Business as usual as the US nears a half million deaths from COVID-19
Globally, the rate of infection from COVID-19 and the death rates associated with the infection are slowing from the devastating winter surge that saw new cases exceed 750,000 per day, with deaths during a single 24-hour period peaking at over 16,000.
The impact of the pandemic throughout Europe, North America and South America was a direct byproduct of malign neglect that allowed schools and economies to open after the summer lulls. As the capitalist ruling classes clamor to reopen the economy, the rapidly emerging variants pose an existential threat as criminal government policies expose the population to repeated infections.
The death toll in the United States has been nothing short of horrifying. This week the number of dead will hit a half million, a number exceeding all American deaths, civilian and military, from World War II. Such a horrific statistic should be appraised soberly and carefully. The criminal policy allowing unrestricted expansion of the pandemic has had a particularly destructive impact on the working class.
Particularly remarkable is the acceleration of the death toll beginning with the surges after the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. As recorded by NBC News, the first 100,000 US deaths required 99 days (February 29–May 17); the second 100,000 deaths required 115 days, to September 19; the third 100,000 deaths took 86 days, until December 14; the fourth 100,000 deaths took only 36 days until January 19; and the fifth 100,000 deaths will require somewhere between 28 and 31 days, depending on when this week that terrible milestone is reached.
More Americans have died of coronavirus since the US presidential election, less than three months ago, than in the eight months that preceded it. By next week, more than 100,000 Americans will have died of coronavirus under the Biden administration.
As the British medical journal, The Lancet, explained, “The global COVID-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate effect on the USA, with more than 26 million diagnosed cases and over 450,000 deaths as of early February 2021, about 40 percent of which could have been averted had the US death rate mirrored the weighted average of the other G7 nations.” This is not praise for the other G7 nations who have pursued profit interests over the safety of their populations. The United States has just been more egregious in this regard.
The Lancet continued, “Many of the cases and deaths were avoidable. Instead of galvanizing the US populace to fight the pandemic, President Trump publicly dismissed its threat (despite privately acknowledging it), discouraged action as infection spread, and eschewed international cooperation.”
Rather than taking a proper accounting of the efforts of the Biden administration to begin a rapid opening of K-12 schools, the bourgeois press has employed the impeachment debacle as a distraction and diversion, while at the same time concealing the real significance of the January 6 fascist coup attempt.
The media has gone on to praise Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago Teachers Union’s betrayal of the rank-and-file and have raised a hue and cry over why schools aren’t opening immediately. Over the weekend, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s primary focus, using the Sunday press shows, was to provide the financial oligarchs assurance that neither the new variants nor the high community transmission would deter the Biden administration from carrying out the agenda of big business.
When questioned by host Margaret Brennan of “Face the Nation” on CBS about holding in-person classes while the B.1.1.7 variant was spreading, Dr. Walensky assured her that, “the amount of disease in school is very much related to the amount of disease that’s in the community. There’s very limited transmission between students, between students and staff.” When such infections occurred, she blamed improper mask wearing and lack of personal responsibility. There was no discussion of the looming half-million dead.
It is of no consequence to Dr. Walensky that 99 percent of all counties in the US are in the red zone, meaning that transmission rates remain still too high under CDC guidelines for children to return to school without massive protective efforts which virtually no school district has the resources to implement.
Walensky also went on to discount the detection of 1,173 cases of the UK variant across 40 states. Now, there are 17 cases of the South African variant across eight states, as well as three cases of the Brazilian variant. And to add another dimension to the crisis, the New York Times reported on Sunday that a team of researchers has found “seven growing lineages of the novel coronavirus, spotted across the country. All of them have evolved a mutation in the same genetic letter.”
The Q677P mutation in the virus’s spike protein was first detected in the US on October 23. By January 19, these new lineages now make up 28 and 11 percent of all the SARS-CoV-2 genomes sequenced from Louisiana and New Mexico, respectively. These cases have been predominately found in the south central and southwest of the United States. As of early February, GISAID data has shown there have been close to 500 viral sequences of this variant in the US.
Though it remains to be determined if these new variants are more contagious, the scientists studying these new mutations are concerned because they are located in a gene that determines how well the virus can bind to a human cell and enter it. More concerning is that these mutations are following a convergent evolutionary pathway that provides them a survival benefit. In a setting of high community transmission, they are facing evolutionary pressures to adapt.
In countries like Brazil, South Africa and the United Kingdom, where such variants became dominant, the outcome was a rapid surge in cases that led to health systems becoming inundated and death tolls soaring. What perplexed politicians and state officials was that the usual measures taken during the spring didn’t work with these new variants. A concerted effort and hard lockdown were required. The Netherlands and Norway, which faced their own fight with the UK variant, quickly adopted these strict measures and turned their pandemic curves. In the United States, the Biden administration is counting on the vaccine to avoid such choices.
However, according to the Washington Post vaccination tracker, only 38.7 million people have received one or both doses of the vaccines. Though vaccinations have sped up to around 1.66 million per day on a seven-day average, supplies of the vaccines cannot keep up with demand. California has used up more than 72 percent of its doses and is experiencing shortages in some areas. For instance, Dodger Stadium had to shut down vaccinations after exhausting its supply, having only received 16,000 doses last week.
Not surprisingly, there is little stomach in the media to discuss any future lockdowns. If 100,000 deaths were shocking, 500,000 deaths and more leave them numb and callous. So ingrained has become the policy of herd immunity within the ruling class that a strategy to eradicate the virus is no longer conceivable as a point of discussion.
Yet principled epidemiologists like Dr. Deepti Gurdasani, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, have been on the front line warning Prime Minister Boris Johnson that the drive to open schools prematurely will squander the gains over the last several weeks. She is fighting for a COVID strategy she calls “zero COVID.”
Her strategy would require a lockdown of two to three months to reach a target level of under 10 per 100,000 infections per day before easing restrictions. In the interim, investment in fixing the test, trace and isolate programs need urgent attention and to be placed in federal hands. Additionally, vaccine distributions could be enhanced per vaccine protocols—two-dose regimens for targeted populations, improvement in infrastructure investment and safety in schools. This strategy would also remove any uncertainty around the evolution of new variants and possible impact on vaccine efficacy.
The course the ruling class is pursuing will only bring more death and suffering for the working class, who have paid dearly for the incompetence demonstrated by capitalist governments. The ruling class and their political servants have no clear exit strategy. They have no idea what the herd immunity threshold is or if it is achievable. Repeat surges and shutdowns have been the characteristic and unscientific reaction to the pandemic. Because profits will always be a primary objective, there is no hoping that they can come to their senses. Only the working class can turn the tide of social misery and prevent further loss of life.
Oregon and other US states prioritize vaccinating educators in order to boost profits
The state of Oregon and at least 28 other states have placed teachers in Phase 1 of the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine as part of the effort to resume in-person learning as quickly as possible. This policy is being promoted by the teachers unions as the CDC released its latest guidelines on school reopenings last Friday, encouraging districts to open schools “at any level of community transmission.”
Oregon’s Democratic Governor Kate Brown, with the support of the Oregon Education Association, has spearheaded the policy of vaccinating teachers before the most vulnerable sections of the population, announcing their plan on January 15. Teachers began to receive first doses on January 23. Most day care, preschool and K-12 school employees have been eligible to receive the vaccine since January 25.
Many educators have opposed this policy, requesting that the vaccines instead be given to those at higher risk of contracting or succumbing to the virus, including essential workers, the elderly, and those with chronic illnesses. At a controversial press conference on January 15, Brown responded to these criticisms by doubling down on the position that schools need to be reopened “as quickly as possible.”
By denying the vaccine to elderly age groups in order to prioritize teachers, the state is allowing dozens if not hundreds more people to become infected and die from COVID-19. According to Oregon Public Broadcasting, “People over the age of 65 make up about 16 percent of the U.S. population, but 80 percent of all COVID-19 deaths. 91 percent of all deaths in Oregon have been in those 60 and older, despite making up just a quarter of the state’s population.”
Governor Brown could not offer a scientifically justified response to criticisms from the press, instead asserting that students suffer most when schools are shut down. She blamed the mental health crisis among young people on remote learning rather than on the real underlying cause: the homicidal policies of the state. Further, she ignored the mental health consequences of young people bringing the virus home to their families, which will far outweigh the consequences of remote learning.
The unstated but overriding concern is the desire to reopen the economy as quickly as possible, which requires schools to effectively serve as childcare so parents can go back to work. Brown constantly stressed that she is working directly with the Biden administration, whose top economic advisor Brian Deese recently stated, “We need to get the schools open so that parents, and particularly women… can get back to work.”
State officials admit that it could take months for every education worker to receive two doses, even if elderly age groups’ eligibility is pushed back. The director of the Oregon State Health Authority promised to vaccinate educators over a two week period, but the Oregonian recently reported, “It could take up to four weeks to provide only a first shot to early learning and K-12 employees.” Further, this schedule “assumes virtually no vaccinations for seniors 80 and older who will soon qualify.” As of Monday, state residents aged 75 and over are eligible to start vaccination, but the 70-plus group must wait until February 22 and 65-plus until March 1.
Events in Oregon are taking place as part of a national campaign to rush the reopening of schools, which is now overseen by the Biden administration. Last week, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) rammed through a deadly betrayal of its membership to reopen Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the third largest school district in the US.
During the negotiations in Chicago, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky intervened publicly and insisted that “vaccinations of teachers is not a prerequisite for safely reopening schools.” Within days, the CTU caved on their initial demand that teachers should only return to schools when vaccinated, settling for having 1,500 out of roughly 25,000 CTU members vaccinated each week and having teachers return before receiving both doses of vaccine.
The entire premise that schools can reopen safely as the pandemic rages out of control—regardless of whether or not educators are vaccinated—is false and unscientific. Numerous studies have demonstrated that implementing these policies will lead to an explosion of cases and deaths.
Even if teachers are successfully vaccinated in Phase 1 of distribution, children are a significant factor in the spread of COVID-19. The European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention has openly acknowledged that children are susceptible to the virus and do transmit the disease. Antoine Flahault, director of the University of Geneva’s Institute of Global Health, admitted that children and young adults are infected just as often as adults. A study conducted in southern India came to the same conclusion. British prime minister Boris Johnson has been forced to admit that “the problem is schools may nonetheless act as vectors for transmission, causing the virus to spread between households.”
The rush to reopen schools, led by the corporate media, the entire political establishment and the teachers unions, is unfolding as COVID-19 cases continue to surge through the population, with a 7-day average of 99,565 cases as of February 12. Up to 20,400 deaths are expected to be reported from February 8 to March 6, amounting to a total of 540,000 deaths in the US alone.
Further, the B.1.1.7 variant first discovered in the UK is forecast to become the dominant lineage in the US by late March. This variant is more infectious and lethal than the wild type of the virus, and the capacity for the vaccines presently available to mitigate the most severe symptoms of this new variant is still an open question. There are reports that the B.1.1.7 variant could be 30 to 70 percent deadlier than the wild type of the virus.
The B1351 variant first discovered in South Africa carries two mutations that have shocked the medical community. One mutation, called N501Y, make the virus far easier to spread. Another mutation, E484K, allows the virus to avoid the immune system more effectively. It has also been shown that certain coronavirus vaccines are worse at preventing infection from this coronavirus variant.
Medical scientists are still unsure of what effect the vaccine will have on the spread of the virus, given the new variants. It is probable that those who have been vaccinated will still be capable of spreading the virus to others, even after receiving both doses of the vaccine. Stanley H. Weiss, M.D., an epidemiologist and professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and the Department of Biostatistics & Epidemiology at the Rutgers School of Public Health, has stated that the risk of transmissibility after vaccination is “greatly diminished, but not eliminated.”
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is a living organism that will continue to evolve as it is allowed to rip through the population. Dr. Katherine O’Brien, director for Immunizations, Vaccines and Biologicals at the World Health Organization (WHO), stated that vaccinations are not sufficient for making schools or communities safe, noting, “risk of variants relative to the vaccines is ever greater when the transmission is very high in the communities. Not only because of variants that have occurred, but because of the possibility of additional variants emerging under the pressure of vaccines.”
O’Brien asserted, “We have to emphasize the importance of really crushing transmission now while we are rolling out these new vaccines.” The drive to reopen schools directly contradicts the advice of the WHO, regardless of whether or not teachers are vaccinated.
The closure of schools has been crucial in limiting the transmission of the virus and preventing death. A JAMA study published last July 29 found a 62 percent decline in infections per week when a state closed its schools statewide. The mortality rate dropped 58 percent per week when schools were closed.
The policy of “social murder” is being exacerbated by providing the vaccine to teachers before the most vulnerable individuals in society, under conditions where teachers and students could safely stay home and learn sufficiently with well-funded remote learning programs. The elderly and those who are immunocompromised or have preexisting conditions will receive the vaccine only after teachers are providing in-person instruction.
A struggle must be waged by educators and workers across the US against the unions, state and local governments of both parties, and the Biden administration, all of whom seek to implement a homicidal policy. The drive to reopen schools is due to the need under capitalism to extract surplus value from the working class. The financial oligarchy will take any measure to boost their profits and is ready to sacrifice the population on a global scale to maintain this course.
Educators across the US and internationally have heroically resisted the homicidal policy of “herd immunity.” The lessons of the Chicago teachers’ struggle to save lives must be assimilated. The unions are functioning as a branch of management and the state. Educators must appeal to workers around the world and build rank-and-file safety committees for the preservation of life.
No comments:
Post a Comment