Today, there are over 10 million fewer jobs than pre-pandemic levels, and almost half a million people have died. The huge growth of wealth among the very richest is the direct result of the massive injection of cash by the Federal Reserve Board into the markets and subsidies to big business. At the same time, there has been no significant investment in social resources and infrastructure necessary to save lives.
Five public Los Angeles vaccination sites forced to close due to lack of doses
Last Wednesday, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that five vaccination sites managed by the city, including the massive operation underway in the Dodger Stadium parking lots, will close for at least two days, beginning February 12, due to a shortage of COVID-19 vaccine doses. Thousands of appointments have been canceled or postponed, and timely second doses for those who received initial vaccinations are in jeopardy.
As of February 10, Los Angeles, with a population of four million, has administered only 293,252 vaccinations, consuming 98 percent of the vaccine supply. Health care workers were injecting an average of 13,000 doses per day across the sites forced to close. According to Garcetti, the city received only 16,000 doses this week, after receiving 90,000 doses last week and 29,000 the week before.
Garcetti stated that he hopes to reopen the drive-through vaccination sites by February 16 or 17, adding, “It is only fair that Los Angeles receives a steady supply to meet this moment.”
That the largest city in the richest state of the richest nation on Earth cannot be provided a steady supply of vaccine doses is the direct result of capitalism’s inability to meet basic medical and social needs for the overwhelming majority of the population.
Over the course of the last year, as the pandemic has raged, representatives from both the Republican and Democratic parties ruthlessly pursued a deadly herd immunity policy while billionaires increased their collective wealth by over $1.1 trillion and the stock market averages hit record highs.
Today, there are over 10 million fewer jobs than pre-pandemic levels, and almost half a million people have died. The huge growth of wealth among the very richest is the direct result of the massive injection of cash by the Federal Reserve Board into the markets and subsidies to big business. At the same time, there has been no significant investment in social resources and infrastructure necessary to save lives.
There is a direct contradiction between the advanced state of modern medicine, which relatively quickly formulated vaccines which are effective against COVID-19, and capitalism’s failure to allocate sufficient resources for the mass production, distribution and inoculation of the population, not only in the United States but throughout the world.
More could be done to ensure that more lives are saved, but the priority of both the Trump and Biden administrations has been to preserve the stock market and put workers back on the job as quickly as possible. The resulting spread of infections has caused new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to evolve, threatening the efficacy of the existing vaccines.
Both Republicans and Democrats have blood on their hands as the death toll continues to climb. To save lives and end the pandemic, workers must unite and fight for their own interests in opposition to the entire capitalist system.
California nursing home workers strike as state surpasses New York for most COVID deaths
Workers at the Burlingame Skilled Nursing Facility in California are on strike in protest against understaffing and unsafe conditions for residents and staff. After months of pleading with management while battling the Coronavirus pandemic, workers began the strike on Thursday demanding better wages, improved health benefits, more staff, and patient safety.
The strike began just a day after Democratig Governor Gavin Newsom announced the presence of the South African variant of COVID-19 in Northern California, and two days after the state surpassed New York to become the state with the most number of COVID deaths, or 45,976 as of this writing.
Burlingame workers held a rally mid-January where a number of workers cried out “This is inhuman,” describing horrific scenes in the facility, and demanded that the company provide additional resources. The Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) staff have been forced to care for both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients in the same shifts. They have been unable to provide adequate care as patient loads have more than doubled, increasing from 10 patients to 24 patients per worker, according to staff.
According to state data, 207 residents at the Burlingame facility have contracted Covid-19 and 34 have died. At least 65 workers have also been infected. Nationwide, reports have surfaced in a number of cities that nursing care facility deaths are highly underreported.
Reynafe Mosquera, a licensed vocational nurse who has been working at the Burlingame nursing home since 2013, told the Daily Journal that when the pandemic began workers had to take on longer shifts and come in frequent contact with Covid-positive patients. Mosquera said, “In December and January, it was too much. Almost every day someone had to die and it scared us.” In the last six weeks alone, 53 workers tested positive for the virus and 20 patients died.
Workers at the facility not only had to take on more shifts but saw their hours and wages change without any announcement. Mosquera said she used to work 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., but now works until 7 p.m. until she can find a replacement. Given the understaffing, she is forced to work these shifts anyway without any recourse except through striking.
Despite these horrific accounts, the union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 829, has kept workers on the job throughout the pandemic even when their contract expired last September. AFSCME, which receives over $1 billion each year in dues payments, has not called on any of its 1.3 million members around the country to support the strike. It is working to contain and isolate the growing anger of workers, confining the strike to two days, categorizing it as an unfair labor practice strike, and are not paying workers strike pay.
Instead, the union has created a gofundme page to raise $25,000 with the hopes of paying workers $25/day in lieu of strike pay. Their website reads, “Please support healthcare workers and vulnerable patients in this facility by donating to our strike fund. $25,000 in the strike fund will ensure we can stay out on strike for up to five days if necessary ($25/ day to each member).”
Only a portion of the 150 workers at the nursing home are on strike with many remaining on the job. The union also told local news media that the company has tried to bribe the workers who make poverty wages with $500 to cross the picket line.
The Burlingame nursing home is one of 80 such facilities owned by Brius, LLC, California’s largest for-profit nursing home company. Brius has an abysmal track record caring for seniors and workers and has been investigated by government agencies, and sued by nursing home residents and their families over chronic failures to attend to their patients and staff.
The Long-Term Care Ombudsman of Los Angeles told the Sacramento Bee that conditions in Brius nursing homes show a “flagrant disregard for human life.”
AFSCME reports that it has been in bargaining with Burlingame since August for a 3.5 percent wage increase from last July, but the company has responded with a mere 2 percent increase. Workers also want medical coverage for themselves and their families. Management instead offered only minimal coverage to workers who had been at the facility for 10 or more years.
AFSCME representative Gaelan Ash told local news KPIX 5, “If you want to have your family on, it’s $900 a paycheck, or $1,800 a month to have your spouse and children and yourself covered,” adding, “And when you’re making 14 bucks an hour or even 21 bucks an hour, that’s completely impossible. There’s no way people can afford that.”
What the AFSCME official did not mention was that these poverty-level wages were agreed to by the union in the first place and workers have been kept on the job in what they describe as inhuman conditions.
One worker, Irma Bandala, said that after paying insurance she’s left with only $400 per paycheck every other week. “But they need to understand we are humans. We’re not animals,” she said. “They treat us like animals, ‘whatever, you guys take care of the patients with COVID, if you get infected, it’s on you.”
Nurses and staff are at the breaking point after battling the coronavirus pandemic for almost a year with no end in sight. Arnel Dolores, a licensed vocational nurse, told the Daily Journal he has had to work with 40 patients in a day and once worked a 20-hour shift because he could not find a replacement to cover him. “Every day you come into work fearing the worst just because we don’t have enough bodies to check on the patients,” he said. “We’ve spread ourselves thin and it’s unbearable.”
Despite all efforts to isolate them, the Burlingame nursing home workers are not alone in their struggle. Since the start of the pandemic, the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has reported more than 624,000 cases among nursing home residents and 125,000 deaths. One in four Covid deaths in the U.S. took place in a nursing home. Nursing home staff have also seen more than 536,00 cases and almost 1,500 deaths.
To broaden their struggle, Burlingame workers must reach out to other sections of workers, nurses, logistics, Amazon, shipyard and dock workers, and educators who either have been working in unsafe conditions or are being forced into dangerous workplaces by both parties, and most fervently by the Democratic Party and Gov. Gavin Newsom in California
California study highlights dangers of COVID-19 pandemic to the working class
A recent study published by preprint server medRxiv, entitled “Excess mortality associated with the COVID-19 pandemic among Californians 18–65 years of age, by occupational sector and occupation: March through October 2020,” provides further evidence that closing non-essential businesses with full compensation and providing protection for essential workers are necessary to reduce the number of deaths caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
The paper is an initial effort to determine the dangers of working in different workplaces, those considered both “essential” and “non-essential.” The authors, who include Dr. Yea-Hung Chen and his team at the University of California, San Francisco, noted that “Despite the inherent risks that essential workers face, no study to date has examined differences in excess mortality across occupation,” a gap this research seeks to correct.
As the title suggests, the authors focused their research on deaths among working-age Californians during the initial lockdown and the first phase of reopening last fall. Overall, they found that essential workers, whom they defined as those in the “food/agriculture, transportation/logistics, facilities, and manufacturing sectors,” experienced a 22 percent higher mortality rate than they did in the four years before the pandemic.
This excess mortality increased to more than 40 percent during the first two months of California’s reopening.
The authors also did a detailed analysis of the risks associated with nine different types of work. “Relative to pre-pandemic time,” they wrote, “mortality increased during the pandemic by 39% among food/agriculture workers, 28% among transportation/logistics workers, 27% among facilities workers, and 23% among manufacturing workers.” Unemployed workers also had a 23 percent increase in their mortality, which includes the hundreds of thousands thrown out of work during the pandemic in California, and millions nationally.
Further into the study, the authors take a more granular look at the dangers posed to workers, observing the increased risk of dying among different occupations. They define a “risk ratio,” which is the number of observed deaths in a given type of job divided by the expected deaths. This value is then interpreted as the increased risk of dying during the pandemic from one’s job.
The most at-risk job was line cook, which had a calculated risk ratio of 1.60. This was followed by “packaging and filling machine operators and tenders (RR=1.59), miscellaneous agricultural workers (RR=1.55), bakers (RR=1.50), and construction laborers (RR=1.49).” Nurses had a risk ratio of 1.34, truck drivers were at 1.32, and other “production workers” stood at 1.46.
The research also listed how many deaths occurred during the pandemic among these occupations. Among the most lethal jobs were hand laborers (2,550 deaths), truck drivers (1,962 deaths) and construction laborers (1,587 deaths). At least 1,360 line cooks and head cooks lost their lives during this time, as did 562 customer service representatives and 378 house cleaners. Even jobs one might consider less dangerous because workers are often outside, such as grounds maintenance workers, suffered 712 deaths, 40 percent more than average.
These data are invaluable for understanding the extent and breadth of the pandemic, as well as providing a scientific appraisal for what workplaces are truly “safe” to open. That line cooks are the most directly threatened, for example, suggests that even take-out dining, much less in-person dining, should be restricted to protect the lives of those workers.
It should be noted that these data do not include a great deal of information on teachers, which is because during the time analyzed by this study (March–October 2020), schools in California were all remote. Even then, 183 teacher assistants died, of which at least 40 deaths were directly attributable to COVID-19.
The paper also cut through the racial narrative being pushed by institutions like the Atlantic and its COVID Racial Data Tracker, which claim that “people of color” are affected more than whites by the pandemic. In fact, the real disparities are by class, with workers dying far more often than those in the upper 10 percent of income earners, much less the top 1 percent or more.
What racial disparities do exist, the research notes, are caused “because certain occupations require in-person work,” such as agricultural labor, and that those jobs are largely held by California’s Hispanic population, many of whom are immigrants. The data further shows that “Though non-occupational risk factors may be relevant, it is clear that eliminating COVID-19 will require addressing occupational risks.”
Many of these occupational risks can be eliminated through the closure of schools and non-essential businesses, as recommended by those such as US President Joe Biden’s former advisor, Dr. Michael Osterholm. This would minimize both the exposure of those workers, including the aforementioned line cooks and manufacturing workers, to the virus, as well as greatly reduce the paths of transmission and mutation.
At the same time, the study notes that “In-person essential workers are unique in that they are not protected by shelter-in-place policies.” This includes those in the food and agricultural sector, where “excess mortality rose sharply…during [California’s] first shelter-in-place period, from late March through May; these increases were not seen among those working in non-essential sectors.” It then stresses the need for “complementary policies” for “those who cannot work from home.”
For all workers, the authors list the bare minimum requirements for safe work, including “free personal protective equipment, clearly defined and strongly enforced safety protocols, easily accessible testing, generous sick policies, and appropriate responses to workplace safety violations.”
They explain that “vaccination programs prioritizing workers in sectors such as food/agriculture are likely to have disproportionately large benefits for reducing COVID-19 mortality.”
The paper ends with the following point, one that directly contradicts the openly pursued policy of herd immunity by the ruling elite: “If indeed these workers are essential, we must be swift and decisive in enacting measures that will treat their lives as such.”
But such actions must be taken by the workers themselves. As the recent struggle by Chicago teachers against in-person learning demonstrates, the entire political apparatus—the Democrats, the unions, the media—is arrayed against them in an effort to fully reopen factories and workplaces, no matter the death toll. There is no section of the existing social system that genuinely listens to the very clear science, that schools and nonessential business must be closed during the pandemic to preserve human lives. It is only the working class, through an understanding of the science involved and the formation of rank-and-file safety committees in their workplaces and neighborhoods, that can carry out such lifesaving action.
Los Angeles Hospital slated for closure amid pandemic
On New Year’s Eve, the hospital giant Alecto Healthcare Services, announced that they will be closing the 200-plus-bed Olympia Medical Center Hospital in Los Angeles County on March 31, 2021 and laying off all staff. The announcement came as the majority of the state of California was reporting zero percent ICU capacity and hospitals throughout Southern California were strained to the brink as ambulances snaked around emergency rooms and health care staff were given directives to ration care.
The planned closure of the hospital in the middle of a deadly pandemic—as the death toll approaches half a million victims—is a testament to the utter irrationality of the capitalist system and dire need to remove the profit motive from health care entirely.
The closure of Olympia will have a devastating impact on Los Angeles County, which has been one of the major epicenters of the pandemic in the US. According to the state’s tracking system as of February 9, at least 44,997 people have died in California where cases exceed 3,428,698. In Los Angeles County alone there are 1,110,384 positive COVID-19 cases, of which 17,764 have resulted in death. The county’s ICU capacity has run dangerously low, as average daily admissions remain at approximately 400 according to County Health Director Dr. Christina Ghaly. The state’s tracking system predicts that a total of 51,950 deaths will occur in California by February 27. The closure of Olympia Medical Center will only put further strain on hospital systems and drive up the number of deaths.
The announcement of the hospital closure has been met with outrage by nurses, health care workers, and the larger community as a whole, which will lose access to crucial medical services provided by Olympia. UCLA Health Services plan to convert the medical center into a neuropsychiatric center, which will leave the region without direct access to vital services such as an emergency room, medical surgical beds, intensive care unit, surgical services, hyperbaric wound care center and their internationally-recognized digestive disease institute.
Patients and ambulances will have to travel farther to other area hospitals in a region with some of the heaviest traffic in the state. The next closest medical centers are Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, 1.9 miles; Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, 6.2 miles; Southern California Hospital at Culver City, 3.6 miles. For patients suffering a heart attack or stroke travel times to reach emergency rooms are a matter of life and death. This is true under “normal” or non-COVID-19 circumstances, but the impending closure is unfolding under a pandemic in which hospitals are already overwhelmed and will now need to absorb patients that would have been admitted to Olympia Medical Center.
Adding insult to injury, the entire staff at Olympia faces layoffs at the end of next month, on top of being expected to maintain the daily care of COVID-19 patients under conditions where many health care workers are suffering from PTSD, and what one nurse described to the WSWS as the “endless conveyor belt of death.” The uncertainty of employment at the end of March has now been hoisted upon their shoulders. The knowledge of the impending closure has already forced nurses and health care workers to seek employment at other hospitals, leaving Olympia further short-staffed and placing patient lives at risk. It is unclear where and how these patients will be relocated throughout the region and the effect this will have on their care.
The hospital profiteer Lex Reddy, M.D., former president and CEO of Ontario, California-based Prime Healthcare Services (PHS), a for-profit hospital chain that was investigated by the Department of Justice for Medicare fraud, founded Alecto. Reddy stepped down from PHS in 2012 after initial accusations of Medicare fraud and an investigation by the Department of Justice surfaced. In 2018 the PHS agreed to pay $65 million for engaging in what the DOJ called a “deliberate corporate-driven scheme” to fraudulently bill Medicare. This amounted to a slap on the wrist for the multibillion-dollar chain that owns 45 acute-care hospitals around the country. Reddy deemed he would then start another for-profit hospital chain, Alecto Healthcare Services. He has since been named nine times by Modern Healthcare as one of the “50 Most Influential Physician Executives,” and among the “25 Top Minority Executives in Healthcare.”
Last Thursday a rally was held outside of the Medical Center to demand the new owner, UCLA Health Services, keep medical services open. Olympia nurse Shenita Anderson told the gathered crowd that many of the hospital’s patients are low-income and unhoused, with some 40 percent of admittances being African Americans and 60 percent of patients over the age of 60.
Olympia serves a racially diverse working class community, and the forthcoming closure has everything to do with the profit considerations of Alecto and its shareholders. However, attempts have been made to portray the closure as a purely racial issue. Cathy Kennedy, vice president of the California Nurses Association told ABC7 News that “If this hospital were to close it would exacerbate the racial disparities we are seeing play out in this county during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Mark-Anthony Clayton-Johnson from Frontline Wellness Network also told ABC7 that the closure of this facility would be “devastating to Black, Latinx and indigenous communities who are dying at alarming rates.”
By focusing on race, the Democratic Party seeks to conceal the fact that the majority of the 470,000 US COVID-19 victims, whatever their ethnicity, come from poorer working class communities. According to statista.com, as of January 2021 the racial breakdown of the nearly half a million deaths stands at 60.7 percent White, 18 percent Hispanic/Latino, 15.6 percent African American/Black, and 3.6 percent Asian. Instead of outrage over the fact that the virus has been allowed to continue to rip through the entirety of the population, the proponents of this narrative focus on race, to conceal the vast class gulf in society.
According to a December 2020 report in Becker ’ s Hospital Review, at least 21 hospitals closed last year. Among them, multiple hospitals were closed in the states of Tennessee, West Virginia, Georgia, Kansas, Pennsylvania and Texas. The opening of the economy and the devastating closures of hospitals from urban Los Angeles to rural West Virginia are not the result of racist decisions but of profit considerations and, fundamentally, a product of the crisis of the capitalist system, which is indifferent to the preservation of human life.
Health care workers have responded to these policies with grave concern and have begun linking up with educators throughout the state to oppose the policy of school reopenings that threaten to ignite major outbreaks and push hospital systems far past the horrors of December and January. Health care workers and educators are natural allies who must unite together along with other sections of the working class, begin to build independent rank-and-file committees and join a national network of committees dedicated to policies that put human life and safety above profit considerations.
The calls for Olympia Medical Center to remain open must be accompanied by the demand that billions of dollars be injected into the crumbling hospital systems, new hospitals must be built, the most advanced PPE and protection provided for health care staff, with resources directed to the training and hiring of large numbers of health care workers to help provide the highest levels of patient care. Staffing and the organization of patient care must be under the control and direction of health care workers themselves. The trillions handed to the corporations through the ill-named CARES act must be seized and used to pay for these measures.
Educators in Chicago and beyond are fighting for their lives to keep schools closed. All sections of workers throughout the US and globally must come to their aid with an understanding that their struggles are one. If Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot, assisted by the Chicago Teachers Union, succeeds in forcing schools to open, the same awaits millions of children and their families throughout the country, which will further drive up the death toll and devastate hospital systems.
The ruling class is doubling down on its bipartisan policy of reopening and herd immunity, no matter the death toll. On the other side is the working class, which must begin organizing and uniting for a policy and program that puts human life above all considerations, including the profits of the financial elite. Nurses and educators in California and beyond must come to the support of Chicago teachers, build rank and file committees, and take up the demands that schools remain closed everywhere and full financial assistance be provided to workers, parents and small business owners to ensure they can stay home and protect themselves and their families.
California health care worker explains how COVID-19 catastrophe has been fueled by the drive for profit
I’m a hospital worker in California. I’m writing to share the conditions, pre- and post-pandemic, at the hospital we work at.
It’s a small hospital that serves several suburban, commuter communities. Most of the people who live here commute out of town to work, and likewise, most of the hospital workers, clinical and nonclinical alike, have to commute a good distance to get here. We are not a trauma center; severe car crash injuries and the like are transported to other hospitals. Nominally we are not-for-profit, but you know how that really goes.
One year our interim CEO was paid over $400,000. I don’t have the numbers on the current CEO at the moment. The hospital hires all sorts of “consulting” companies to better squeeze money out of patient care: our physicians are pressured to cut down inpatient admission stays to only one day, instead of two or three, because that’s “wasteful.”
Before the pandemic, we were understaffed and underequipped in all departments. Every flu season, the administration hires travelers, because they refuse to staff us adequately the rest of the year. Night crews are always skeleton crews. One pharmacy tech all alone at night; decreased staffing in ICU (intensive care unit) so patients in the ED (emergency department) are transferred upstairs only on morning shift change, when there’s actually nurses to attend them. There’s only one radiation tech at night to x-ray and CT all the patients in the hospital. On weekend nights there’s only one phlebotomist and one lab tech, as opposed to the one offset and two lab techs on weekday nights. The admitting (read: registration and billing) department is chronically understaffed, and they are constantly pressured to collect more from patients with very specific phrasing to psychologically corner patients into paying as much as possible up front. The ED at night is almost always short, especially when no one’s able to cover callouts. When the unit secretary calls out, one of the clinical workers, usually a tech, takes over.
Right before flu season a couple years ago, administration fired a dozen nurses and all the monitor techs; some of these guys had been here for over a decade. That left the remaining workers in the wards to pick up the slack and monitor the heart rhythms of up to 50+ patients. The parasites who play the stock market have sophisticated automated trading software to make microsecond decisions based on the smallest market fluctuations, and we just have one schmuck trying to keep two eyes on dozens of heart rhythms. Come flu season, administration realized they made a poor decision, and extended job offers to all the nurses they fired. Most, if not all of them, said no, having found jobs somewhere else. So, we brought in travelers, as usual.
Security is always understaffed, so when we have psych holds awaiting transfer to actual psychiatric facilities, it’s often a clinical worker watching the one patient. A tech or nurse is pulled away from all other patient care for the entirety of their shift to make sure a suicidal ten-year-old girl—and we get a lot of those—does not attempt self-harm.
About our rad techs. They image not only the emergency, surgery, and inpatient patients, but also outpatients! Two ducks running around an entire hospital, going from code, to surgery, to STAT ICU, to emergency department patients, and having to somehow, eventually, get to the patients who have actually scheduled their outpatient radiology procedures. “I got here at 10, I had an appointment at 10!” (It’s 11:40, now.) “I’m sorry, I know you came here on time for your appointment, but we were called to the ICU, then we had to assist so-and-so surgeon…” That’s right—the hospital schedules outpatient without actually having clinical staff to attend them for their appointments.
And you know how the hospital dealt with that?
They closed one of our outpatient centers. Sold it to RadNet. [Ed. note: RadNet is the largest outpatient imaging service in the United States, it reported net revenue of $1.2 billion in 2019.] Officially, the hospital is entering into a “partnership” with RadNet, who’ll give a percentage of profits to the hospital in exchange for being the exclusive service provider for the patients who go to the center. As for RadNet’s modus operandi: Imagine the mafia seizing control of all the doctor’s offices in a city, briefly offering the poor doctor a 10 percent cut of the profits before closing the joint down quicker than Speedy Gonzales running for queso Oaxaca and funneling every single patient in the city to a centralized Dr. Giancana’s office. That’s what RadNet does with radiology and imaging centers. They’ll close that outpatient center and patients will have to travel further just to get the care they need. By the way, anyone working at that outpatient center who isn’t a rad tech is out of a job now.
We don’t have a phone operator at night, so admitting department workers, the people who are trying to update your records, register your bed placement when you get admitted so the nurses can actually chart on you, and argue with your insurance company about medical necessity of inpatient stays gets to monitor all the hospital alarm panels, call codes, and take phone calls. EVS (environmental services; housekeeping) is always scrambling to clean the rooms.
Our two Bioquells (decontamination equipment) for the whole hospital are always breaking down, one or the other. Management keeps “repairing” them instead of replacing them. It takes four hours to finish Bioquelling a room, and if multiple rooms that housed C. diff patients need to be decontaminated whilst one of the machines is out of commission, it can be a long time before a room is actually ready for use. Our EKG machines have now seen eight years of use and are the most frequently used pieces of equipment in the entire hospital. The fax printers are always acting up, and we’re always joking about going Office Space on them. That might strike you as funny—and it is—but our anarchic health care infrastructure is such that faxes are the only way we can exchange medical records with other providers, e.g., obtaining the medical history of a Kaiser patient, or sending clinical data to a pediatric hospital taking a child we can’t care for. And keep in mind the times when the hospitals we’re trying to communicate with have problems with their fax machines, too. We used to have a dedicated on-call biomedical engineer to make emergency repairs to our clinical equipment, but last year they outsourced that to some center that never sends a guy at night. If something breaks at night, it’s just going to have to wait till day shift to be addressed.
This kind of horrific understaffing and underequipping isn’t exclusive to us, and we’re far from the worst. On December 8, I spoke to a traveler radtech from this huge 10-storey hospital that looks like a Marriott hotel. They had only ONE ancient portable x-ray machine for the whole hospital, to cover all ten floors. And they’re a trauma center! The hospital acquired more machines only in late November two weeks before our conversation, after said traveler “politely raised her concerns”—during a pandemic.
So: Those were our working conditions before the pandemic. Over a year since SARS-Cov-2 emerged, our staffing issues have only been exacerbated. Patients are waiting 42+ hours for their ICU beds. Sometimes the telemetry admissions are stuck in the ED for so long that they spend the entirety of their admission in the ED, never making it to the telemetry department where they were supposed to have been. This causes trouble for the ED nurses, because the process in our software to discharge a patient from the floor is different from the process to discharge from ED. They don’t know how to go about it. We’re now doubling up patients in their rooms, and our basement is ready to take a surge. Why didn’t we put patients in the basement before doubling them up on a room? I would guess (short) staffing—it is “easier” to keep one eye attending two patients in the same room, rather than hiring more nurses to look after patients in an ad hoc ward. We have a small “disaster tent” outside. Our first large one, in the parking lot, actually blew up in the first month it was set up due to an electrical issue.
Our clinical staff are starting to break. The hospitalists, the admitting physicians are not intensivists (ICU doctors). But circumstances have forced them to act in the capacity of one, especially at night—when the intensivist is on call, not on campus. One of our nightshift hospitalists broke down in tears two weeks ago, when someone asked her how one of the patients we recently admitted was faring. “I don’t know. I don’t remember how many people have died.” She called out after that night and hasn’t been back since. Regional management, meanwhile, likes to come make rounds during day shift to yell at workers for not using PPE we don’t have. “Why aren’t you using a face shield?! You’re in direct patient contact!” You didn’t give us face shields!
The on-call chaplain sometimes calls us in advance, now. “Is anyone in need of services?”
The toll on the paramedics is heavy. They have to don and doff all their PPE and decontaminate the rig (ambulance) between each patient. The local nursing homes are death traps. Those places were already horrific sites of neglect and abuse before the pandemic—we had an old lady, once we removed her pants, rose an actual cloud of human dust we couldn’t see through. She hadn’t been bathed in months. Now we get multiple runs (ambulances) from the same nursing home in the same night, and often the same crew going back for more patients. The staff at these residential care facilities are often found cowering in the corner. They don’t want to touch death. Their patients arrive blue. One of our ED physicians actually complained: “Why did you bring us a corpse?” The paramedics cry when they’re not too busy or tired to cry.
Last month, we got patients from over 200 miles away, transported by air, because the hospitals in their areas were all on diversion—they couldn’t take any more ambulances, they had to go somewhere else. This month, we’re on diversion most nights. I don’t know where those patients go. Obviously, they’re not going to LA (Los Angeles). On the nights where every single hospital in the county is on diversion, that actually cancels it out, in an absurd way—there’s no place for these patients to go, so we might as well take them. Have them sit in the ambulance until a bed somewhere in the ED opens up.
Our hospital is now using over four times the amount of oxygen we use normally. This is freezing the pipes, and pressure is running low. The alarm for this goes off literally every second or less. The hospital operators have taped the “acknowledge” button down to mute the sirens. I don’t know how that system is supposed to support the surge of patients we’re expecting to serve without doubled up rooms.
And I hate to say this to people, because it’s horrific and the last thing you want to think about during a pandemic, but being in a fully staffed, safely ratioed ICU, if you can find one—doesn’t guarantee you a decent quality of care. The quality of our intensivists—our hospitalists and ED physicians, exasperated, joke: “We’re not intensivists! And neither are our intensivists.”—is pretty poor. We operate in a relatively calm, affluent area, and we aren’t a trauma center, so our ICU doesn’t get as much experience as say, the ones in major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles. A couple of the intensivists on our panel are always pulling away the ED physicians to help intubate every single patient they get—they can’t do it themselves. There’s a lot of resentment in the ED because of that. So, if our ED physician is busy tubing a guy upstairs, then there’s no doc to see whatever new person the ambulance has brought in—and they might need to be tubed, too.
The last thing I want to talk about—and this is going to kill more people than most realize—are all the medical bills. Yeah, you survived COVID-19, maybe even without any of the nasty long-term sequelae we’re seeing in the long-haulers. (In my case, it took me three months after clearing the virus before I could do a couple of star jumps without wheezing.) But I guarantee you that a lot of these people are going to wish they didn’t survive. These bills are going to crush entire families, especially the ones without insurance. I’ve already seen an uninsured patient die from trying to avoid medical bills, not coming in for difficulty breathing for so long that their heart, overcompensating and overtaxed, failed. He was a father with a wife and kids. They and the extended family were sobbing outside the hospital in the cold winter air.
One night in the ICU in my hospital is $25,000. Does not include diagnostics (e.g., x-ray & bloodwork), anaesthesiologists, respiratory therapy, intensivist. That’s only the room. Most people transfer from the ED to ICU—so there’s an additional emergency room bill on top of that. Cost of an ER can vary, but if you’re placed under isolation, expect $5,000 to include all the sterile supplies in the room (e.g., crash cart) that must be thrown out and cannot be reused for other patients. The ED physician also has a separate bill. Meals are separate expenses, too. (Of course, if you’re intubated, you don’t have to pay for a meal.) In a busy hospital, maybe half the meals in the ED don’t ever make it to the patients; the nurses are too busy to hand-deliver them after they arrive upstairs from the cafeteria. A lot of patients pay for meals they don’t eat.
The ambulances are run by private companies and have their own bills. In Los Angeles County, an Advanced Life Support ride can cost up to $2,500. Basic Life Support can cost up to $1,700. Does not include cost of ancillary services (e.g., respiratory therapist, additional $2,800). And this is just ground transportation—I don’t know the rates for aerial transport, like our patients with the 200-mile helicopter ride.
At our hospital, no one is getting hazard pay, and they completely cut the yearly raises for non-clinical workers. Our new benefits for this year, vision, dental, and medical, are garbage. I’m part-time due to my disability, and that means I have to pay double for medical benefits that have been slashed by more than half for 2021, and those are just the biweekly premiums, not the out-of-pocket portion I owe when I actually see a doctor. I was already stretching my medication last year, and now I have to think about spreading them thinner—right as my health is starting to deteriorate, when it’s best to start any preventive interventions before things worsen and/or become permanent. I’ve stopped seeing my cardiologist. My visual processing is starting to go, I caved in and bought a white cane on New Year’s Eve, and now I have to think about what the hell I’m supposed to do if I go completely blind. My fiancé’s dead and my biological relatives generally don’t want anything to do with me as a genderqueer person. If I go legally blind, I’ll probably just kill myself, because disability benefits don’t even cover half rent for a stoveless studio apartment in California. With or without a pandemic, this is what capitalism has to offer workers.
Democrats push ahead with school openings in California as state’s death total approaches 50,000
Yesterday, nearly 500 people died of coronavirus in the state of California, according to the Worldometer website, pushing the state's death toll to 45,971. While total infections and deaths in the state are down from their peak last month, daily infections are still averaging more than 10,000 every day.
In spite of the dangers, California Democrats, with the support of the teachers’ unions, are pressing ahead with plans to rapidly reopen schools in major cities throughout the state, in line with the nationwide campaign spearheaded by the Biden administration, which has described school reopenings as its top priority. On his second day in office, the Biden White House promised to have kindergarten through eighth grade students back to in-person learning by April 30.
The start of reopening yesterday of schools in Chicago, after the Chicago Teachers Union forced through a deadly and unpopular agreement with the school district, was only the beginning of a nationwide conflict pitting the ruling class, and above all the Democrats and their trade union lackeys, again teachers and the working class as a whole. One of the next major battlefields in the fight against the reopening of schools will be in California.
Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest school district in the country, has yet to announce its plans on reopening but is working behind the scenes with Governor Gavin Newsom to open the schools as state and local officials grow impatient with refusals to reopen campuses.
Cases and deaths in Los Angeles County are staggering and on the rise. Reported cases have reached 1.2 million with more than 18,000 deaths. Currently, there are only 330 free ICU beds available in the county, as LA COVID hospitalizations just barely dip below a record high.
In the poorer neighborhoods of Los Angeles, nearly 1 in 3 school-age children tested are recording positive for COVID-19. The reopening of schools would be catastrophic for the families of students and teachers, as tragically the deaths of school workers, and even young children, are becoming less rare.
Last week, the Los Angeles city council published a letter in the Los Angeles Times to demand that schools reopen, and filed a lawsuit against the LA Unified School District for not reopening. LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner—who fully agrees with the need to reopen—argued the district cannot open immediately but only due to state restrictions. Beutner noted last week, “We are ready to reopen and want nothing more than to welcome children back to classrooms safely but we cannot break state law to do so.”
The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), meanwhile, has only requested that teachers be vaccinated before returning to the classroom. The demand for vaccinations, too, is a false choice. Even in the far-off scenario that every teacher in the United States has received their two vaccinations against COVID-19, children are still not vaccinated, and teacher vaccination does not prevent the contraction and spread of the virus among children. Moreover, the continued unabated spread of the virus produces mutations that are already putting the efficacy of current vaccines in question.
There is tremendous opposition to reopening schools among educators and other workers. “I am vehemently opposed to the reopening of LA schools and other school districts during a time when the pandemic surge has not totally subsided,” Elizabeth, a registered nurse from Los Angeles, said. “It is irresponsible and dangerous to place teachers, children and families at risk of contracting COVID-19, and more so now with the contagious UK variant taking hold in LA County and predicted to become the dominant variant by March.
“Teachers, parents and other sectors of the working class must stand together and oppose the murderous policy of the ruling class that is only concerned with protecting the profits of Wall Street. They will not be safe until the virus is brought completely under control through a vigorous vaccination campaign. Teachers and other sectors of the working class must push back on the Democratic Party leaders and unions who are pushing for this murderous policy in the name of profits!”
This week San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD), the second largest district in the state, reached a deal with the San Diego Education Association (SDEA) to reopen in-person “learning labs” offered to students from low-income or immigrant families, homeless or foster students, or students with special needs. This plan allows more than 22,000 eligible students on campuses, of the district’s estimated 97,000 student population. These “learning labs,” which will hold up to fourteen K-5 students and ten 6–12 students per classroom, are the initial phase of throwing teachers and students back into classrooms.
The city’s schools are continuing with “hybrid” school returns, where select students are to be on-campus for a limited amount of time, and their teachers perform regular full day instruction. Currently, San Diego County has more than 35,800 students in full in-person instruction, 103,000 students in hybrid learning, and 34,200 employees on campus.
In a statement on the tentative agreement, SDUSD Board President Richard Barerra declared that once more teachers are able to get vaccinated, the district will begin requiring them to return to in-person instruction, even if the county case rate still remains in the “purple tier.” The major hospitals in the county currently remain near 100 percent ICU occupancy, as they have for most of the winter.
San Francisco is also pushing forward with reopening. Last week, the city filed a lawsuit, the first of its kind, against its own school district, San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), claiming the district had “failed to offer classroom-based instruction whenever possible.” On Tuesday, the city attorney, Dennis Herrera, amended the lawsuit claiming “the district is violating the state constitution as well as state law by keeping students out of the classroom.”
SFUSD had originally planned to reopen schools for the district’s youngest as well as special education students under a hybrid model as early as January 25. Widespread opposition from teachers and parents effectively delayed reopening until March 25, as the district had not reached an agreement with the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) in December. Since December negotiations with the district, UESF has demanded only that teachers be vaccinated prior to returning to classrooms.
Rank-and-file teachers and school workers understand that schools cannot be reopened safely, in any capacity, while COVID-19 continues to spread unmitigated and the vaccine distribution remains stalled. Resources must be equitably devoted to assuring students and teachers have the resources necessary to facilitate effective online education, and schools and non-essential production must remain closed until the spread of COVID-19 has been contained.
This requires a struggle not only against school administrators but the Democratic Party and the trade unions, which are serving as their chief instrument in beating back the opposition of teachers.
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