Science summit warns of escalating pandemic disaster
On Wednesday and Thursday, the World Health Network (WHN) hosted its second online “Global Summit to End Pandemics,” which featured over 20 distinguished scientists who have advocated for the global elimination of COVID-19. The summit provided further substantiation of the case for global elimination presented at the October 24 webinar, “How to End the Pandemic,” which was hosted by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
The WHN summit featured 22 different sessions spanning roughly 25 hours and covering the most essential scientific aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Michael Baker of the University of Otago in New Zealand and Dr. Malgorzata Gasperowicz of the University of Calgary in Canada each gave similar presentations to those delivered at the WSWS webinar, outlining the measures necessary to stop the pandemic.
Dr. Baker, who successfully advised the New Zealand government on how to eliminate COVID-19 early in the pandemic, made clear that the government’s recent shift in policy had come over the objection of scientists, including himself. He stated, “At a certain point the [New Zealand] government decided that we needed to basically rejoin the rest of the world, and so switched to what we call a ‘tight suppression’ approach. Many scientists in New Zealand objected to this change, but the government felt for various reasons that it had no choice.”
Other scientists provided comprehensive reports on airborne transmission, the importance of using high quality face masks, inequities in global vaccine distribution, the effects of Long COVID, the development of new variants of SARS-CoV-2 and other topics. There were also reports on the experience of the pandemic in specific countries and regions of the world, including Norway, Sweden, Germany, Brazil, Canada, the United States, Taiwan, Qatar, Australia and other countries.
The summit was held at a critical point. Global daily new COVID-19 cases are once again surging, with nearly one million people officially infected over the two days of the summit.
Last week, the official death toll from COVID-19 surpassed five million, while estimates of excess deaths place the real figure at roughly 17 million. On Friday, a study was published in the BMJ which found that life expectancy has declined drastically in countries that have rejected the elimination strategy, with American men losing 2.27 years of life on average in 2020, while “more than 28 million excess years of life were lost in 2020 in 31 countries.” Despite the catastrophic situation globally, governments throughout the world are lifting mask mandates and all mitigation measures.
Dr. Anthony Leonardi, a T-cell immunologist at Johns Hopkins University in the US, spoke on the latest research into Long COVID, a condition where symptoms persist for weeks or months after initial infection. He cited multiple studies on Long COVID and stressed the uniquely harmful character of the virus, noting that Long COVID includes over 50 reported symptoms that “can span physiological systems,” with the most alarming research showing that COVID-19 can cause encephalitis, long-term neurological damage and the development of autoimmune disorders.
Dr. Leonardi has opposed unsafe school reopenings and authored a widely circulated letter outlining the neurological dangers posed to children by COVID-19. Asked about the potential long-term implications of unsafe schools reopenings, Dr. Leonardi responded, “There’s a publication that lists a lowered productive lifespan in kids, and it’s more of an attenuation in kids than adults. So it’s a bad idea, we’re setting kids up to have chronic illness.”
Asked to comment on the need to fight for a global elimination strategy, Dr. Leonardi cited a study conducted on rhesus monkeys which showed that every test subject infected with COVID-19 formed Lewy bodies in its brain. Lewy bodies are associated with Parkinson’s disease and dementia.
Drawing out the implications of this finding, Dr. Leonardi presented a horrific scenario, asking: “If that happens in humans, if we start getting neurodegeneration down the line, who is going to take care of all those people that are afflicted by it? Do we really want to risk almost everybody in the populace and have a very small amount of people able to take care of these other people?
“I think there’s a risk we might see institutionalized end-of-life, where people aren’t taken care of, they’re just given a drug and pass away.” He added, “I think we run a big risk of something like that, just a massive amount of people with neurodegeneration and problems. So, it would be very wise to have a strategy of elimination.”
Multiple sessions at the summit highlighted the science of the airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, with speakers emphasizing the need to educate the population on this science, require the universal use of high-quality masks, improve ventilation in all schools and workplaces, and implement other measures.
At one session on aerosols, Dr. Chia Wang of the National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan commented, “It is really time for us to upgrade the current paradigm of disease control by including aerosol precautions, and we must pay more attention to the air we breathe.”
At another session, Julia Raifman, ScD, SM of the Boston University School of Public Health, spoke on the impact of the May 13, 2021 change in masking guidelines from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She referred to the CDC decision as “an historic policy error that will likely have ramifications potentially for decades.”
She noted that in 2020 there were 43 states with masking policies but that only Hawaii kept theirs in place after May 2021, while only seven states and the District of Columbia have since reinstated masking policies during the ongoing Delta surge.
In the same session, scientist Nicolas Smit noted that the CDC’s change in masking recommendations “came six days after the CDC finally admitted that airborne transmission was happening.”
In a session titled “Big Pharma and ‘Vaccine Apartheid,’” Dr. Anthony Staines of Dublin City University in Ireland denounced the for-profit pharmaceutical monopolies for creating global vaccine inequities. He commented, “We’ve ended up with a monstrously inefficient, very expensive and very unfair way of distributing resources around the world, and a way which puts us at unquantifiable risk. No one knows whether there will be another new variant, and no one knows if that new variant could be worse than the ones we have at the moment.”
The reports at the summit collectively provide a clear understanding of COVID-19, the dire character of the present situation, and what measures must be taken to eliminate the virus worldwide. The event should have been widely attended and viewed by millions. However, it has been blacked out and ignored by the mainstream media, with no reports in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or any other corporate news outlet, underscoring once again their role in allowing the pandemic to continue.
Outside of this WSWS article, there has been no reporting whatsoever on the event.
Listening to the summit, one could not help but be struck by the disturbing chasm between the enormous significance of the content presented and the total absence of publicity in the media, which caused a low attendance at each session. At its highest point, only 80 people attended the opening session, and each breakout session only had roughly 10–30 attendees.
From a purely scientific standpoint, the participants are to be congratulated, and their work deserves widespread appreciation. Clearly, they were motivated by a desire for action to be taken and dedicated a great deal of time to preparing their reports.
However, there was a clear contrast between the science and the political perspective advanced at the summit. Deprived of a mass audience by the media, which feeds the public pablum and lies on the pandemic, the scientists themselves framed much of their conclusions as appeals to the powers that be to listen and change government policy.
The argument was advanced that one can convince governments to eliminate COVID-19 because it would save them money. From a humanitarian standpoint, this should be irrelevant, and there is something profoundly wrong with a society where the saving of human lives has to be shown to be cost-effective.
But this argument is itself meaningless to the ruthless financial elites that have amassed trillions of dollars during the pandemic through the funneling of state funds into the stock market. In the US alone, the billionaires increased their wealth by $1.8 trillion, or 62 percent, in just the first 18 months of the pandemic. While the international working class has suffered unfathomable losses, the stock markets continue to reach record highs globally.
The scientists are not political strategists. Not knowing how to reach broad masses of people and cut off by the media, they remain something of a shut-in community. In this context, the WSWS’s October 24 webinar acquires all the more significance. That event, which has been viewed by over 10,000 people from over 100 countries, established a living link between science and the working class. It presented three-and-a-half hours’ worth of scientific reports, as well as a clear political perspective, stressing that the working class is the only social force capable of ending the pandemic.
One of the central lessons of the October 24 webinar was that the fight to end the pandemic requires close collaboration between the international working class and the scientific community. Many workers who attended the webinar have told the WSWS how profoundly educated they were by the scientists, saying they now have a clear sense of what measures must be taken to save lives.
Taken as a whole, the reports at the World Health Network summit provide overwhelming proof that the only correct pandemic policy is one aimed at the global elimination of SARS-CoV-2. For this to be implemented requires the development of a mass movement of the international working class armed with a scientific understanding of the pandemic. As Karl Marx said so well, “Theory becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.”
New study in the BMJ provides damning testimony of the impact the pandemic has had on life expectancy
The actual toll of the COVID pandemic has been assessed in several recent studies and analyses, which have highlighted in detail both the deadliness of the virus and its extensive reach across the globe. Despite these repeated confirmations, high-income nations and the financial oligarchs continue to insist that the cure in the form of elimination of the disease globally remains far worse than the disease, which allows the virus a free rein to upend livelihoods and kill millions so that financial institutions are unfettered by the demands placed on their craving for ever more enrichment.
On November 3, 2021, BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) published a probing investigation on “the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on life expectancy and premature mortality in 2020” across 37 high-income and upper-middle-income nations. The study is a continuation of previous work done by the same group on estimating excess deaths during the pandemic in 2020. The findings corroborate previous reports and stand as testimony to the malign policies of the ruling elites which can only be construed as deliberate and intentional social murder.
By including in their analysis countries that employed more comprehensive pandemic-fighting measures, the BMJ study provides a stark contrast to the policies followed by the US and Europe. It provides irrefutable evidence against the ignorant mantra of Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, and other apologists for mass death, who put forward the slogan, “The cure can’t be worse than the disease.” From the standpoint of science and public health, the cure has always been better than the devastation wrought by allowing the virus to rip through communities across the globe.
Rather than using excess deaths, the BMJ study employed data on all-cause mortality, which stands as a more reliable measure of the pandemic’s impact, allowing comparisons between countries. The authors explained, “Although using excess deaths has been considered the ideal method for measuring the impact of the pandemic, this metric does not take into account age at death. When people die at an older age, they lose fewer years of remaining life. Analysis of life expectancy and years of life lost (YLL) provides a more nuanced estimation of premature mortality at a population level.”
Life expectancy is a measure of how long a population can expect to survive if the factors that contribute to deaths for various ages remain constant for the remainder of their lives. Years of life lost utilizes age distributions for these deaths, giving greater weight to deaths at younger ages. It is calculated using the number of deaths observed rather than “hypothetical life tables.” The study notes, “Life expectancy depends solely on mortality, and YLL depends on both the mortality and the age structure of the population.”
The study found that in the 15 years before 2020, all 37 countries studied showed a rising trend in life expectancy at birth for both men and women. However, for 2020, the first year of the pandemic, this trend dropped precipitously. The reduction in life expectancy was most significant in Russia, with 2.32 years, followed by the United States with almost two years. Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Poland were next in descending order.
However, the authors found that life expectancy was not impacted for South Korea, Norway, and Denmark, where strict mitigation measures remained the norm. In Taiwan and New Zealand, life expectancy actually climbed, highlighting the beneficial impact that measures eliminating the virus from their borders had on maintaining access to healthcare and population-based interventions that protected citizens from the hazards posed by day-to-day life.
Regarding Years of Life Lost (YLL) in 2020, only Taiwan and New Zealand had a decline (an improvement) in this category. Iceland, South Korea, Denmark, and Norway had no demonstrable change in the expected years of life lost, corroborating the life expectancy data.
However, in the remaining 31 countries, the 222 million years of life were lost in 2020 (130 million in men and 92.6 million in women), were 28.1 million higher than expected, showing the impact of the pandemic. Men accounted for 17.3 million of these excess years of life lost, while women lost 10.8 million.
When age categories were evaluated in the 31 worst-hit countries, excess YLL increased with age in both genders, showing the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on older populations. However, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan saw excess YLL for the elderly decline, meaning the intensive mitigation measures employed against the virus benefited the elderly the most.
The findings on life expectancy were especially remarkable for younger populations in the US, especially in men. When the US was compared to Lithuania, Poland, and Spain, “between the observed and expected age-specific death rates by age intervals,” those under the age of 65 in the US and Lithuania were “responsible for a high proportion of the total losses in life expectancy.” By comparison, in Poland and Spain, older age groups drove the loss of life expectancy.
This is damning testimony demonstrating that the working class in the US, in particular male workers, have been impacted disproportionately. However, the impact of COVID on younger people has been much more severe in 2021, meaning the figures cited in the study will be far more horrific in the pandemic’s second year. In 2020, more than 70,000 people between 25 and 65 died due to COVID. In 2021, over 111,500 in this age bracket have been killed, despite access to COVID vaccines.
The authors found “[that] with a similar burden of excess deaths per 100 000 in Spain and the US (161 and 160, respectively), excess YLL (per 100 000) was substantially higher in the US (3400) than in Spain (1900), indicating higher numbers of deaths at younger ages in the US compared with Spain. Indeed, the ratio of YLL rate in people aged under 65 and 65 years or older at death was 0.29 in the US, whereas it was only 0.07 in Spain. Despite a lower excess death rate than Lithuania, Poland, and Spain, the reduction in life expectancy in the US was higher than in these three countries.”
The death toll in the second year of the pandemic has outpaced the first year of the pandemic. Approximately 2.35 million died in the first 12 months since the World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on January 30, 2020. With three months left to the second anniversary of this declaration, another 2.64 million have already died as the world enters the sixth wave of the pandemic.
Indeed, with the introduction of the COVID vaccines, there has been a push by governments of high-income countries to completely force open every economic avenue that remains closed regardless of its devastating impact on the working people of the planet upon whose back the financial oligarchs have enriched themselves.
This critical study published in theBMJ by these courageous researchers should be applauded and studied. It carefully demonstrates that the virus can be eliminated and lives can be protected. The policies that have promoted “let the bodies pile high”, “let it rip”, and “learn to live with the virus”, are fraudulent and criminal. In fact, their findings provide irrefutable evidence to indict these ruling criminals responsible for the massive loss of life and livelihood.
However, these same principled scientists who have been decrying the dangers posed by the ruling elite’s criminal policies must engage with the working class, the only progressive force for whom the issue of eliminating the pandemic is most urgent. It is the turn to the working class that will generate the necessary response to their analysis.
Colorado considers emergency “crisis standards of care” in hospitals as COVID-19 spreads rapidly
Colorado may introduce emergency measures to handle a surge in COVID-19 cases this week if case numbers do not improve. Democratic Governor Jared Polis said in a statement last Thursday that hospitals could move to “crisis standards of care” to handle the large number of hospitalizations across the state.
Polis followed this up on Sunday by signing two executive orders: one that authorizes the state health department to direct hospitals to stop admissions and transfer patients to other facilities; and another that provides guidelines for implementing crisis standards of care if it is deemed necessary.
The medical crisis in Colorado is severe. Hospital beds are at 90 percent capacity with nearly 1,300 people currently in the hospital. A third of facilities are anticipating a shortage of ICU beds by the end of the week and nearly 40 percent are expecting staff shortages.
If implemented, the crisis measures would involve redirecting less experienced nurses to help in intensive care units, activating the National Guard to take over clerical and nonmedical tasks, and even mobilizing volunteers and family members to assist patients with hygiene in a last-gasp effort to free up medical personnel for more intensive tasks.
The state could also impose the rationing of medical care. This system would involve a triage based on a points system designed to allocate the sickest patients to the last of the available medical supplies. Patients who do not qualify for the intensive care unit, even if they medically require one, will be relegated to standard medical beds where they may not receive the care that they need to survive.
“This is probably the biggest challenge our hospitals have faced in the modern era,” Cara Welch, the Senior Director of Communications for the Colorado Hospital Association, told CBS News.
Despite the clear threat of an even greater surge of cases as winter sets in, the state government has refused to impose any stricter mitigation measures. Health officials have remained adamant that they will not bring back a statewide mask mandate, nor will they consider restrictions on capacity for indoor activities.
This is the policy of herd immunity and social murder at work. Case numbers in Colorado have been steadily rising for four months. In mid-July the state was recording under 400 cases a day, now daily case numbers are at nearly 3,000. Deaths from COVID-19 have increased as well from a daily average of five in July to over 20 today.
Cases are at their highest point since mid-November last year, just before the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday surges. Colorado is now two weeks ahead of case numbers from a year ago, even with two-thirds of adults vaccinated. This is a worrying sign that a deadly winter surge may perhaps be even worse than a year ago.
The majority of patients, 77 percent, are unvaccinated. However, a concerning 23 percent of those infected have been vaccinated, demonstrating what leading epidemiologists have warned, that vaccination alone cannot stop the virus.
Behind the surge is a clear sign that school children have been a major source of infection and transmission. Those under the age of 20 make up close to a quarter of all cases in the state, and since May of this year children aged 0-11 have been the single largest group of those exhibiting COVID-related symptoms during emergency department visits. In total, children aged 0-14 constitute 15 percent of all COVID-related emergency department visits across the state.
The role of schools in fueling the surge in cases is becoming increasingly undeniable. According to data from the State of Colorado, education and childcare is the single largest source of outbreaks, accounting for 1,800 (28 percent) of all outbreaks statewide. Education and childcare has been the largest source of outbreaks since February of this year, outpacing inpatient health care outbreaks, now the second largest source of outbreaks.
Of the 572 active outbreaks in the state, 234 were in K-12 schools, 41 percent. The number of outbreaks in schools last week was also twice as many as the week before, indicating a concerning trend of how quickly COVID-19 spreads through schools.
Yet schools in the state are abandoning the most basic health and safety measures.
Cameo DeDominces, principal of Ryan Elementary in Lafayette, Colorado, told 9 News that her school was relaxing mitigation measures to allow more students into the classroom. “I’d rather start with being more loose because kids need to be in school,” she said.
Stephanie Faren, Boulder Valley School District Director of Health Services, told 9 News that schools did not have to quarantine every student in a class when an infection occurs. Instead, schools have been isolating as few students as possible in a desperate bid to keep schools open.
“Having more students in classrooms, you know, we just have to think creatively, and our teachers and our district has been doing that,” Faren said.
Such a policy has clearly been a disaster. Since the beginning of the school year in Colorado, there have been more than 4,000 cases officially reported within schools. This figure is most likely an understatement considering that Colorado schools are not required to report cases unless five or more infections can be linked to the same source.
More than a third of all school cases since the beginning of the pandemic last year have been recorded in just the past two and a half months, likely in large part to the spread of the Delta variant, which is now 100 percent of all COVID-19 cases, according to the state data.
With the rate of infection in schools higher than at any point during the pandemic, it is almost certain that outbreaks will continue to grow as the winter sets in over the next two months.
Significantly, the Democratic Party in Colorado is employing the same deadly policies as the far-right Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. The virus is being allowed to run free by both parties in order to protect the economic interests of the ruling class. The working class must take the fight against the pandemic out of the hands of the capitalist political parties and take up an independent political fight to eliminate the virus in opposition to the murderous policies of herd immunity.
Regardless of whether Governor Polis implements crisis measures this week or not, infections and deaths will continue unless serious action is taken to stop the pandemic and eliminate COVID-19. Nonessential workplaces and schools must be shut down nationwide and basic public safety measures must be re-implemented.
World Health Organisation warns “pandemic is far from over” as COVID-19 surges through Europe
Europe is driving a new global upsurge of COVID-19. Total worldwide cases have now increased for the last two weeks to an average of over 430,000 recorded infections per day. With cases falling or stable in every other region, the growth is entirely down to a massive spread of the virus on the European continent.
Cases rocketed from mid-June to late July, driven overwhelmingly by the United Kingdom. After falling slightly in the period to mid-September, they have shot up again as part of a more generalised spread of the disease, concentrated particularly in Eastern Europe as well as the UK.
In the week to last Sunday, the seven-day European average of daily new cases increased by nearly 11 percent. Over 220,000 people are now being infected every day. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, Europe is registering more than twice the number of daily cases per million (299) than the next-highest region, North America (139). Over 3,000 people in Europe are being killed by COVID-19 each day—34 percent higher than the same time last year.
World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus commented last week, “The global number of reported cases and deaths from COVID-19 is now increasing for the first time in two months, driven by an ongoing rise in Europe that outweighs declines in other regions. It’s another reminder that the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over.”
Expressing the homicidal policies of the entire ruling class, however, WHO Regional Director for Europe Dr. Hans Kluge urged the continent’s governments to keep schools open this winter, accompanied by a range of (inadequate) mitigation measures. He claimed, “Last year’s widespread school closures, disrupting the education of millions of children and adolescents, did more harm than good, especially to children’s mental and social well-being. We can’t repeat the same mistakes.”
The cost of keeping open schools and the economy in the middle of a raging pandemic—a policy driven by the profit motives of the ultra-wealthy—is already playing out across the continent, even before the winter months begin to bite.
The growth of infections in many Central and Eastern European and Balkan countries is astronomical. Official daily case rates are the highest they have ever been in Estonia (1,286 per million), Latvia (1,268), Slovenia (1,095), Slovakia (715), Bulgaria (685), Ukraine (526), Greece (355) and Russia (259), and are rapidly on their way to their highest ever values in Lithuania (1,090) and Croatia (876).
There have also been sharp increases in average daily cases in Hungary (up 82 percent in a week), Czech Republic (up 63 percent), Poland (57) and Austria (42 percent). Across the region, real rates of infection are likely to be far higher as inadequate testing infrastructure is overwhelmed by the spread of the disease. Last week, testing in the Croatian capital returned a positivity rate of 50 percent.
In many countries, the situation is exacerbated by low rates of vaccination. Less than half (43 percent) of Serbia’s population is fully vaccinated, 33 percent of Romania’s and Russia’s, 22 percent of Bulgaria’s and 17 percent of Ukraine’s. General distrust of the government and the healthcare system, the impact of government propaganda declaring the pandemic over or of little concern, and the agitation of far-right and religious forces have all contributed to this phenomenon.
Without even the protection of vaccines, the wave of infections is translating into unprecedented death tolls. Even official average daily COVID-19 death rates are at their highest levels since the start of the pandemic in Russia (1,104 deaths a day), Romania (439), Ukraine (581) and Serbia (64), with Bulgaria (132) on the way. Romania’s average daily death toll is more than 2-and-a-half times its previous peak, Ukraine’s is 44 percent higher, and Russia’s is 28 percent higher.
The burden of severe disease is straining woefully underfunded health infrastructure to breaking point. Intensive care units in Romanian hospitals are beyond capacity. Medical teams have been sent by Poland and Denmark to provide support and other European countries have donated oxygen concentrators and bottles of monoclonal antibodies. One of Bulgaria’s main suppliers of medical oxygen warned last week, “If the number of patients in hospitals continues to increase, there will be no oxygen next week.”
Even the more heavily vaccinated countries are suffering serious numbers of fatalities. Latvia, with 54 percent of its population fully vaccinated, is recording its highest average daily death toll of the pandemic. Similarly vaccinated Baltic states Estonia and Lithuania are not far behind.
The catastrophe unfolding in Latvia has forced its government to declare a one-month lockdown, switching some schools to online learning and some industries to remote working, banning indoor and outdoor gatherings, and closing the majority of shops and all restaurants, salons, cinemas, theatres, concert and sports venues.
This falls well short of what is required to stem the tide of infections and deaths. Other governments, however, have refused to go even this far, introducing only a patchwork of partial measures from vaccine and mask mandates, to COVID passes, curfews and limited restrictions on large gatherings.
In Western and Northern Europe, cases have risen dramatically in Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Germany. In the last week, the seven-day average of daily new cases in Norway climbed 62 percent in the week to Sunday, in Belgium 49 percent, in Denmark 48 percent, in the Netherlands 42 percent, and in Germany 40 percent.
Belgium is on track to outstrip the UK in per capita figures, after a slight decline in Britain’s recorded infections over the last week. Its government has responded by introducing the most minimal measures, requiring face masks in public places and for bar, restaurant and fitness staff and mandating COVID passes for entry. The same is planned for the Netherlands.
The Danish government will review its measures on Friday but has already downgraded the threat status of COVID-19, limiting its options. Opposition parties the Red Green Alliance, Danish People’s Party and Conservative Party have all expressed their opposition to the return of restrictions.
The German parliament is planning to end the “epidemic situation of national scope” in November, leaving in place only mask wearing in public spaces and vaccine restrictions on entry to certain venues as protective measures. Dirk Wiese, deputy-head of the Social Democrats parliamentary group spelt out, “There will no more be school closures, lockdowns or curfews again.”
There have also been significant upticks in cases in France and Italy. COVID hospital admissions in Italy have increased 7.5 percent and admissions to intensive care units in France have climbed 12 percent.
In the UK, despite a small decline, daily infections remain extremely high and over 150 people on average are being killed by the virus every day. The virtually unchecked spread of the virus for the last few months appears to have given rise to a major growth of the AY.4.2 sublineage of the Delta variant, thought to be 10-15 percent more transmissible, which the WHO reported on October 26 has now reached 42 countries.
The initial resurgence of the pandemic in Europe, as the Northern hemisphere heads into winter, is an urgent warning of the dangers of “living with” COVID-19. Yet more waves of suffering and death will engulf the populations of the world if action is not taken by the working class to stop the murderous policy of herd immunity in its tracks, and implement policies for the elimination of the virus.
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