A new count reveals 1,600 more deaths at nursing homes.
|
|
At “reopen the economy” event, Trump confirms plans to shut down coronavirus task force
6 May 2020
At an appearance in Phoenix, Arizona on Tuesday to promote the government’s back-to-work campaign, President Donald Trump confirmed reports that he is planning to dismantle the White House coronavirus task force. Trump traveled to Phoenix to tour a Honeywell aerospace plant that has partially converted to the production of N95 masks.
His first major event outside of Washington DC in a month, it was meant to signal that the period of quarantining is over and it is time to shift to reopening business. The White House indicated that more such appearances would soon follow, including one in Ohio later this week.
President Donald Trump tours tour a Honeywell International plant that manufactures personal protective equipment, Tuesday, May 5, 2020, in Phoenix, with Honeywell CEO Darius Adamczyk, right. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Trump combined his tour of the plant with a so-called “round table” with Navajo Indian officials, at which he displayed an executive order allocating $600 million for the Navajo Nation to combat the coronavirus. This is a drop in the bucket compared to the massive social needs of an impoverished and oppressed population that lacks the basic health infrastructure needed to deal with the pandemic. It is a tiny fraction of the more than $6 trillion that has been allocated on a bipartisan basis by Congress and the Federal Reserve to bail out Wall Street.
In a brief exchange with reporters following the round table, Trump was asked to respond to a report in the New York Times that he was planning to “wind down” the White House task force on the virus. He confirmed the report, saying the country had entered “phase two” of the pandemic, which he called “safety and opening.” He added, “We will have a different group probably set up for that.”
Trump’s appearance featured the combination of self-congratulation, stupidity and brazen lying to which millions around the world have become accustomed. Significantly, he made a point of calling the American people “warriors,” implying that they had to be prepared to die. And to die, moreover, for Wall Street.
His announcement on the task force underscored that the drive to force workers back into factories and workplaces, without any serious safety precautions or equipment, and while the pandemic continues to rage unchecked, puts an end to any pretense of a coordinated effort to contain the disease.
It makes clear that the drive to resume corporate-profit making, in defiance of warnings from public health experts as well as polls showing lopsided majorities opposed to the operation, is a conscious decision to let the deadly virus spread more widely and take untold thousands more lives.
In practical terms, the existence of the task force, which includes scientists and medical experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, exerted little influence on the response of the Trump administration and the political establishment as a whole to the pandemic. From the onset, the response of the government has been determined by the interests and demands of the corporate-financial oligarchy that runs the country.
But the winding down of the body has considerable symbolic significance. It is a statement that neither the facts, nor science, nor popular opinion, nor the horrific toll in death and disease will deter the ruling class from propping up the stock market and expanding the wealth of the super-rich, no matter the human cost.
Trump is using the technique of the “big lie” to justify his back-to-work campaign. He claims that the pandemic is all but over, even as deaths surge past the 70,000 mark and infections continue to increase. It is, moreover, well known that the official figures vastly underestimate the real levels of contagion and death.
Earlier on Tuesday, as he left the White House to fly to Phoenix, Trump dismissed as irrelevant a report to the Centers for Disease Control by Johns Hopkins University predicting that the infection rate in the US would explode to 200,000 a day and the death rate would nearly double to 3,000 by the end of May.
He said the report assumed the absence of mitigation measures, while the moves to “reopen” already underway or announced by at least 42 states included “lots of mitigation.” This is a lie.
Few if any of the states meet the guidelines for reopening that Trump himself announced last month, including 14 straight days of declining infections. Many are openly flaunting minimal social distancing precautions, opening barber shops, beauty salons, gyms, beaches, shopping malls, restaurants and even movie theaters.
Even the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which has consistently produced the lowest estimates of COVID-19 deaths of any scientific body, and which the White House has cited in the past, on Monday raised its projection for US deaths by August 1 from the already surpassed 60,000 to 135,000, based on what it called a “premature” lifting of social distancing measures.
In shutting down the task force, Trump is seeking to suppress any objective factual and scientific reporting. Despite efforts to accommodate himself to Trump, Fauci frequently felt obliged to contradict claims by the president of miracle cures and early vaccines, and he warned of the dangers of a premature reopening of the economy. As he seeks to intimidate and repress working class resistance to being forced to work under unsafe conditions, Trump will no doubt step up efforts to suppress statistical data on the actual impact of the disease.
Like everything else Trump does, the Phoenix event is closely linked to his electoral prospects in November. Arizona is considered a battleground state. He carried the state in 2016, but recent polls show a close race with the presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
Like a majority of states across the country, including states with Democratic governors, Arizona is loosening social distancing measures and beginning to allow non-essential businesses to reopen. The day before Trump’s visit, Republican Governor Doug Ducey announced he was accelerating his plan to reopen the state’s economy.
Also on Monday, Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of the California, the most populous state in the country, announced that he would begin to reopen this Friday. Echoing Trump, he said, “We are entering into the next phase this week, end of the week.” The “next phase” will include the reopening of beaches and “adjustments this week in the retail sector.”
Trump’s sociopathic gangsterism is not simply an individual question. He embodies the corporate-financial ruling elite in America. As in the rest of the world, this financial oligarchy is consciously exploiting the pandemic to implement policies of social plunder it had long been preparing to deal with a deepening economic crisis of the capitalist system. Despite tactical differences, the Democrats fully back this homicidal policy, which is directed above all against the working class.
6 May 2020
Long-term care homes overrun with COVID-19 infections and deaths, refrigerated trailers holding bodies that overburdened funeral homes cannot accept, nursing home morgues stacked with corpses, seniors left to suffer and die alone—these are just some of the horrors and indignities that face residents of America’s facilities caring for the elderly during the coronavirus pandemic.
The Trump administration has openly stated that up to 100,000 Americans can expect to die in the coming weeks and months as states move to reopen the economy. This shocking revision upwards of the administration’s death projections were recounted by the president on Sunday with cold-blooded contempt for the lives of those who stand to die. And the numbers are likely an underestimation.
Disproportionately included among these countless thousands of deaths will be the elderly, many of them residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. In the US, perhaps more than in any other nation, seniors are not revered by the powers that be for their long years of labor and family care, but rather are seen as a drain on the economy. It can be said with confidence that the wiping out of large numbers of the older population is seen by the ruling elite as a convenient and positive byproduct of the coronavirus pandemic.
An internal report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published by the New York Times projects that 3,000 daily deaths can be expected by June 1. This horrific death toll is the price the American ruling elite says is required to restart the economy under conditions where COVID-19 infections continue to steadily rise.
COVID-19 has already exacted a grim toll among the nearly 3 million individuals living in long-term care facilities across the US, including in nursing homes, assisted living facilities and intermediate care facilities. Another 3 million people work in these facilities, the majority under deplorable conditions and for poor pay, and with little to no protection against contracting the virus themselves.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), in the 23 US states that publicly reported death data in long-term facilities, there were over 10,000 reported deaths due to COVID-19 among residents and staff. In five states—Delaware, Massachusetts, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Utah—deaths in these facilities accounted for a staggering 50 percent or more of coronavirus deaths.
Horrific stories continue to emerge from long-term care facilities across the country in the pandemic. Of the more than 25,000 deaths in New York, the nation’s hardest hit state, at least 4,813 residents with confirmed or presumed cases of COVID-19 have died at 351 of New York’s 613 nursing homes since March 1. On Monday the state reported more than 1,700 previously undisclosed deaths at nursing homes and adult care facilities.
At one New York City nursing home, the Isabella Geriatric Center in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, nearly 100 of its 705 residents have died. Officials at the nursing home revealed Friday that 46 residents who tested positive for COVID-19, along with 52 suspected of having the virus, had passed away.
This huge death toll, the largest nursing home cluster in New York state, was first reported by local cable news station NY1. The station’s report also revealed that due to delays by overburdened funeral homes in picking up bodies, the center had brought in a refrigerated trailer to store bodies and had concealed the trailer under tarps hung on the nursing home’s fence. An official at the geriatric center said that the deadly situation had been compounded by a lack of in-house testing, staffing shortages and difficulty obtaining personal protective equipment (PPE) for employees.
In Medfield, Massachusetts, north of Boston, COVID-19 has killed 54 residents over the past four weeks at the Courtyard Nursing Care Center. An additional 117 residents and 42 employees have tested positive for the virus. Dr. Richard Feifer, chief medical officer for Genesis Healthcare, which owns Courtyard, told the Boston Globe that the nursing home cares for “largely frail, elderly seniors with multiple health conditions,” a description that applies to virtually all nursing home residents.
Deaths at the Medfield facility have received less media attention than would be expected until recently because of the COVID-19 outbreak that has ravaged the Soldiers’ Home, a veterans’ care facility in Holyoke in the western part of Massachusetts. A shocking 84 residents have died at the facility since the virus outbreak. Eighty-one employees have tested positive for the coronavirus.
The deaths at the Soldiers’ Home were initially hidden from both the mayor of Holyoke and local health officials, who only became aware of the developing situation when employees at the facility reached out to them. Staff said management at the facility refused to provide them with PPE and instructed them to crowd patients together from multiple wards into a single ward as a solution to staffing shortages due to infections. A state investigation into the deaths is underway.
A particularly gruesome discovery took place in mid-April when police found 17 corpses piled up at the Subacute and Rehabilitation Center in Andover, New Jersey. The bodies were stacked in a small morgue designed to hold a maximum of four bodies. The more than 2,000 deaths of staff and residents in New Jersey’s long-term facilities account for about 40 percent of the state’s coronavirus-related deaths.
The Detroit Health Department reported at the end of April that 200 residents along with three workers had died of coronavirus in the city’s 26 nursing homes. All 26 nursing homes in the city have cases of COVID-19, according to Mayor Mike Duggan. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services released data showing a total of 2,637 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among nursing home residents throughout the state.
As the state of Florida began to reopen some of its beaches and businesses this week, a list from the Florida Department of Health detailed more than 300 long-term care facilities where staff or residents had tested positive for COVID-19. Florida reported nearly 1,400 deaths statewide and 284 deaths in these facilities, but these numbers are suspect. They do not correspond to numbers reported by senior facilities and figures from the state’s medical examiner’s office.
Coronavirus cases and deaths in nursing homes and other elder care facilities have been similarly prevalent in Europe. According to the World Health Organization, up to 50 percent of the COVID-19 deaths in Europe have been associated with long-term care facilities. In the UK, official figures only recently began to include at-home and nursing home deaths.
As in the US, many of the elderly are suffering COVID-19 without visits from friends and family, which adds an additional emotional toll. Elders’ dignity is robbed as they take their last breaths hooked up to a ventilator with only hospital staff around them. Despite being overworked and placing themselves in danger of infection, doctors and nurses have been treating those dying with compassion, tending to them in their final hours and setting up phone and video calls with patients’ family members.
This kindheartedness stands in sharp contrast to the cruelty heaped on the elderly by government authorities—local, state and federal—who have underreported deaths in senior care facilities and provided little assistance to nursing homes and their workers in the form of testing and PPE. With the lives of hundreds of thousands of the population seen as the price that must be paid to get workers back on the job to produce profit, seniors who deserve high-quality medical care are instead seen as expendable as their profit-generating days are over.
The American oligarchy decides for death
5 May 2020
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Trump administration has embraced an approach to the pandemic that will—and that it knows will—result in the deaths of tens of thousands of people in the coming weeks and months.
On Sunday night, Trump nonchalantly stated that he now expects 100,000 people to die from COVID-19 in the United States, up from his previous estimates of approximately 60,000.
Referring to death numbers like he was negotiating a real estate deal, Trump stated, “I used to say 65 thousand, and now I’m saying 80 or 90. And it goes up and it goes up rapidly. But it’s still going to be, no matter how you look at it, at the very lower end of the plane.” He added separately, “And look, we’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100 thousand people.”
That is, an additional 40,000 people, by Trump’s own count, will die—40,000 people with children, spouses, families and loved ones, who would not have died if appropriate measures were taken to contain the virus.
This is, in fact, a vast underestimate. The president’s remarks were followed Monday by the publication by the New York Times of an internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) report that projects that there will be 200,000 new cases per day by the end of this month, and by June 1 an expected 3,000 daily deaths.
Graphe 1
This would push the death toll into the hundreds of thousands, as the report shows that actual daily deaths have consistently outpaced government projections. At that rate, more than a quarter million people would be dead by the end of the summer, and more than a million within a year.
The CDC figures make clear that the Trump administration’s guidelines, released in mid-April, marked the abandonment of any official effort to contain the pandemic. As the World Socialist Web Site warned on April 17, the White House and the ruling class were seeking to “normalize death on a massive scale, in which outbreaks of COVID-19 are seen as the cost of doing business.”
Graphe 2
As the death toll mounts, the Trump administration’s internal calculations are being released in dribs and drabs. At the end of March, when the US death toll had just surpassed 4,000, Trump declared that a total of 100,000 deaths would be “a good job” by his administration. Today, the official death toll has surpassed 70,000 and is still climbing at an average pace of more than 1,750 per day.
However, even this is a significant undercount of deaths that have resulted from COVID-19 infections and the stress that has been put on health systems by the pandemic. Excess deaths, those on top of the average number of weekly deaths, exceed reported deaths by as much as two times in many states. On top of this, Florida and Tennessee, two states that have already moved to reopen, are actively suppressing their official death tolls.
It must be stated again: The White House is deliberately and consciously implementing measures that it knows will lead to tens of thousands additional deaths. There is a sociopathic character to these policies, but they follow a ruthless class logic. The gangster in the White House expresses the demands of the financial oligarchy, which controls the entire political system.
The pandemic gave the ruling elite the pretext to carry out policies that otherwise would have come under extreme scrutiny and been met with popular hostility. Without the crisis caused by COVID-19, it would be difficult to justify a $10 trillion handout to the rich—unanimously supported by the entire political establishment, Democratic and Republican.
With the bailout secured, it is, as far as the ruling class is concerned, time to get back to the business of extracting surplus value from the working class, regardless of how many will die.
There are only two concerns that the ruling class has in implementing this policy.
First, there is the problem of how to get workers back to work under unsafe conditions. The response here is economic blackmail and impoverishment. Millions of workers who have been thrown out of work overnight will never see an unemployment payment. With many states now lifting all restrictions on business operations, workers will be forced back to work under the threat of being cut off from all aid if they refuse to do so.
Second is the problem of legal responsibility on the part of companies for the death of their workers. Trump set the agenda last month by using the Defense Production Act to order slaughterhouses, a center of the outbreak with thousands of workers already infected and dozens of workers dead, to remain open and to indemnify the corporations from being sued for any worker deaths.
On Monday, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News Radio that any future bailout package should indemnify all employers. “We have brave health care workers battling the virus, entrepreneurs who will reopen their economy, all of whom deserve, in my view, strong protections from the opportunistic lawsuits… arguing that somehow the decision they made with regard to reopening adversely affected the health of someone else.”
With companies being freed of any responsibility for the lives of their employees, the strategy of the ruling class now is to withhold as much information as possible about the growing number of infections and deaths, and to give the impression that it is safe to return to work and to normal life, even as the coronavirus rampages through communities across the country.
Workers will and must reject the false choice being put forwarded by the ruling elite—starve or risk death from COVID-19. This “choice” is premised on the idea that the capitalist system is inviolable and that the interests of the corporate-financial oligarchy will dictate the response to the pandemic.
The development of opposition in the working class requires the formation of independent rank-and-file safety committees in every workplace and factory to ensure safe working conditions and to fight for the closure of all non-essential production. The organization and operation of workplaces cannot be left in the hands of the capitalists, whose only interest is in producing profits!
The effort of the working class to fight for life over profit, for a scientific and rational response to the pandemic that mobilizes all social resources to combat the coronavirus, will bring workers into an ever more direct and open conflict not only with the Trump administration, but with the corporate and financial oligarchy that is dictating policy—and the capitalist system upon which its wealth and power rests.
No comments:
Post a Comment