Hospital capacity in the US severely strained as coronavirus infections continue to surge
As the Food and Drug Administration advisory panel has formally recommended that the Pfizer vaccine be given emergency use authorization, approximately 125 people are dying from COVID-19 every hour in the United States. The level of testing continues to lag as the national positivity rate has climbed over 11 percent.
The approval of the life-saving vaccine will have little impact on the current pace of fatalities raging through community after community across the nation over the next several months. “The reality is the vaccine approval this week’s not going to really impact that I think to any degree for the next 60 days,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield said Thursday. If projections hold, more than 500,000 Americans will have died from COVID-19 by the end of March.
The statistics are staggering.
There have been 16.2 million people in the US confirmed infected with COVID-19, 5.5 million in just the last 30 days. Over 300,000 have succumbed to this deadly disease. The seven-day average of deaths has reached 2,425 per day. The last three days running, COVID-19 deaths have hovered near or exceeded 3,000. On Friday, six states had more than 10,000 new cases, with California registering a one-day high of 37,143 cases with an exponentially accelerating trajectory.
The COVID Tracking Project reported that there are currently 108,044 people hospitalized with COVID-19. Almost one in two patients admitted to the ICU is for COVID-19. This is up from one in 10 in September. A recent report by the US Department of Health and Human Services showed that as many as 200 hospitals had reached full capacity last week. One-third of all hospitals reported their ICU occupancy was above 90 percent.
Repeatedly, public health officials and epidemiologists have sounded the alarm. Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told CNN, “What we have seen over the last few weeks is a sharp rise in infections. And what we know—from the beginning of this pandemic—is infections are followed by hospitalizations, which are then followed by death.”
Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and a member of President-elect Joe Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board, warned Thursday that the surge in cases would continue through January. “However, it’s likely that until we see substantial rates of vaccination, high numbers of cases and deaths will occur for at least the next 5 to 6 months,” Osterholm tweeted.
Neither scientist followed up their dire warnings with a call for a lockdown of nonessential production, even to provide health systems breathing room. While Congress has been able to approve a record $740 billion budget for the military, a billion-dollar emergency program to build a national public health infrastructure with an adequate number of tests and contact tracers is inconceivable.
The situation is particularly severe in California, with more than 1.5 million cases and nearly 21,000 deaths. Hospitalizations across the state are at record levels. ICU admissions are up 70 percent from two weeks prior. As in the spring, elective surgeries are being canceled to make room for COVID-19 patients. Jan Emerson-Shea, the vice-president of the California Hospital Association, told the Associated Press on Thursday, “Canceling elective procedures [like heart valve replacements or removal of tumors] really is a last-resort option. However, in the midst of this current surge, which is the largest to date, some hospitals may have no choice.”
Los Angeles County reported an alarming 13,718 new cases on Friday. Barbara Ferrer, the county’s public health director, called it the most dangerous time for the region. San Gabriel Valley, South Bay, the Westside, and central Los Angeles have seen more than 200 percent increase in infections since late September. The ICU availability in Southern California is down to 7.7 percent. In the San Joaquin Valley region, hospitals are reporting only 1.9 percent availability in ICUs.
US hospitals are facing severe staff shortages. Traveling intensive care nurses are seeing their pay double or even quadruple. Despite finding ways to expand hospital capacity, such as in Reno, Nevada, where the parking garage of Renown Regional Medical Center was turned into a 700-patient COVID unit, staff shortages are straining health care systems’ ability to treat patients.
Parth Bhakta, chief executive of NurseFly, told the Financial Times, “Major health systems in all 50 states are scrambling to figure out how to cope with the surge in cases to all-time highs. We’re seeing the situation significantly more dire than what it was in April.” Many nurses are quitting their positions to pursue these lucrative temporary traveling positions. More impoverished hospitals and those in rural areas face the brunt of this exodus as they are unable to afford the higher rates.
However, many health care workers are leaving their positions due to exhaustion and PTSD, traumatized by the repeated waves of COVID-19 patients and deaths. This is not dissimilar to the phenomenon suffered by soldiers deployed to war zones.
As deaths mount, morgues throughout the country are reaching capacity as they had in New York City and El Paso, Texas. For instance, Idaho Governor Brad Little stated that COVID-19 is now the leading cause of death in the state. Little reported, “In multiple counties, the morgues are full, and they are starting to ask for refrigerated trailers to hold the bodies.” Yet, with the Christmas holidays in less than two weeks, things are expected to turn for the worse.
In Springfield, Missouri, Mercy Hospital is putting to use a mobile morgue used in 2011 after a deadly tornado killed more than 160 people in the city of Joplin. The Star Tribune in Minneapolis noted that there had been a 40 percent increase in “the number of pages dedicated to paid obituaries in November.” Peoria County, Iowa, coroners have reported that morgue capacity is at a critical stage. The National Guard has set up a 250-bed field hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Stop the wave of death! Repudiate the policies of the pandemic profiteers!
A wave of mass death is spreading throughout the world. While the coronavirus pandemic is once again devastating Europe and Latin America, the epicenter is in the United States.
Yesterday, the total death toll surpassed 300,000, or nearly one out of every one thousand people. There were another 3,019 deaths and a record 246,000 new cases. Approximately 125 people are dying every hour, or more than two every minute. At least 17,000 people have died in the past week alone. These figures are expected to rise sharply in the coming weeks. The current case count is only beginning to reflect the surge due to Thanksgiving travel toward the end of November, and the death rate lags two weeks behind.
The situation is made vastly more dangerous by the overflowing of hospitals, and the health care system is beginning to break down, forcing doctors and nurses to make the horrific decisions about who will be treated and who will not. At least 200 hospitals in the US were at full capacity last week, and one-third of all hospitals in the country have more than 90 percent of their ICU beds occupied.
The media focus in the US and Europe has been on the initial approval and distribution of a vaccine. However effective a vaccine, people will only benefit from it if they are alive to receive it. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield warned on Thursday that “for the next 60 to 90 days we’re going to have more deaths per day than we had at 9/11 or we had at Pearl Harbor,” and that a vaccine will have no real impact on the death toll for at least 60 days—and likely far longer.
Without an intervention of the working class now, the dying will continue at unprecedented levels. If deaths remain above 3,000 for 90 days, this means that another 270,000 people will be dead by early March.
The ruling class is responding with a staggering level of indifference. As the WSWS warned earlier this week, death on a scale unlike anything seen except in a major war is being “normalized.” The pandemic is being treated, we wrote, “as if it were an unavoidable cosmic event, requiring no immediate action.”
The Trump administration, as it pursues its fascistic conspiracies, is continuing its policy of “herd immunity,” by which it means that no measures will be taken to stop the spread of the virus. Whatever their tactical differences, the Democrats agree with this policy. They are proposing no emergency measures to halt and reverse the catastrophe. This week, Biden unveiled his coronavirus response “plan,” which includes nothing more than urging the population to wear masks, promises of vaccine production and a demand that schools be reopened.
The media reports every day the scale of death without providing any indication of what must be done to stop it. Reference is made to the danger of travel and gatherings during the holiday season. Yet there is no reference to the role of factories and workplaces in spreading the virus, and deliberate lies are being spread about the supposed safety of opening schools.
The ruling class is attempting to blame workers for spreading the virus at home. However, the absence of systematic contact tracing is designed to cover up the spread at workplaces that remain open and unsafe. When cases do occur in factories or schools, information is suppressed by management, with the complicity of the trade unions.
When there is any challenge to the policy of the ruling class, the response is repression. This week, data scientist Rebekah Jones, who has worked to expose government lies about the spread of the pandemic in Florida was targeted with a gestapo police raid ordered by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
As it is doing nothing to save lives, the ruling class is also taking no action to address the massive social disaster facing tens of millions of people. Four in ten households in the US report a lower income now than before the pandemic. More than 4 million people have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks, and new unemployment claims surged to 850,000 this week. More than 12 million Americans were behind on their rent in November and face eviction as the national moratorium expires at the end of this month.
Congress has recessed until next week without any agreement on a “stimulus bill,” which, even if it is passed, will not meet the massive social need. The Democrats and Republicans are currently fighting largely over how much more money they will hand out to the corporations and the rich.
This catastrophe was not inevitable. While the virus is a product of nature, the response to it has been dictated by social and economic interests.
On March 17, when the US death toll was at only 121 and the virus was just beginning to spread, the Socialist Equality Party (US) outlined a “program of action for the working class,” including the emergency expansion of health care infrastructure and the immediate closure of all schools and nonessential workplaces, with full income for all workers affected.
If emergency measures had been implemented, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. The fact that in China, where the virus first emerged, total deaths have been under 5,000 and the virus has been virtually eradicated, demonstrated that this was possible.
The ruling class, however, rejected all measures that were incompatible with its interests. The Trump administration, aided and abetted by the Democratic Party, downplayed the threat and refused to take any action. At the same time, the pandemic was exploited to implement the largest transfer of wealth in world history. Trillions of dollars have been turned over to Wall Street, with the unanimous support of the Congress.
Once this was done, the line from the political establishment and the media became: “The cure can’t be worse than the disease.” Businesses were reopened and restraints on economic activity were lifted throughout the country in April and May.
Public health has been sacrificed at the altar of the pandemic profiteers. The wealth of all billionaires in the US (651 people) has increased by more than $1 trillion (or 36 percent) since the pandemic began, due largely to the surge in the stock markets. This increase in wealth alone would be enough to provide checks of $3,000 for every adult and child in the country.
The refusal to implement a shutdown now has assumed an out-and-out criminal character. Among the tens of thousands who will die in the coming weeks, many will have been infected as a result of the reopening of schools and workplaces.
Hundreds of thousands of lives can be saved if emergency action is taken now!
The Socialist Equality Party demands the immediate closure of all nonessential businesses and schools. Workers must be provided with an income sufficient to guarantee a decent standard of living until a return to work is possible. There must be real assistance to small businesses that face economic collapse.
All claims that nothing can be done to stop the virus are based on the position that all social life must be subordinated to the interests of Wall Street. The trillions of dollars hoarded by the pandemic profiteers, amassed through the looting of the public treasury, must be reclaimed to meet social need. The gigantic financial and corporate institutions must be converted into democratically controlled public utilities.
The SEP calls on all workers to organize safety committees and committees of action to take the necessary measures to save lives. Teachers, auto and other manufacturing workers, Amazon and logistics workers, student and young people should form these committees to organize common action. Workers have every right to refuse to work under these conditions. The health of workers must take precedence over the profits of the corporate and financial oligarchy!
These committees will forge ties between workers in the United States and workers throughout the world, who are facing the same conditions and have the same interests.
Above all, the fight against the pandemic is a political struggle against the ruling elite and the capitalist system. American capitalism is being comprehensively exposed. The ruling elite is revealed in all its incompetence, brutality, and criminality. The unfolding catastrophe is demonstrating the necessity of putting an end to the capitalist system with socialism.
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