CDC surrenders US population to the spread of Omicron
As the Omicron variant of coronavirus surges exponentially and out of control, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced Monday afternoon a radical change in its isolation and quarantine guidelines, not to defend the American people from this impending disaster but to preemptively capitulate to it.
The CDC is cutting its recommendation of a 10-day isolation period for positive cases—itself an arbitrary reduction from the 14 days recommended by epidemiologists—to five days of isolation, followed by five days of mask-wearing, for those without symptoms.
For those in contact with a positive case but not infected themselves, there was a similar cut in the recommended isolation period from 10 days to five days for those who are fully vaccinated, and to zero for those who have received booster shots.
Since asymptomatic people can be infectious for 10 days or even longer, this means that hundreds of thousands—and soon millions, given the exponential spread of Omicron—will be sent into workplaces to infect their co-workers.
Even those fully boosted have only 75 percent protection against Omicron. That means that if 60 million people who have received booster shots come into contact with a COVID-19 case and are sent back to work without even a day off, 15 million of them would be carrying the infection with them to spread.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky openly admitted that an enormous surge in Omicron cases was taking place and that it was necessary loosen quarantine and isolation rules, which would otherwise take too many people out of the economy for too long.
“Not all of those cases are going to be severe. In fact many are going to be asymptomatic,” she told the Associated Press. “We want to make sure there is a mechanism by which we can safely continue to keep society functioning while following the science.”
The reference to “following the science” is mere pretense. As for “society functioning,” this means only one thing under capitalism: maintaining the flow of profits to the capitalist class. Public health is being subordinated to corporate profit. Science is being junked to appease the howls of American business interests over the exodus of workers under the combined impact of the spread of Omicron and the perfectly justified fears of infection from the new variant.
The AP report, which cited Walensky’s remarks, made no effort to disguise the economic motivation, declaring, “The decision also was driven by a recent surge in COVID-19 cases, propelled by the omicron variant … the sheer number of people becoming infected—and therefore having to isolate or quarantine—threatens to crush the ability of hospitals, airlines and other businesses to stay open, experts say.”
The CDC action was announced amid reports of a nationwide increase in the contagion and a particularly ominous rise in infections and hospitalizations among children, who appear to be more affected by Omicron than by previous variants of COVID-19. In New York City, child COVID-19 hospitalizations have quadrupled over the past three weeks, rising from 22 to 109. Nationwide, child infections rose to 170,000 last week, a rise of 28 percent, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
CDC figures showed that an average of 200 children a day were being admitted to the hospital for COVID-19, while a Washington Post analysis showed a total of 1,987 pediatric COVID-19 patients hospitalized nationally, a 31 percent jump in 10 days.
The average daily number of new cases is approaching 200,000, surpassing the worst of the summer outbreak driven by the Delta variant and approaching last winter’s horrific levels when, in January 2021, 3,000 people a day were dying of COVID-19 in the United States. The daily death toll last week averaged 1,408, a rise of 17 percent over the previous week, and this still largely reflects the impact of Delta, not yet the surge in Omicron. Hospitalizations, also a lagging indicator, rose to an average of 71,000.
In New York state alone, the daily case rate has reached 50,000, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul said on Monday. Hochul appeared at a press conference with her health director Mary T. Bassett, who was masked and distanced because she herself is the victim of a breakthrough case of Omicron, despite being double-vaccinated and boosted.
Bassett warned, “Many people continue to think that children do not become infected with COVID. This is not true. Children become infected with COVID, and some will become hospitalized.”
Local and state health officials report dramatic increases in cases and hospitalizations from coast to coast. In Los Angeles County, the most populous in the country, new coronavirus cases rose from 3,052 on Tuesday, December 21; to 6,509 on Wednesday; to 8,633 on Thursday; to 9,988 on Friday; and to 11,930 on Saturday, Christmas Day.
The state of Ohio has the highest rate of COVID-19 hospitalizations, and ICUs are running out of beds, even at the Cleveland Clinic, long a national leader in medical services. Major hospitals published a joint appeal last week for unvaccinated people to get vaccinated, warning they were being inundated with new, serious infection cases, mostly among the unvaccinated.
These reports conform to the dire projection last week from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, which forecast that at its present exponential rate of transmission, the Omicron variant would infect 3 billion people worldwide in the next three months, and 140 million in the United States.
In the face of this looming emergency, the US government is effectively declaring an open door to a disease that will potentially take millions of lives and have incalculable consequences on the long-term health of millions more.
Last week, the CDC lowered the isolation requirement for health care workers from 10 days to seven days for infected workers who have no symptoms and then test negative and suggested this could be cut to five days, or even less, for health facilities with severe staffing shortages—a description that applies to virtually every hospital, clinic and nursing home.
This step was ostensibly justified by health concerns, to prevent the collapse of the health care system under the impact of the pandemic. But now even looser rules are being proposed for all business operations. There is no health consideration involved in herding factory and office workers back to their jobs while still infected or contagious. Just the opposite: Public health is being sacrificed for profit interests.
Under capitalism, a “functioning society” doesn’t mean a society where all people are fed, clothed and housed, their children properly educated and other social needs met. Even American capitalism, the wealthiest in the world, can hardly claim to meet that standard. A “functioning society” means just one thing: A society in which the working class is exploited in the labor process to produce surplus value and profit for the class of capitalists.
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Life expectancy in the US dropped by an astounding 1.8 years during the first year of the pandemic
During his live televised speech regarding Omicron’s dominance in the United States on Tuesday, President Joe Biden claimed that the country was in a far better position now than in March of 2020. This blatantly false assertion was exposed the next day when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that Americans’ life expectancy fell 1.8 years (from 78.8 to 77.0) in the course of 2020, 0.3 years more than their interim estimate of July 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic has been the cause of the most significant drop in life expectancy in the US since World War II, 75 years ago.
Last year more than 3.3 million people died in the United States, the highest such number at any point in the country’s history. By comparison, in 2019 and 2018, 2.85 and 2.84 million died, respectively. COVID-19 deaths were attributable for three-quarters of the overall life expectancy decline in 2020 and 11 percent of annual deaths.
By comparison, China’s life expectancy has climbed from 76.91 years in 2019 to 76.96 in 2020 and 77.13 in 2021. Their pursuit and strict adherence to a dynamic Zero COVID policy limited the death toll to 5,000 during the initial outbreak. Only three people have reportedly died of COVID-19 since April 2020, and as a consequence, it is likely that this year China, still a relatively poor country, will surpass the United States in life expectancy for its citizens.
As a trigger event in world history, the pandemic magnifies every social contradiction of capitalism in its advanced state of decay. For instance, during the pandemic, the two-decades-long opioid crisis saw deaths jump 30 percent from 2019 to 2021 with deaths attributed to accidental overdoses exceeding 100,000.
Still, as staggering as these statistics for 2020 are, 2021 has proven even more deadly. The US COVID-19 death toll by the last week of December 2020, according to the Economist, stood at 340,878 and excess deaths at 528,185. One year later, the magazine’s dashboard placed the COVID-19 reported deaths at 810,000 and excess deaths between 1.0–1.1 million. This suggests there will be an even more significant drop in life expectancy in the first year of Biden’s presidency than during the last year of Trump’s.
According to a report published yesterday by USA Today, “Nationwide, nearly one million more Americans have died in 2020 and 2021 than in normal, pre-pandemic years, but about 800,000 deaths have been officially attributed to COVID-19, according to the CDC data. A majority of those additional 195,000 deaths are unidentified COVID-19 cases. Public health experts have long suggested [this], pointing to the unusual increase in deaths from natural causes.”
Coronavirus has become the third leading cause of death in the US, behind heart disease and cancer. More than 203,000 people between 18 and 65 have died during the pandemic, and it was the leading cause of death for people aged 45 to 54. One in 400 people of all ages have died from COVID-19, and among those 65 and older, one in 100.
Each week since August 12, 2021, more than 100,000 children have been infected with COVID-19. They have consistently accounted for nearly one-quarter of all infections. Since the onset of the pandemic, almost 7.4 million children have tested positive for COVID-19. According to the CDC, at least 1,017 children under 18 have died from COVID-19, a level nearly twice the average flu mortality and in the top 10 leading causes of death for this age category. Severe multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) continues to climb. Almost 6,000 have developed this menacing illness, and 52 have died in the US.
Hospitalization rates among children, who are, for the most part, the largest constituent of the unvaccinated, have climbed higher than at any other time in the pandemic. Though children fare much better than adults, they remain at risk for chronic complications posed by Long COVID that can affect a small subset of children. These, by the sheer scale of infections due to Omicron, will pose significant challenges with uncertain long-term consequences.
Biden, and the press corps surrounding him, did not once touch on the impact the pandemic has had on children who have been orphaned and won’t be sharing holiday celebrations with their loved ones and caregivers. A daunting 120,000-plus children have lost a parent or grandparent who was a primary provider or financial support, and another 22,000 have lost a secondary caregiver.
“Are these children better off, Mr. President? Wouldn’t we have all been better off if in March 2020 we had eliminated COVID once and for all and prevented such a colossal loss of life?” These would have been appropriate follow-up questions. But no one asked them.
Indeed, in just three weeks, when the incidence of Omicron was far less than one percent of all sequenced strains, it now accounts for more than 73 percent of all COVID-19 cases in the country. By all accounts, the US trails the UK by around two weeks, which means events there have significant relevance to what the population can soon expect in the US.
In London, the epicenter of the Omicron wave in the UK, hospitalizations have tripled since a month ago. This means that state after state in the US can expect a potentially sudden and alarming rise in emergency room visits. Two years into the pandemic, with repeated assaults on their capacity to care for patients, health systems have been left destitute.
In a recent email by the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio to their medical and ancillary staff, where the state’s health care is facing calamity brought on by the surge of infections, they offer this sobering assessment:
This past month has been sobering for many of us in healthcare. Nearly two years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, we’re seeing some of the highest volumes of patients with the disease in hospitals throughout the Midwest. Here at Cleveland Clinic, we’re caring for more than 800 patients with COVID-19 at our Ohio hospitals. Of these, more than 200 are in the intensive care unit. The majority of these patients are unvaccinated. Our Ohio emergency departments are filled. We have people waiting to get into our hospitals. Neighboring hospitals in our communities are facing the same issues. We’ve had to postpone many non-urgent surgeries in Ohio as we try to leave enough space for patients with COVID-19. Our physicians, nurses, and caregivers are working around-the-clock to care for these sick patients. They are exhausted.
Despite the grim news on the decline in life expectancy, stocks traded higher on the President’s announcement that there would be little done in the way of impeding the surge of infections. Having recouped all their losses from Monday when Omicron’s dominance was announced, yesterday the Dow closed 261 points up at 35,753.
As comparisons between China and the US show, the drop in life expectancy is a purely political phenomenon attributable to the policies the ruling elites have employed that continue to place profits over lives, as evidenced by the financial aristocracy’s trillions amassed.
Thousands of flights canceled worldwide due to rising infections among airline workers
Nearly 3,000 flights were canceled around the world Monday, including nearly 1,000 to, from or within the United States, according to the aviation tracking website FlightAware. The cancellations, as well as nearly 11,000 delays that same day, were largely due to shortages of flight crews and ground support workers caused by the spread of COVID-19 infections.
Globally, airlines canceled more than 6,000 flights on Christmas Eve, Christmas and the day after Christmas. This included at least 2,800 US flights over the weekend as pilots, flight attendants and other airline workers called off sick.
Told by the Biden administration that air travel was safe—despite the explosive spread of the Omicron variant—millions of air travelers piled into packed airports over the holiday weekend. This included a peak of 2.19 million passengers who passed through US airport security checkpoints on December 23 alone.
A flight attendant from Southwest Airlines told the World Socialist Web Site that she had been forced to work during the holidays after being infected with COVID-19. “I worked on December 21 and the 22, which I believe is when I was exposed because there were several passengers not wearing their masks correctly. All we are supposed to do now is make one announcement [about wearing masks] and that is it,” she said.
“I was feeling symptoms on the night of the 24th. I went to work on the 25th but as the day went on, I got sicker and sicker,” she continued. The flight attendant, who asked that she be identified by a pseudonym “Jodi” to protect her from management retaliation, said that if she hadn’t been traveling with co-workers who assisted her, “I don’t think I would have made it.”
“I did everything I was supposed to do, I got vaccinated, I had the booster, I was vaccinated three times,” she said. Due to her COVID-19 infection, Jodi has been pulled from the rest of her week’s schedule, meaning that she has effectively lost holiday triple pay for the year.
“I called the [Transport Workers Union] today, they didn’t answer, and I was on hold forever. I will find out tomorrow if I will get my premium pay. For me, that is $6,000 lost.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Monday announced it was shortening the recommended time infected people should isolate from 10 days to five days if they are asymptomatic. The quarantine period for someone exposed to an infected person was also reduced to five days if they are vaccinated, the CDC said, and people who are fully vaccinated and boosted may not need to quarantine at all.
The CDC made its decision after direct requests from the airlines. As CNBC reported, “Delta CEO Ed Bastian wrote to CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky [on December 21], urging the agency to cut that time in half to just five days, saying the longer quarantine time could hurt the airline’s operations. JetBlue Airways CEO Robin Hayes followed with a similar request to the CDC on Wednesday.”
Airlines for America, a trade group for US air carriers, wrote to Walensky on December 23, requesting that the agency “update” its current 10-day isolation guideline, Barron’s reported. “As with healthcare, police, fire and public transportation workforces, the Omicron surge may exacerbate personnel shortages and create significant disruptions to our workforce and operations,” wrote Airlines for America CEO Nicholas Calio.
On NBC Nightly News Monday, reporter Kristen Welker asked Biden’s top COVID-19 advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, “What do you say to people who might be concerned that the revised quarantined guidelines are being driven solely by workers shortages and not necessarily in the best interests of public health?” Fauci responded, “No, actually we feel it is safe to do that. If you look at the chance of getting a transmission in that second half of that 10-day period it is considerably less than in those first few days. So, on balance, if you look at the safety of the public and the need to have society not disrupted this was a good choice.”
Walensky echoed the administration’s talking points, saying, “We want to make sure there is a mechanism by which we can safely continue to keep society functioning while following the science.”
The CDC guideline changes, which follow similar measures for staff in chronically short-staffed hospitals, have nothing to do with public health considerations. On the contrary, they will only increase the danger of mass infections, long-term physical and mental debilitation and death. Saving lives, as opposed to “keeping society functioning”—a euphemism for keeping the economy open producing profits for Wall Street—would require the temporary suspension of non-essential travel, business activity and in-person schooling to cut off the transmission of the virus as a part of a strategy to finally eliminate it and eradicate it.
What the White House is concerned with is keeping profit-making going, regardless of the cost in lives. The CDC action is aimed at shoring up the positions of American, United and other US airlines whose stocks continued to fall Monday in tandem with the number of flights they were forced to cancel.
The labor shortage in the airlines as in other industries has been largely driven by mass retirements encouraged by big business to cut costs and boost profits. Millions of nurses, teachers, transit workers and airline workers and others decided to quit rather than risk their lives and the lives of their loved ones by working in unsafe workplaces.
Since the pandemic began, the US Congress has handed over $54 billion to the US airlines, more than any other single industry. This included a $25 billion bailout through the March 2020 CARES Act, $15 billion in the December 2020 relief bill and another $14 billion in the 2021 American Rescue Plan. Another $5 billion was paid to contractors who do food service, janitorial work, maintenance and other work for the airlines.
While much of the money was paid through the Payroll Support Program (PSP), which was ostensibly designed to prevent layoffs, the airlines nevertheless forced tens of thousands of workers to take “voluntary” buyouts and early retirements. Over 80,000 airline workers were furloughed or lost their jobs, and as of November, airlines have 24,000 fewer workers than they did in 2019.
Far from opposing the attack on workers, the airline unions have blocked any unified struggle to shut the industry down and protect lives. After the CDC decision, Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants and a leading member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), said it “was less than reassuring” that the CDC’s guideline change “aligns with the number of days pushed by corporate America…”
However, she praised the CDC for adding caveats that “recognize concerns raised by our union,” pointing to the reduction of quarantining to five days “only if asymptomatic and with continued mask wearing for an additional five days.” Knowing this would not impress any airline workers, Nelson went on, “If any business pressures a worker to return to work before they feel better, we will make clear it is an unsafe work environment, which will cause a much greater disruption than any ‘staffing shortages.’”
This is empty bluster. The AFA, the TWU and other airline unions have colluded in the attack on jobs, the piling up of more tasks on workers and the continued life-threatening working conditions in the industry. That is why airline workers should join the growing network of national and international rank-and-file committees to take the conduct of the struggle out of the hands of the pro-company unions and fight to end the continued sacrifice of workers’ lives and livelihoods to corporate profit.
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