Andrew Cuomo Tells Hospitals to Recruit Retired Doctors ‘NOW’ amid Coronavirus Surge
New York is preparing to recruit retired doctors and nurses to staff hospitals dealing with a surge in coronavirus cases, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said Monday.
The governor called it a “new phase in the war against COVID [Chinese coronavirus],” according to the New York Post, adding that daily hospitalizations across the state are almost quadruple what they were in June.
Cuomo said every hospital in New York must compile a list of retired doctors and nurses they can call on because of staffing problems in some areas.
“I am very worried about staff shortages. I’m more concerned about the staff shortage than I am the [number of hospital] beds. We can build beds. We can’t create more staff. And the staff is starting tired,” he explained.
In a tweet Monday morning, the governor shared an infographic titled Initiate Emergency Hospital Procedures, with the first point reading, “Staff shortage: identify retired nurses and doctors NOW”:
We are laser-focused on ensuring enough hospital capacity as COVID surges.
Today @HealthNYGov is initiating emergency hospital measures.
Hospitals are directed to identify retired staff, make plans to add 50% bed capacity, confirm they have a 90-day PPE stockpile, and more. pic.twitter.com/6XzF4jXFxY
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) November 30, 2020
In a subsequent post, Cuomo told residents to stop attending small gatherings immediately.
“Hospitalizations are climbing — statewide. What can you do? Cut out the small gatherings. Now. 65% of all cases are traced to small gatherings. Gov’t can’t enforce who’s in your living room. But you can,” he wrote.
As his state prepares to go into another lockdown that could put thousands out of work, Cuomo accepted his International Emmy Award last week by claiming victory and saying his press conferences offered “authentic truth and stability,” according to Breitbart News.
“In what became a Cuomo love-in for the so-called ‘Love Gov,’ a chorus of celebrities joined in to sing the governor’s praises,” the report continued:
Absent from the ceremony was any mention of Gov. Cuomo’s March directive ordering New York nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients, which caused the virus to spread like wild fire among that state’s elderly and infirm population. His decision contributed to the state’s COVID-19 mortality rate, which currently ranks as the second highest in the nation.
“Cuomo’s nursing home mandate reportedly led to 6,000 nursing home deaths from the coronavirus,” the article read.
Report: Over a Quarter of Small Businesses in New York and New Jersey Closed This Year
Over a quarter of small businesses in New York and New Jersey, areas hit hardest by the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, have not reopened this year, according to a report from a Harvard-run database.
The database, TrackTheRecovery.org, revealed that 27.8 percent of small businesses in New York have not reopened following the mass shutdowns that occurred in the state this year, as of November 16. Even more businesses remained closed in New Jersey — 31.2 percent.
The New York Post reported:
The figures are in line with estimates from the New Jersey Business & Industry Association, which says 28 percent of the Garden State’s small businesses had shut up shop by the end of October, according to the Star Ledger newspaper.
…
More than half of small businesses in both states were forced to shut their doors in the spring at the height of the pandemic, with both hitting highs in mid-April — 52.5 percent of New York businesses and 53.9 percent in the Garden States, the stats show.
The news comes as virus rates begin to spike, prompting Govs. Andrew Cuomo (D) and Phil Murphy (D) to reintroduce restrictions in their respective states.
Murphy, who was recently confronted after dining out with his maskless family after retightening restrictions in the Garden State, told Fox News Sunday that a statewide lockdown remains “on the table.”
“It has to stay on the table. Gov. Hutchinson, I think, had a similar answer to that. You hate like heck to even have to consider that, and God willing, we won’t have to,” he said, calling for a “big federal stimulus,” which he believes will act as a “lifeline” for small businesses.
“That would be a game-changer. Not just in their lives and in their prospects, but it gives us more degrees of freedom in terms of dealing with the virus. So it’s on the table in terms of a shutdown,” he continued.
“I don’t anticipate it, and I sure as heck don’t want to go that route but boy, federal stimulus would give us a lot more ammunition to do a lot more things right now,” Murphy added.
State and local governments across the country are also taking action as virus rates increase, preemptively closing businesses deemed nonessential and limiting capacity limitations at essential retailers, forming what has been dubbed “modern breadlines” in states such as New Mexico ahead of its recent two-week lockdown.
New York City schools to reopen amid explosion of coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, deaths
New York City’s Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to reopen the city’s schools next week, which was announced Sunday, is a direct threat to the lives of the students, parents and teachers involved. Moreover, it is a warning to the working class in the United States and internationally that even as numerous coronavirus vaccines are nearing completion, workers and youth will continue to be sent into workplaces and schools to needlessly get sick and die.
De Blasio’s plan was summarized on his Twitter account, where he noted that all 3-K, Pre-K and K-5 students will resume in-person learning beginning Dec. 7, followed by all grade levels for students with disabilities on Dec. 10.
The order came amid an explosion of daily coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in the city, which have both more than doubled in the past month, along with a 50 percent increase in daily deaths during that same period. They demonstrate that there is no medical basis for the school reopenings.
Indeed, a key part of de Blasio’s new plan is the abandonment of the earlier three percent coronavirus positivity threshold that was crossed in the city on Nov. 11, which triggered the school closures earlier this month. Instead, in the wake of the city’s positivity rate rising to 3.6 percent, the students will be given “weekly COVID-19 testing,” with little concrete information provided as to what will occur when outbreaks in various buildings inevitably occur.
The school reopening is being aided and abetted by Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, who commented Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that, “the default position should be as best as possible, within reason, to keep the children in school and get them back to school.” Fauci, regarded as one of the most trustworthy public health officials by various opinion polls, justified his comments by claiming that reopening schools is safe because the spread of COVID-19 among children is “low.”
The good doctor certainly knows better. A recent report from the American Academy of Pediatrics found 1.04 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 among children as of Nov. 12. Moreover, the study found that the majority of these cases occurred in the wake of the initial school reopenings in August and the refusal of school administrators and local governments to switch to remote learning when cases in their communities began to rise.
Such empirical data did not stop de Blasio from also calling for all schools in the city to, “wherever possible … move to 5 day a week in-person learning,” meaning the effective end of hybrid learning and the possibility of teachers and students physically distancing while in the classroom. De Blasio continued, “We want our kids in the classroom for as much time as possible,” and then magnanimously claimed, “Our families do, too.” This last comment was met with derision and outrage on social media, exemplified by one teacher commenting, “This is absolutely insane.”
There is no doubt an element of insanity in de Blasio’s plan. The inevitable result will be death on a mass scale in New York City, as, teachers, students and their family members begin dying just in time for Christmas.
More importantly, however, is the deeper class logic at play. From the perspective of the ruling elite, which the mayor of New York City, the home of Wall Street, is among the foremost representatives, schools must fully reopen in order to act as holding pens for children in order to get their parents back to work. Only then can the process of extracting surplus-value from the working class recommence in full, further enriching the American oligarchy.
Such policies are laying the groundwork for school reopenings nationwide. If schools are deemed “safe” in New York City, the former world epicenter for the pandemic, even as cases and deaths are rising, it will supposedly be “safe” to fully reopen schools in other cities where the coronavirus is raging, such as Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles.
As in New York City, there is no basis anywhere for school or workplace reopenings. The 7-day average of daily new confirmed cases remains above 165,000, even with the dip in reporting caused by the Thanksgiving holiday, up from 82,000 at the end of October. Deaths have similarly spiked from 850 to just under 1,500 a day in just four weeks. Hospitalizations from COVID-19 are at an all-time high of 93,238.
The decision to reopen New York City schools is all the more irrational knowing that one or more vaccines will be ready to distribute either in December or early next year. The New York Times counts six vaccines that are approved for limited use and 13, including those by Pfizer and Moderna, that are undergoing or finishing up large scale efficacy tests. This makes all the more necessary the most far-reaching measures to contain the spread of the virus and save lives until a vaccine is widely available.
Instead, reopenings in New York and nationwide are being pushed even harder. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) estimates that, if mandates continue to ease as they are nationwide, there will be more than 3,000 deaths caused by COVID-19 every day by Dec. 21. This amounts to nearly 89,000 needless deaths by the New Year and up to 400,000 more deaths by March 1, for a staggering total of 650,000 deaths from the pandemic in the United States alone.
Such projections do not account for what will happen if hospitals are no longer able to care for all their patients, a distinct possibility. The crowded waiting rooms full of dying, panicked people reminiscent of hospitals in Wuhan, China, when the coronavirus first emerged in January will become the daily reality for all of America a year later.
Workers, parents, students and youth must take action to save their own lives. As the World Socialist Web Site and the New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee warned on Nov. 19, “the closure of schools is a temporary maneuver, and the unions and Democratic Party will work together to ensure that schools reopen as soon as they deem it politically viable.” That prognosis was borne out in only ten days.
The statement also made clear that one of the key elements of the inevitable reopening would be the marshaling of the news media, the political establishment and the trade unions to force teachers back into schools. Wasting no time, the United Federation of Teachers retweeted de Blasio’s reopening plan and wrote in support of it that, “The mayor’s reopening plan will enable our most vulnerable students to receive in-person instruction as early as Dec. 7,” further claiming that the reopening will only be “in parts of the city where transmission rates remain low.”
No support can be given to such statements, especially coming from the organization which played such a filthy role downplaying the threat of the virus in May. An emergency fight must instead be waged to keep schools closed and to shut down all nonessential business, in New York City, nationally and internationally, to save lives while a vaccine is being completed, with full compensation for all lost wages to workers and small businesses.
More than 273,000 Americans have already needlessly lost their lives as a result of the homicidal “herd immunity” policy being pushed by Democrats and Republicans alike. A further 400,000 must not be allowed to perish after being forced back on the job, wondering whether or not they would have been able to receive the vaccine if they had been able to hold on a little longer.
Where production is essential, it must be overseen by workers’ rank-and-file safety committees working closely with medical professionals to ensure safe working conditions and the provision of full protective gear, with no concern for profit.
Such measures must be combined with a massive investment in public health care infrastructure, including the broadest possible program of testing and contact tracing to contain and isolate the virus. A global vaccine production and distribution network must be established in order to efficiently and freely provide the vaccine to all, with no regard for corporate interests or the rivalries of nations.
Above all else, capitalism must be abolished. It has proven utterly incapable of dealing with the threat of infectious diseases, and mass death will continue as long as this outmoded social system exists. The working class must take power into its own hands, guided by a revolutionary socialist program.
World economy to take biggest hit since Great Depression
The International Monetary Fund has forecast that the world economy is entering its worst slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s and the loss of output will “dwarf” that suffered in the global financial crisis 12 years ago.
Even on the assumption that the second quarter records the sharpest downturn, followed by a recovery and then a rebound next year, the IMF said the world economy will lose $9 trillion in output over 2020 and 2021. This is an amount equivalent to the combined economies of Japan and Germany, the world’s third and fourth largest respectively.
It said under the assumption that the pandemic and the required containment measures peak in the second quarter for most countries, global growth would fall to minus 3 percent this year, a 6.3 percentage fall from the forecast issued in January.
This “major revision over a very short period” made what the IMF has called the Great Lockdown the “worst recession since the Great Depression, and far worse that the global financial crisis,” IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath wrote in a comment on its World Economic Outlook report issued yesterday.
Gopinath said the IMF forecasts were grounded in its “baseline scenario” in which it anticipated global growth would rebound to 5.8 percent next year. But even if that did take place, the recovery would only be “partial,” with the level of economic activity below that projected for 2021, before the virus hit.
However, given the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, the IMF has projected more adverse scenarios. The outbreak may not recede in the second half of the year, leading to longer periods of containment that would worsen financial conditions and a further breakdown of global supply chains.
Under these conditions, Gopinath wrote, “global GDP would fall even further: an additional 3 percent in 2020 if the pandemic is more protracted this year, while, if the pandemic continues into 2021, it may fall next year by an additional 8 percent compared to our baseline scenario.”
The IMF has predicted a contraction of growth in the advanced economies of 6.1 percent with emerging and developing economies, excluding China, expected to experience negative growth rates of between 1 percent and 2 percent in 2020. Income per capita will fall in over 170 countries.
The actual falls could be steeper than estimated by the IMF at this point, with the forecasts of private sector organisations pointing to an even larger contraction. In recent years the IMF has had to revise down its forecasts amid the marked slowdown in the world economy that had developed well before the coronavirus shock.
An example of the possible depth of the collapse was highlighted in a report by the UK Office for Budget Responsibility, also issued yesterday. It said if the lockdown of the British economy proceeded for three months then it faced a 35 percent plunge in the second quarter.
It said this was not a forecast but should be taken as a “reference scenario” because it could not predict how long the restrictions on economic activity would need to be maintained.
However, if they stayed in place, education, accommodation and food services would be the hardest hit, with contractions of 90 percent and 85 percent respectively. Similar estimates have been made by government statisticians in France.
The IMF said multilateral cooperation was “vital” for the health of global recovery. But precisely the opposite is taking place.
In a comment on the IMF report, Financial Times economic columnist Martin Wolf wrote that the world was confronting the “biggest economic disaster since the Depression of the 1930s.
“The world has come into this moment with divisions among its great powers and incompetence at the highest levels of government of terrifying proportions.”
He noted that the “negative-sum economic nationalism that has driven Donald Trump throughout his term as US president, and has even emerged within the EU, is a serious danger… If the world economy is broken apart, as happened in response to the Depression, the recovery will be blighted, if not slain.”
Wolf cited the conclusion drawn by the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington which stated: “Put simply, in the COVID-19 pandemic, lack of international cooperation will mean that more people will die.”
But just as the insatiable drive for profit via financialisation has undermined public health systems around the world, so the division of the global economy into rival nation-states and great powers is provoking a struggle of each against all. This is rapidly rendering any international collaboration a dead letter.
The IMF also issued a warning about the state of the global financial system saying it had already felt a “dramatic impact” and “further intensification of the crisis would affect global financial stability.”
The massive injection of money by the world’s central banks, amounting to at least $6 trillion, along with their indications of a readiness to do still more, has stabilised markets in recent weeks.
But signs of stress have emerged in major short-term funding markets, including the global market for US dollars. Less developed economies have been hardest hit, experiencing an outflow of about $100 billion, the largest on record.
Major markets could also be impacted if the spread of the pandemic required further containment measures exacerbating the COVID-19 shock.
Asset managers facing large outflows could be forced to sell into falling markets, accelerating the decline. Leveraged investors may face further margin calls, aggravating selling pressures.
“As firms become distressed and default rates climb higher, credit markets may come to a sudden stop, especially in risky segments like high yield, leveraged loan and private debt markets. These markets have expanded rapidly since the global financial crisis, reaching $9 trillion globally, while borrowers’ credit quality, underwriting standards, and investor protections have weakened,” the IMF stated.
In other words, the consequences of the policies of central banks since the global financial crisis are coming home to roost. The continuous supply of ultra-cheap money to enable the continuation of the very same speculation and parasitism that produced the 2008 crash has created the conditions for an even bigger disaster.
The IMF noted that banks have more capital and liquidity than they did 12 years ago but they could be tested in the face of a “sharp slowdown that may turn out to be more severe and lengthy than currently anticipated.”
Measures of bank capitalization based on market prices were now worse in many countries than in 2008, giving rise to a concern that “banks and other financial intermediaries may act as an amplifier should the crisis deepen further.”
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