI) for the services sector of the UK economy. With a level of 50 indicating neither expansion nor contraction, it fell from 53.2 in February to 34.5 in March.
IHS Market, which conducts the surveys, said it was the fastest fall in the services sector since it began taking the survey in 1996.
PMI data across Europe have all fallen by about 20 points, indicating that levels of business activity are going below those reached at the worst stage of the 2008-09 global financial crisis. One set of PMI data in Italy hit the lowest level on record at 17.4.
Speaking on a joint television presentation with the World Health Organisation, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, said: “This is a crisis like no other. Never in the history of the IMF have we witnessed the world economy coming to a standstill. It’s way worse than the global financial crisis.”
She warned that just as COVID-19 hit hardest at individuals with pre-existing conditions, so the economic impact would take its worst toll on weaker economies.
The demand for IMF financing has skyrocketed. “In, fact, never in the 75 year history of our institution have so many countries found themselves in need of emergency financing—85 countries have approached us so far, all at one time,” she said.
The assets of so-called emerging market economies are being dumped on a scale never seen before. According to the Institute for International Finance, foreign investors have withdrawn $95 billion from stocks and bonds in the period since January 21. This is a rate of withdrawal four times faster than took place in the global financial crisis.
The fall in oil and commodity prices is a major factor in the crisis, as producers in Latin America and Africa have seen the price drop from near $70 a barrel to somewhere between $20 and $30.
And the job cuts in restaurants, bars, hotels and the hospitality industry in the major economies are sending out shock waves around the world. A large portion of the workforce in these areas are foreign-born workers who send remittances to their families in their countries of origin in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. These remittances are now drying up, putting a further strain on foreign currency reserves.
Much worse is to come, as major rating agencies move to downgrade emerging market corporate bonds and other financial assets. Yesterday, Fitch cut its rating on the debt of Mexico’s state oil company, Pemex, to junk status and forecast that the company would have a clash outflow of between $15 and $20 billion for the year.
If other rating agencies follow Fitch, then investors who are required to hold only investment grade debt will be forced to sell. This could trigger turbulence in the unstable junk bond market that goes beyond Pemex and oil.
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