Australian governments demand full economic “reopening” by December

Mike Head

Despite the still-worsening global COVID-19 pandemic, and continuing outbreaks in Australia, the bipartisan “national cabinet” has outlined a plan to almost completely “reopen” the economy within three months.

Worldwide, the number of reported cases is nearing 27 million, with almost 900,000 deaths. This includes more than 26,000 infections and over 750 fatalities in Australia.

Yet, the leaders of the federal, state and territory governments—Liberal-National and Labor Party alike—agreed last Friday to resurrect the “three-step” reopening agenda that was accelerated disastrously in May and June, leading to a deadly second wave of the virus.

This reckless agenda is driven solely by the rapacious demands of big business for the lifting of all restrictions on profit-making, regardless of the concerns and opposition of working class households, particularly those of health and aged care workers, and school teachers, who are on the front line of the “return to work” offensive.

The revived blueprint includes the key industrial state of Victoria, currently the epicentre of the pandemic’s resurgence in Australia, accounting for 675 of the country’s 762 deaths, as of today. Infections are still erupting elsewhere too, particularly in Sydney and Brisbane, where outbreaks are being reported virtually daily in schools.

Victoria’s state Labor Premier Daniel Andrews yesterday announced a parallel reopening “road map,” which includes partially lifting lockdowns as early as next week and herding about 100,000 more workers back into workplaces by September 28.

Andrews was at pains to meet the demands of the corporate elite and keep in sync with the national cabinet timetable. Like the rest of the political establishment, he spoke in terms of reviving the economy, not concern for working class health and lives.

“I want all of us to stay the course so that we can all have something approaching a normal Christmas,” he said. “I want to get the place open and I want to keep it open, and unless this is done safely and steadily that simply won’t happen.”

Working closely with the trade unions, the state Labor government has already kept major industries substantially open, with limited safety restrictions, during the past five weeks of a “Stage 4” lockdown in Melbourne, the state capital. This includes mining, construction, manufacturing and warehousing.

Now the Labor government intends to start reopening schools and childcare facilities by September 28, risking the lives of teachers and students and their families, in order to push more workers back onto work sites. There will be a “staged” return to face-to-face teaching, starting with the youngest and oldest students, in Melbourne, and an even faster schedule in regional areas of the state.

The Andrews government released Melbourne University modelling showing a 60 percent risk of a third wave lockdown if the economy is reopened before cases are below 25 a day. New cases in the state are still averaging around 70 each day, after exceeding 500 before last month’s lockdown measures.

But the potential delay of some workplace reopenings, such as offices, until November provoked fury in the corporate media and business establishment. One main employer organisation, the Australian Industry Group, predicted “catastrophic economic, health and social damage caused by the continued lockdown.”

Andrews has been accused of pursuing a de facto virus “eradication” strategy rather than the officially-imposed “suppression” plan. “Suppression” is based on allowing the coronavirus to continue to spread, while asserting it can be mostly contained by testing, tracing and quarantining—a claim belied by the ongoing emergence of COVID-19 “hotspots” in the states of New South Wales and Queensland.

The ferocious business criticism highlights the demand of the capitalist class for the subordination of lives to the generation of profits and the accumulation of private wealth. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott revealed the homicidal logic of this agenda in a speech in London last week. He branded any measures to tackle the spread of COVID-19 as a “health dictatorship” and called for the elderly to be left to die from the virus.

While neither the current Liberal-National leader, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, nor his Labor Party counterparts are stating their calculations so blatantly, this is their outlook as well. Most of Australia’s COVID-19 deaths have occurred in chronically under-funded and under-staffed aged care homes in working class areas, the result of decades of bipartisan indifference.

However, the Andrews government and the union leaders are anxiously seeking to keep suppressing the resistance of workers. That includes the over-worked health and aged care workers who have been forced to care for pandemic victims without adequate masks and other personal protection equipment, and the teachers who eventually forced the closure of schools in June due to the well-proven danger of infections in classrooms and school yards.

Reflecting that nervousness, today’s Australian Financial Review editorial denounced the Andrews government’s “aggressive suppression” policy but concluded that “if Victoria follows the road map, the state would be pulled back into line with the national cabinet’s reopening plan by December.”

Likewise, while Morrison echoed the corporate frustration with the “hard and crushing” situation in Victoria, he avoided open criticism of Andrews. Both Morrison and Andrews are carefully retaining the unity of the de facto coalition government established with the formation of the unprecedented “national cabinet” in March.

As it did in May-June, the national cabinet is already lifting restrictions long before any of its three “stages” has had a chance to be assessed. Friday’s announcements featured a “National Agricultural Workers’ Code” to allow backpackers and other low-paid workers to be moved across state borders to pick crops.

Also announced was a “hotspot” definition to require the lifting of state border restrictions when an area records less than 30 cases in three consecutive days. By that rule, border controls would be scrapped across the country, except, for now, for Melbourne residents.

The close partnership between employers and the unions in pushing workers back into unsafe sites was underscored by a joint statement issued by the Victorian Master Builders Association and the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union (CFMMEU). It welcomed the Andrews government’s “vote of confidence in our industry” by shifting its activities from “heavily restricted” to “restricted” on September 28, claiming to be already adhering to such measures.

Last Friday’s national cabinet decisions further demonstrated the sidelining of parliamentary democracy. Federal parliament had just sat for two weeks, after not meeting fully since March. It will not reconvene until the delayed federal budget is handed down on October 6.

The main bill rushed through both houses of parliament last week by Morrison’s government, with Labor’s backing, was to slash the already poverty-line rates of JobKeeper wage subsidies and JobSeeker unemployment benefits from late this month. This reduction is designed to give about five million jobless or “under-employed” workers no choice but to return to workplaces, regardless of the threat to health and lives.

Toppling of Sir John A. Macdonald statue triggers furor within Canada’s ruling elite

Roger Jordan & Keith Jones

A few hundred protesters calling for “defunding the police” pulled down a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, at a demonstration in Montreal Saturday, August 29. In doing so, they inadvertently decapitated the more than century-old statue.

The incident, which has been trumpeted by ostensibly “radical” proponents of identity politics as a blow to the “racist” and “colonial” Canadian state, has provoked howls of outrage from across the political establishment.

In place of the statue, protesters raised a banner that denounced Macdonald for his role in the adoption of discriminatory legislation targeting Asian Canadians and in the establishment of the residential school system. Residential schools functioned for over a century to tear indigenous children away from their families with the aim, explicitly advocated by Macdonald, of eliminating indigenous cultures and languages.

In aggressive Trump-style fashion, Alberta’s hard-right United Conservative Party premier, Jason Kenney, railed against the protesters as “roaming bands of thugs” and the “extreme left.” He added threateningly, “This vandalism of our history and heroes must stop.” Francois Legault, Quebec’s “Quebec First” premier, called the incident an attack on “democracy” and vowed the statue would be restored to its prominent place in downtown Montreal.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose Liberal government has touted its “gender-balanced” and racially “diverse” cabinet and “feminist” foreign policy as “progressive” cover for its right-wing policies, said he was “deeply disappointed” by the toppling of the statue, and denounced it as “vandalism. “We are,” he intoned, “a country of laws, and we are a country that needs to respect those laws even as we seek to improve and change them.” But unlike Kenney, he made his defence of Macdonald more conditional. “I believe,” said Trudeau, “that a country must inform itself of its past, must be conscious of positive things and negative things that any leader has done in their career.”

New Democrat (NDP) leader Jagmeet Singh, who has led Canada’s social democrats in propping up the minority Liberal government as it provided a massive corporate bailout and is now orchestrating a reckless back-to-work drive amid the COVID-19 pandemic, avoided criticizing the toppling of the Macdonald statue outright. Nevertheless, he sought to distance himself from the action. Said Singh, “Taking down a statue of (Macdonald) doesn’t erase him from history any more than honouring him out of context erases the horrors he caused.”

Who was John A. Macdonald?

Trudeau and Singh undoubtedly came under pressure from the most powerful sections of the ruling elite to condemn the toppling of the statue. Macdonald was, after all, the principal architect of Confederation—which united the three largest British North American colonies in a federal state in 1867—and Canada’s dominant political figure in its first quarter century.

By spearheading the creation of the Canadian nation-state and then its expansion, including the effective annexation of the territory that now comprises Canada’s three prairie provinces and much of its three northern territories, Macdonald played a major role in laying the groundwork for the rapid development of Canadian capitalism and its emergence, at the beginning of the 20th century, as an imperialist power.

It is these services—accomplished through deceit and violence, and in close cooperation with railway promoters, bankers, and the British Colonial Office—which compel Canada’s ruling elite and political establishment to honour him, regardless of their current political orientation.

A Tory, Macdonald was a fitting representative of the emerging Canadian bourgeoisie, which rejected the US as “too democratic and egalitarian,” and founded the Dominion of Canada as a constitutional monarchy and an integral part of the British Empire.

The Canadian capitalist elite’s successful consolidation of its rule over the northern tier of North America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, was inseparably bound up with the dispossession and subjugation of the Native peoples, whose communal forms of property were incompatible with bourgeois private property. Nomadic indigenous communities were brutally driven off their lands, in a process described as “the clearing of the Plains,” to make way for the Canadian Pacific Railway, “settlement,” and the development of western Canada as the “bread basket” of the British Empire.

As the head of federal Conservative governments from 1867-73 and 1878-91, Macdonald presided over the suppression of First Nation and Metis rebellions, and a policy of starving Native peoples so as to force them onto reservations.

The seizure of the lands of the indigenous peoples was a key plank in a policy of national capitalist development championed by Macdonald, and codified in the Tories’ National Policy. It called for high tariffs to stimulate manufacture in the East, and for the development of agriculture in the West, with the aim of providing markets for Ontario and Quebec-based industry, and profits for the banks, railways and merchants who were to organize the export of Western grain and other resources to Britain.

From this brief overview of Macdonald’s career it is clear that there is no reason for working people to mourn the toppling of his statue.

However, the racialist political perspective being advanced by those celebrating the attack on the Macdonald monument is deeply retrograde and antithetical to the struggle for socialism.

These forces do not denounce Macdonald as a political leader of the Canadian bourgeoisie, but as the supposed representative of “white society,” thereby blaming the working class and poor immigrant farmers for the crimes of Macdonald and Canadian capitalism. Similarly, they rail against “white society,” not capitalism, for the continuing injustices against Native people, racism, and police violence (whose victims, while disproportionately indigenous and black, are first and foremost overwhelmingly working class.)

This outlook, saturated with racialist identity politics, is well suited to these forces’ political agenda, which is to press for a more “equitable” distribution of wealth, privileges and power within the top 5 to 10 percent of society, while leaving capitalist oppression untouched.

The recently-established Coalition for Black, Indigenous and People of Colour Liberation has been presented in the media as the political voice of the protesters. In a post on the statue’s toppling, it wrote that “racist monuments don’t deserve space,” and demanded that “all statues, plaques and emblems commemorating perpetrators of racism and slavery” be taken down because they encourage “white supremacist attitudes.” It also appealed for the police to be defunded by 50 percent and that the funds be redistributed to “black communities” and small businesses.

Macdonald dismissed the indigenous peoples as inferior, denounced Chinese immigrants as a threat to Canada’s British and “Aryan” character, and subscribed to the claim that the British Empire had a civilizing mission (memorialized shortly after his death in the Rudyard Kipling poem “The White Man’s Burden”).

But to characterize Macdonald or any other leading Canadian politician of that period as a “racist” or “white supremacist” without mentioning their chief function as representatives of the Canadian bourgeoisie is to falsify history, above all by covering up the essential class content of their racism.

The Canadian ruling elite required the destruction of the indigenous population’s communal forms of property, including through mass murder and genocide, in order to solidify its control over the northern half of the North American continent and profitable capitalist development. Furthermore, under conditions in the last decades of the 19th century where the increasingly sizable working class was emerging as a powerful adversary, Canada’s capitalist elite whipped up Anglo and anti-immigrant chauvinism as a means of diverting mounting social tensions along reactionary lines.

Identity politics and “settler colonialism”

The Coalition’s failure to even mention the interrelated issues of capitalism and class oppression is in keeping with the longstanding insistence among “left” petty bourgeois forces that Canada is a “settler colonial” state, not a capitalist state.

Not only does this definition whitewash the Canadian bourgeoisie for its crimes against the native population. It is also aimed at legitimizing calls for “decolonizing” and “deracializing” the Canadian state and Canadian society by promoting a supposedly more equitable capitalism. That is, by integrating privileged elites from the native population and other minorities into positions of power and privilege, from corporate boardrooms to government, through the expansion of affirmative action programs, reparations, and an enhanced role for native self-government within the Canadian capitalist state.

The Trudeau government, and broad sections of the ruling class, are by no means hostile to this agenda. Since its election in 2015, the Trudeau government has sought “nation to nation reconciliation” with Canada’s Native peoples. What this means in practice is the cultivation of a tiny First Nations elite to serve as business partners and political allies for the Canadian bourgeoisie as it intensifies its exploitation of indigenous-controlled lands and workers.

Earlier this summer, tens of thousands of people from all racial and ethnic backgrounds participated in mass protests across Canada against racist police violence. The protests were motivated by the emergence of a mass, multi-racial movement in the United States, triggered by the brutal police murder of George Floyd. But they also expressed the deep anger among working people over rampant social inequality, mass unemployment, poverty, and the social crisis triggered by the pandemic. When Trump sought to suppress this movement by inciting police violence and seeking to initiate a military coup by deploying military forces on the streets of America’s major cities in defiance of the Constitution, the protests only grew bigger.

Terrified by the growth of social opposition, powerful sections of the ruling elite and petty bourgeoisie felt the need to change the subject. In the United States, the Democratic Party, and its house organ, the New York Times, took the lead in injecting racialist poison into the mass protests. They insisted that police violence was not the product of the police’s function as defenders of private property and arm of the capitalist state, but rather arose out of a racist “white population.” They also lent encouragement to the defacing and toppling of statues of the leaders of America’s two bourgeois democratic revolutions—revolutions which, whatever their historically-rooted limitations, struck mighty blows in favour of democracy and equality, including by abolishing slavery—on the basis of their alleged “racism.”This is part of a larger project to promote a racialist narrative of American history that presents racial conflict, not the class struggle, as its defining element.

A similar process has developed in Canada. Trudeau and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh made public statements declaring that the root cause of police violence is “systemic racism” for which the entire population must bear responsibility.

Corporate Canada responded to the racialization of the protests with enthusiasm. “Over the past two weeks, many of Canada’s largest companies have made statements condemning racism after a wave of protests against police violence in the United States and Canada,” gushed the Globe and Mail, the mouthpiece of Toronto’s financial elite, in a June article. It reported the creation of an organization called the Canadian Council of Business Leaders Against Anti-Black Systemic Racism, whose leaders include the CEO of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, to support the “black community” by promoting “black employees to leadership positions.”

The Coalition of BIPOC Liberation may not argue so explicitly in favour of the co-opting of a tiny elite of black and indigenous people into positions of corporate power. But its perspective is entirely compatible with and promotes this pro-capitalist agenda. Its protest actions are not aimed at the political education and mobilization of the working class as an independent political force in struggle against big business and its political representatives. Rather, as in the case of the toppling of Macdonald’s statue, they are designed to scandalize the ruling elite into providing greater access for professionals and business people from “racialized minorities” to corporate boardrooms, the top ranks of academia, and positions in the capitalist state.

The BIPOC coalition and like groups seek to gain a popular base for their pro-capitalist program by misdirecting grievances arising out of the social crisis along racial rather than class lines. A prime example of this is its call to support small businesses devastated by the coronavirus pandemic, but only in “black and indigenous communities.”

Working people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds who are horrified by the historic crimes of the Canadian ruling class and want to put an end to social inequality, racist police violence, poverty and the oppression of the Native people must decisively reject all forms of identity politics and recognize that all of these social ills are the responsibility of capitalism. Overcoming them is only possible through the mass mobilization of the working class in Canada and internationally in struggle for the revolutionary transformation of society along socialist lines.

Trump administration adds $1 billion to USDA food box program that has failed to deliver on food aid

Alex Findijs

New reports on the Farmers to Families Food Box program indicate that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) overpaid and underprovided on promises to deliver tens of millions of food aid boxes to families in need.

Ostensibly, the program was designed to bridge the gap between farmers who had lost markets during the pandemic and the millions of people struggling to put food on the table. It would do this by contracting distributors to purchase, package and deliver the food to charities and food banks around the country.

In theory, this would have provided food to those in need, saved farmers from bankruptcy and eased the burden on food banks. The reality has been far from what was promised. Within just weeks, the program has been riddled with issues of inefficiency, disorganization and fraud.

The USDA had promised to deliver 40 million boxes by the end of June. By June 17, only 17 million boxes had been delivered and by the end of July Reuters was reporting that just two-thirds of the boxes ordered had actually arrived.

Food banks across the country were reporting that orders were not being fulfilled. In Puerto Rico, the distributor Caribbean Produce Exchange failed to show up to a scheduled distribution event in mid-May in San Juan, leaving 600 people waiting for food that never arrived.

The catering company CR8AD8 (pronounced Created a Date) was awarded a $39 million contract but failed to deliver 250,000 boxes of the 750,000 ordered. The boxes that were delivered were often reported to have issues with packaging and labeling, making it difficult for food banks to actually distribute the provided food once delivered.

Even when food boxes were delivered on time they were consistently overpriced. Both Caribbean Produce Exchange and CR8AD8 were paid up to $100 per box, much to the dismay of food bank organizers who noted that equivalent boxes could be made for two-to-three times less money.

The issue lies in the very structure of the program.

Other food aid programs provide assistance directly to food banks from farms. Last year, for example, the USDA purchased 18.5 million gallons of milk and delivered it to food banks free of cost. Also in 2019, the USDA purchased $1 billion worth of food impacted by increased tariffs and delivered it to food banks as well.

Instead of distributing food directly, however, the USDA has overspent on contracts to outsource distribution. The idea was that food banks could not afford to distribute the extra food directly to people in need so the contractors would be paid to do that instead. This was referred to as “truck to trunk” and was expected to alleviate much of the pressure placed on food banks to handle nearly double the demand of previous years.

It is now becoming clear that distributors oftentimes did not even uphold this end of the bargain. Food bank organizers have been reporting that distributors have been delivering food to warehouses and then leaving the food banks to foot the bill to handle the “last mile” from the warehouse to the distribution site.

A particularly severe example of this was Gordon Food Service, which refused to deliver outside of its “footprint,” according to Sherrie Tussler, executive director of Wisconsin’s Hunger Task Force. This meant that indigenous communities were left out of reach of the food box program and Hunger Task Force was left to pay $50,000 to deliver the food itself, using money that could have been spent helping more people.

To make matters worse, contracted distributors have generally purchased food from the same commercial vendors that food banks would typically buy from themselves. This means that not only are the contractors essentially pointless as middlemen, but that the farmers whom the program was ostensibly created to protect have hardly benefited at all.

All the money that has been poured into paying distributors for nonexistent services has translated to overinflated box prices and wasted funds. According to the USDA, the weighted average price for fresh vegetables is 64 cents per pound and 71 cents for fresh fruit. This means that a typical American worker should be able to purchase a 20-pound box of fresh fruits and vegetables for less than $14. Eric Cooper, CEO of the San Antonio Food Bank, told NPR that “some of these food boxes, they were $40, $50, $60 for what you’d get at a grocery store for about $20.”

Millions of dollars that could be utilized to feed struggling workers have been wasted all while millions of American families go hungry and millions of pounds of food have gone to waste in the fields.

The USDA has taken some steps to improve the program, including increasing the size of boxes to 30–40 pounds and mandating that they be combinations of produce, meat and dairy with set minimum requirements for each group. Previously, boxes weighed 15–20 pounds and were often just one type of food.

However, this is far too little too late. The extra $1 billion will amount to just 31 cents for each food insecure person, which Feeding America believes has risen to 54 million people due to the pandemic.

The Farmers to Families Food Box program has been a wasteful and disorganized mess that has failed to accomplish even its most basic goals. It is little more than an electoral campaign stunt for President Trump, who has also ordered the placement of signed letters in food boxes touting the President’s response to the pandemic. Such a move is a blatant attempt to utilize federal funds to promote the Trump campaign and is another wasteful insult to the millions of people suffering from the pandemic.

Teen in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania linked to 40 new COVID-19 cases

Isaac Finn

Officials from Allegheny County Health Department reported September 2 that 40 COVID-19 cases over a two-week period had been traced back to one teenager. This revelation by health officials is a deadly warning about the ability of COVID-19 to spread throughout the country that includes the city of Pittsburgh as it prepares to open for in-person learning on September 9.

As part of a monthly department briefing, Dr. Debra Bogen, the health department director, said, “This teenager developed symptoms and within two weeks … it had spread to family members, to the coworkers of family members, to other people in that teen’s community.”

According to the data, the teen—who was not named—began showing symptoms on August 14. In subsequent days, individuals the teen had interacted with began to show symptoms of the virus. These people went on to spread the virus to another layer of people before the spread was able to be identified and contained. As a result, 40 people contracted COVID-19, including two elderly individuals.

Young people walking and talking. (Tulane Public Relations/Creative Commons)

In the monthly department briefing, Bogen elaborated on the now well-known fact that young people are just as capable of spreading the virus as adults: “You start out with young, healthy people who get the infection and, unfortunately, they spread it to more vulnerable populations.”

Furthermore, health officials reiterated that young people are themselves not immune to the effects of the virus. In fact, there have been 14 children in the county who have needed hospitalization because of COVID-19, two of whom had to be placed in intensive care units.

While it is true that youth are statistically less likely than adults to have fatal complications from the virus, many young people who contract it require hospitalizations and some die. In addition, hundreds of very young children have become extremely sick with an inflammatory disease after contracting the virus.

The level of spread that took place from just one unknowing teenager gives an indication of what is to come if the schools in Allegheny County go forward with plans to reopen on September 9. Many schools in the district have either announced plans to include an in-person option within the first week or have failed to publicly update their plans for school reopening since early August.

According to the Pennsylvania Department of Health, there were 105 new confirmed cases in Allegheny County and 257 new cases in Philadelphia between August 27 and September 2. Over the same time, there have been 1,160 cases of COVID-19 across Pennsylvania, bringing the total number of COVID-19 cases throughout the state to 136,771 with 7,732 deaths.

Under conditions in which the virus continues to rapidly spread throughout the country, Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Tom Wolf has made the reopening of schools a top priority.

On top of this reckless policy, Wolf also announced on Wednesday a revision to the state’s previous COVID-19 guidelines regarding high school sports. Wolf will now allow spectators at the high school and youth sporting events as long as the venue adheres to social distancing guidelines. The governor is attempting to distance himself from the policy by issuing a “strong recommendation” that they are postponed, even though he was the one ultimately responsible for changing the policy.

The administration wrote in a public statement, “As with deciding whether students should return to in-person classes, remote learning, or a blend of the two this fall, school administrators and locally elected school boards should make decisions on sports.”

The drive to reopen schools throughout Pennsylvania has prompted widespread opposition from teachers and faculty who are unwilling to needlessly risk the health and safety of their students and themselves.

In late August, the East Pennsboro School board was forced to agree to a policy of all online learning after large numbers of teachers attempted to avoid returning to schools by taking a sabbatical or obtaining medical waivers.

Katelynn Edgar, a district spokeswoman, told the Patriot-News, “The stark reality is that we did not have enough qualified teachers and aids comfortable teaching face-to-face with students to begin school.”

Other school districts in Pennsylvania—including Central Bucks School District, East Penn School District, Mount Lebanon School District and Beaver Area School District—all agreed to transition to remote learning because of a shortage of teachers.

Peters Township School District, located in Washington County on the southwest border of Allegheny County, had to halt in-person classes just two days after school started on August 24 because someone at the school had tested positive for COVID-19. In a letter on August 31, the district reported another two presumptive COVID-19 cases. Despite the clear danger, the district announced that in-person classes would resume on September 8.

The dangers confronting students, parents, teachers and other education workers in Pennsylvania are the same issues facing educators throughout the country and, in fact, internationally. The homicidal drive to reopen schools is a central pillar of the Trump administration’s campaign to get workers back to businesses and factories. While the Democrats and Republicans may have tactical differences over how this policy is discussed and presented, they fundamentally agree on the conclusion: the schools must open.

Democratic Governor Tom Wolf is one of many Democratic Governors throughout the country, including Andrew Cuomo in New York and Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, who are forcing the reopening of schools.

This homicidal policy has resulted in a growing movement of opposition from workers, parents and young people. Last week teachers, parents and students in Kenosha, Wisconsin held a demonstration outside of the Kenosha Unified School District office in opposition to in-person learning. Teachers in Andover, Massachusetts, and Elizabeth, New Jersey have also voiced that they will refuse to work if the district demands they resume in-person teaching.

Last month, teachers from around the country established the Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee to unite educators, parents, and students and prepare for a general strike to halt the reckless opening of schools. Safety committees, which are independent of the unions, are being set up in Michigan, Florida, Texas and other states.

German automotive supplier Continental doubles job cuts

Gustav Kemper

The automotive industry is facing an unprecedented jobs massacre in which workers in the supply chain are its first victims. Major automotive supplier manufacturer Continental has announced the elimination of 30,000 jobs worldwide out of a total workforce of 232,000. The coronavirus pandemic is now being used as an opportunity to shift the costs of the crisis onto the backs of the working class and to push ahead with cost savings that were already planned because of the move to electric motors.

The crisis in the automobile industry is bigger and more intense than anything in the past 70 years, Continental boss Elmar Degenhart told news agency Reuters. The cuts programme, “Transformation 2019-2029,” adopted last autumn, had originally envisaged cost reductions of €500 million and the elimination of 15,000 jobs. Now, one billion euros are to be saved by 2023 with twice as many job cuts as those planned last year.

The company, which has been consistently profitable over the last ten years and received an additional €72 million in subsidies from the German government over the last 13 years, is now cutting 13,000 jobs in Germany alone. That is almost one in four jobs, twice as many as planned for last year. The job cuts affect all locations. Unprofitable business units are to be sold off.

The plant in Karben/Hesse—with 1,100 employees, including some 200 temporary workers—manufactures components for air conditioning systems, speedometers and driver assistance systems, and is to be completely closed down by 2024. The automotive site in Nuremberg is to be closed by the end of 2022, and the Vitesco site in Mühlhausen by the end of the same year.

The Frankfurt Rödelheim plant is to lose 500 jobs, with further jobs to be cut in Babenhausen, Schwalbach, Oppenweiler, Nuremberg, Mühlhausen and Roding. At the same time, 2,000 jobs have already disappeared since the announcement of the cuts programme last year.

A company spokesman emphasized to the press that talks were still ongoing and that “confidentiality had been agreed.” The Group Management Board and the trade union are currently working together on how to implement the planned cuts.

Christiane Benner, Deputy Chairwoman of IG Metall and of the Continental AG Supervisory Board, has called for “a business strategy geared to the future” and has already announced that IG Metall will agree in principle to structural changes. This would depend on their “concrete form.”

For many years, the union has systematically urged the Continental workforce to make ever more far-reaching concessions through so-called “supplementary collective agreements.” Among other things, workers were pushed to give up the alignment of their wages to the level of the regional collective agreement, with the IG Metall claiming that this would secure production in Germany.

Wage “sacrifices” have never secured jobs but ensured the profits of shareholders and company owners. The constant cuts have only prepared the final closure of several sites and the current job cuts.

Since 2006, a lot of money has been saved through wage and salary concessions at German plants, Frank Grommeck, chairman of the Karben works council, told the Wetterauer Zeitung newspaper when hundreds of employees protested against the plant closure there on Wednesday. The money saved was used to build new plants in Lithuania and the Czech Republic, where wage levels are considerably lower. After the plant closure, the remaining parts are to be relocated there.

At the Continental plant in Babenhausen too, the works council and IG Metall had already agreed years ago to an increase in weekly working hours—free of charge for the company—to “support the plant.”

The job losses that have now been announced in the supplier groups and companies, as well as the manufacturers, are only the beginning. The management consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) assumes that the entire automotive supplier industry, with some 187,000 employees in Germany, will face a wave of insolvencies in the autumn. Smaller companies would be bought up or disappear from the market altogether.

The VDA industry association estimates that 60 percent of companies are currently negotiating a reduction in staffing levels; with short-time working operating at 93 percent. The current suspension of the legal obligation to file for insolvency means the expected wave of bankruptcies will not begin for several months. The association estimates that some companies intend to cut up to 40 percent of jobs. Business daily Handelsblatt assumes that the crisis in Germany means there will be “around 100 fewer suppliers.”

Even now, the already announced cutback plans give a glimpse of what is involved:

* The Board of Management of ZF Friedrichshafen AG, one of the five largest automotive suppliers, announced in July this year that an agreement on the “structural realignment” of the company had been reached with the General Works Council and the unions. Worldwide, 15,000 jobs are to be cut in the coming years, half of them in Germany. Since mid-2019, the company has already cut 5300 jobs worldwide, 3,800 of them this year.

* Last year, Bosch already announced the elimination of 1,600 jobs.

* Mahle has already cut 400 jobs in Stuttgart and 770 in Luxembourg. The Italian plants at La Loggia and Saluzzo, with 450 workers, will be closed. Production in Rouffach, France, with 240 employees is to be discontinued.

* Deutz AG has also negotiated an “efficiency programme” with the IG Metall trade union called “Transform for Growth.” Sabine Beutert, the Cologne-based IG Metall membership advisor, announced that Deutz would first “sack temporary workers.” The company wants to save €100 million a year—a total of 1,000 jobs are to be cut in the company’s plants in Cologne-Porz, Ulm and Herschbach. Of the total of about 4,700 employees, the contracts of 380 temporary workers have already expired in the first half of the year. Another 350 employees are to be forced out of their jobs as part of a “volunteer programme.”

* Eisenmann, the Böblingen-based manufacturer of painting systems for the automotive industry, will be broken up. The 650 workers will have to register as unemployed after three months in a “qualification company” from December 8, negotiated with the IG Metall.

* Cable manufacturer Leoni in Nuremberg, with a total of 95,000 employees worldwide, including 4,700 in Germany, received a state guarantee of 330 million euros. Plants in the United States, North Africa and Europe have already been closed. By the end of 2019 2,000 workers were already laid off.

The corporations are working out the job cuts with the IG Metall or other unions such as the IG Bergbau, Chemie, Energie. “There is already a lot going on in the background. Talks have been going on for a long time,” reports Norbert Heinz whose consulting business advises medium-sized supplier companies.

Every day, the unions prove that they are on the side of the corporations against the workers. Many Continental workers responded with anger and tears at the rally on Wednesday in Karben. Now the lessons must be learned.

The unions will not wage a genuine fight to defend jobs, wages or conditions. The initiative must be taken by independent factory committees, which join forces with their colleagues nationally and internationally to fight for the defence of every workplace throughout the industry. This can only be done with a socialist programme that prioritises workers’ interests, takes the factories into collective social ownership in opposition to the profits drive of the corporations.

Alarm bells as London bus driver tests positive for COVID-19

Laura Tiernan

Bus company Metroline is forcing drivers at a London garage to report for duty despite their colleague being diagnosed with COVID-19.

Several drivers were handed “contact tracing” letters at Cricklewood garage on Thursday, stating, “We are contacting you to inform you that an employee with confirmed Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) may have come into contact with you within the last 14 days.”

The infected driver reportedly drove the 112 bus route that travels from North Finchley to Ealing Broadway, via Brentcross shopping centre.

The letter from Metroline’s Head of Human Resources Darren Hill stated, “If you are well, there is no action for you to take.”

Metroline letter from Cricklewood garage

It continued, “If you develop symptoms of cough or fever or shortness of breath, you should immediately stay indoors and avoid contact with other people” and “call NHS 111 to inform them that you are a contact of a confirmed case of COVID-19.”

As of Friday, neither Metroline nor Unite had issued any statement to alert more than 500 drivers at Cricklewood about the reappearance of COVID-19. After 33 bus workers were killed by coronavirus between March and May—including the death of Cricklewood driver Ishrit Ali—Unite’s suppression of information is criminal.

According to eyewitnesses, one driver who received the letter on Thursday immediately reported feeling unwell. He was told to book his own test and sat for more than three hours in the “output” area where drivers sign on, potentially infecting dozens more people. He had already completed part of his duty. He subsequently tested negative.

The Unite rep at the garage met with management but took no steps to protect workers’ health and safety. The union issued no demand that drivers be sent home with immediate access to COVID-19 tests, in keeping with their corporatist collusion with Transport for London (TfL) and the bus companies.

“The driver took the correct decision to go home,” a driver from Cricklewood told the WSWS, “but he was put under enormous pressure by management and also by the union to stay and finish his duty. He stood his ground and quite rightly so. If it’s happening at Cricklewood it could be happening at other garages, not just Metroline. We’ve already lost Ali, we can’t let this happen again.”

The outbreak at Cricklewood raises urgent issues. Once again drivers are being infected with COVID-19 and once again their colleagues are being kept in the dark.

On Friday, WSWS contacted TfL and Metroline asking that they confirm the number of new COVID-19 infections and hospitalisations among London transport workers. They refused to provide this information.

Last week, Andy Byford, TfL’s new transport commissioner, told the Evening Standard, “I believe passionately that the system is safe to use.” Byford’s assurances are worthless. As subway chief in New York City he presided over carnage, with at least 146 transit workers dead from COVID-19.

Refusing to answer questions from WSWS about the latest workplace infection, Metroline issued the following statement, “We have introduced extensive and comprehensive measures to ensure a COVID-19 secure workplace in accordance with Government Guidance, working closely with Unite the Union and utilising NHS Test and Trace to protect our employees and keep them safe.”

The extent of Unite’s collaboration with the bus companies was revealed in July by London’s Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan. In a response during Mayor’s Question Time, he explained that TfL was not conducting any on-site safety inspections because “any significant concerns can be raised at regular network conference calls or separately between Unite the union and TfL.” Such meetings took place on a “day-to-day basis.”

Metroline’s “extensive and comprehensive measures” in collusion with Unite were a death sentence for workers. The company accounted for 38 percent of COVID-19 deaths among London bus drivers between March and May. The “contact trace” letters they distributed last week told drivers, “Please follow this advice until 27th August, even if your symptoms are minor”—but the letters were handed out on September 3!

Metroline refused to disclose what criteria they used to determine the risk of transmission to other employees. They have reportedly only contacted drivers on route 112, yet all drivers clock on from the same “output” area and use the same rest and toilet break facilities. The risk of widespread workplace transmission among transport workers and passengers cannot be overstated.

As with workplace outbreaks of COVID-19 among warehouse and food processing workers, the NHS Track and Trace system has proven to be dysfunctional—and this is deliberate. Employers are effectively handed unlimited discretion over who will be informed and when.

The sole concern of TfL and the transport companies is to ramp up revenue and profit. The Johnson government’s reopening of the economy, and its entire “herd immunity” strategy, is forcing millions into unsafe workplaces, public transport and schools to protect the obscene wealth of the financial oligarchy.

Brazilian postal workers wage bitter strike against wage cuts, privatization

Gabriel Lemos

Postal workers at the state-owned Brazilian Post Office (Correios) are entering the fourth week of an indefinite national strike against wage cuts and the drive by the government of fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro to privatize the postal service. In addition, the company’s criminal negligence amid the COVID-19 pandemic has led to thousands of workers contracting the deadly virus and 120 reported deaths.

According to the two postal union federations—Fentect, affiliated to the Workers Party (PT)-controlled CUT union federation, and Findect, affiliated to the CTB, the union federation controlled by the Maoist Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB)—70 percent of Correios’ workforce is on strike, about 70,000 workers. It is the largest strike since 1995, when all sections of federal workers struck against attacks by the neo-liberal government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

The strike began on August 17 after the company decided to withdraw 70 of the 79 provisions of the collective agreement reached last October that was to remain in effect until 2021. Among the takebacks are the reduction of maternity leave from 180 to 120 days, the slashing of night and overtime differentials, a 20 percent increase in payments for the health plan and an end to aid for children with special needs and childcare. According to the statistical institute DIESEE, this may represent a wage cut of 43 to 69 percent, depending on the salary range.

Banner reads "Postal workers on strike" (Credit: Agencia Brasil)

Correios has justified this huge attack on workers stating, “The exclusion of provisions only has the objective of adopting ... a business logic similar to that practiced in the market,” that is, to pave the way for privatization. In August 2019, the Bolsonaro government announced a sweeping privatization plan for 18 of 130 federal state-owned companies, such as the giant electricity company Eletrobrás, the telephone company Telebrás and subsidiaries and refineries of the energy conglomerate Petrobras, in addition to Correios.

Earlier this year, Bolsonaro’s minister of economy, Chicago Boy Paulo Guedes, said at the World Economic Forum that he intends to privatize Correios by 2021. In Davos, he met the president of US package delivery giant UPS. The Brazilian media has also reported since last year that Amazon, China’s Alibaba and Argentina’s Mercado Livre would also be interested in buying Correios.

During the strike, the Bolsonaro government announced that it will send a bill to the Brazilian Congress to break Correios’ postal service monopoly, and that the Accenture consulting firm has been hired to conduct studies on its the “de-statization.” Today, only parcel delivery is open to free competition in Brazil. However, since 2018, this service is responsible for most of the revenue of Correios (52 percent), which makes 80 percent of the deliveries for small- and medium-sized online retailers.

The government has invoked Correios’ “economic and financial situation” to justify privatization, claiming that it has worsened during the pandemic. However, after losses between 2013 and 2016 amid the country’s economic decline, the company made a profit of more than 1 billion reais (US$190 million) between 2017 and 2019. In addition, during the pandemic, Correios’ delivery services increased 25 percent in the first half of this year compared to the same period last year, representing a profit of 383 million reais ($72 million).

This increase in service has further aggravated conditions for workers who for years have been overworked and subject to constant injuries. With the pandemic, the Bolsonaro government deemed Correios an essential service, making its workers among the most exposed to coronavirus infection. This has led to spontaneous walkouts over lack of personal protective equipment and unsafe conditions in the workplace.

Since the strike began, the postal workers’ actions have escalated. On August 26, about 1,000 workers occupied the Correios distribution center in the city of Indaiatuba, in the interior of São Paulo. Three days later, the state Military Police raided the facility, evicting the workers, after the Labor Court issued an injunction.

On September 2, postal workers occupied the entrance to the Brasilia Airport cargo terminal, paralyzing for one day the company’s air cargo network in the Federal District. Just as in São Paulo, the Labor Court ordered the occupation of the terminal broken up the following day.

On the same day as the airport occupation, Supreme Labor Court minister Kátia Arruda partially granted Correios’ request that the strike be considered abusive. In an attack on the right to strike, Arruda prohibited postal workers from blocking the movement of people and mail and ordered at least 70 percent of the company’s workforce to continue working. If this decision is defied, the unions can be fined 100,000 reais ($19,000).

The minister’s ruling came after negotiations mediated by the Labor Court between Correios and the union federations. In the first meeting, held on August 26, minister Luiz Philippe Vieira de Mello Filho proposed the maintenance of the 79 provisions of last year’s collective agreement, but without a wage increase. Correios rejected the minister’s proposal, which led to the continuation of the collective bargaining. It is expected that the Supreme Labor Court ministers will issue a ruling on September 21.

Unlike Correios, the Fentect union federation had accepted minister Mello Filho’s proposal. On its website, it praised him for showing “willingness and good faith,” while complaining that a settlement had been blocked by the “determination [of Correios’ president Floriano Peixoto,] to withdraw all workers’ rights.” However, even if Correios had accepted the proposal, this hardly would have ensured workers’ rights to the 70 provisions that the company wants to tear up.

For years, the union federations have been appealing to the Labor Court to counter the growing attacks by Correios management. Last year, the union federations ended a weeklong strike in which up to 80 percent after the Labor Court imposed collective bargaining.

Hailing the two-year agreement reached in the Labor Court as “strategic in the struggle against the privatization,” the union federations accepted a wage increase lower than the rate of inflation and the withdrawal of workers’ parents from the health plan. However, two months later Correios filed a request with the Federal Supreme Court to increase workers’ health plan contributions by 20 percent and make the agreement effective for only one year.

The PT-appointed Supreme Court president, Dias Toffoli, provisionally accepted Correios’ request. After the union federations asked Toffoli in July of this year to review his decision, the minister took the case to a full panel of the Supreme Court, which on August 21 upheld his decision unanimously.

The illusions promoted by the union federations in the capitalist courts have only served to betray postal workers and to prevent a unified struggle of all federal workers threatened by Bolsonaro’s privatization schemes.

Earlier this year, after strikes by workers at the Brazilian Mint and at the information technology agency DataPrev, up to 21,000 Petrobras workers also went on strike against the company’s privatization and the closure of one of its subsidiaries. After the start of the Petrobras strike, the Correios union federations twice postponed a strike, preventing workers from unifying against the same attacks by the Bolsonaro government.

The unions’ contempt for postal workers was expressed during the Correios strike by the Mato Grosso state president of the CUT, Henrique Lopes, who is also affiliated to the PT. He declared on social media that postal strikers who voted for Bolsonaro “should screw themselves” (“devem se ferrar”). This slander campaign by the PT and its apologists, blaming Brazilian workers for Bolsonaro’s election, ignores the attacks by PT governments on Brazilian workers, and postal workers in particular.

During the 13 years in which the PT was in power and the ruling elite’s preferred party for defending the interests of Brazilian capitalism, it increased the outsourcing of jobs and subcontracting of services. Workers struck almost annually, burning the PT’s party flag during a strike against the government attacks in 2011. Since the first year of Dilma Rousseff’s government in 2011, there have been no new hires, cutting the number of employees from 120,000 to 100,000. According to the UN’s Universal Postal Union, postal service in a continent-sized country requires 250,000 workers.

It was also under the PT government that the postal workers’ pension fund, Postalis, began to suffer massive losses. A combination of corruption and mismanagement of the fund has resulted today in pensioners having to pay an extra contribution of almost 18 percent.

The Correios strike takes place amid intensified attacks on all Brazilian workers, including mass layoffs in the auto industry, as well aviation giant Embraer’s announcement last week that 2,500 workers will lose their jobs, which could lead to a strike as early as next week.

At the same time, governors and mayors are advancing criminal plans to reopen schools throughout Brazil. In the state capital of Amazonas, Manaus, 36 schools reported outbreaks of COVID-19 in the first days of classes, with more than 600 teachers testing positive throughout the state. Last week, teachers occupied the headquarters of the Amazonas state education office for 30 hours to oppose the reopening of schools.

As the pandemic continues to devastate the country, with on average more than 850 people dying daily, it is urgent that workers unify their struggles to save their jobs and their lives. For this, however, they cannot rely on Brazilian unions, which have been complicit in reopening schools and are allies of Brazilian industry in imposing mass layoffs and factory closures.

Postal workers, teachers and all sections of the Brazilian working class must break with the unions and build rank-and-file safety committees to unify the struggles of workers. Moreover, because of the global character of the pandemic as well as the attacks on the working class, these committees will serve to unify workers’ struggle internationally.

In Europe, COVID-19 cases surge and deaths mount following end of lockdowns

Robert Stevens

A resurgence of coronavirus is taking place across Europe due to the decision to reopen its economies. Across the continent, governments prematurely ended national lockdowns from as early as May.

By the end of July, the number of dead in Europe from COVID-19 passed 200,000. In the weeks since has climbed to almost 210,000. Total cases now stand at 3,797,904, with over 30,000 new cases being recorded daily. On Friday 35,223 cases were announced across Europe; 29,348 on Saturday. On Sunday, a further 26,021 cases were registered.

Last week, Andrea Ammon, director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, warned that the virus was starting to infect as many people as it did when the pandemic started to spread exponentially in March.

“The virus did not sleep during the summer. It was not on holiday,” Ammon told Members of the European Parliament. New data showed that 46 people per 100,000 were infected in Europe. “We almost went back to the numbers we saw in March,” She noted that by the end of March, the number infected had reached around 40 infected per 100,000. This shot up by the end of April to around 70 infected per 100,000.

In some parts of the continent, the infection rate is far higher already than it was in late April. The Dubrovnik Times reported of Ammon’s statement, “The figures, relating to the 27 EU member states, Britain, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, vary widely from country to country, from two infected to 176 per 100,000 people, she said, without specifying the countries in question.”

Central to the ruling elites’ opening their economies is the return of tens of millions of pupils to class, so their parents can be forced back to work to create profits for the corporations.

On Friday, France, Spain, Italy and Britain all reported the highest numbers of coronavirus cases since the height of the pandemic in the spring, when the world was shocked by scenes of mass deaths and hospitals unable to cope with the rapid spread of the virus.

In France, according to data released by the Directorate General of Health on Saturday, 8,550 new COVID-19 cases had been identified since Friday. This was roughly the same level as the day before (8,975 cases). On Sunday, another 7,071 cases were recorded, with Public Health France noting, “In mainland France, the progression of viral circulation is exponential.”

A rapid and sustained transmission of the virus is taking place across approximately one-quarter of France’s territory, including all the largest cities: Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Lille, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Strasbourg. According to lepoint, 53 new “clusters” of the virus have been detected out of 484 already identified, including 208 in nursing homes.

Seven new local regional districts have been moved into the COVID-19 “red zone” category, bringing to 28 the number of districts where enhanced measures to prevent the spread of the virus can be adopted. As 12 million children return to school in France, 22 schools have already been shut down due to COVID-19 infections (12 in mainland France and 10 schools in the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion).

Spain, with 517,133 cases, has the most per capita of any European state. Another 4,503 cases were announced on Friday—the highest level in four months. The 184 deaths registered the same day took its official death rate to almost 30,000. The Madrid region is among the epicentres of the pandemic, with around a third of Spain’s 96,000 infections recorded there over the past fortnight.

In the UK, almost 3,000 new cases (2,988) were recorded on Sunday. This was the biggest leap in cases since May 23 and a substantial rise on Saturday’s figure of 1,813 infections. Total cases stand at 344,164.

The death toll, according to the official figures, stands at 41,549, the fifth highest of any country in the world. These figures are highly manipulated as thousands more have died according to statistical analysis based on excess deaths. Those country with higher death tolls (the US, India, Brazil and Mexico) all have significantly larger populations than Britain.

The Johnson Conservative government, which declared in favour of a herd immunity policy at the outset of the pandemic, fully ended the national lockdown from July 4. Such is the rampant spread of COVID-19 since then that a large area of northern England, as well as the city of Glasgow, and the regions of West Dunbartonshire and East Renfrewshire in Scotland are under local lockdowns. From August 11, over 10 million pupils and 1.5 million education staff returned to classrooms in Scotland, Northern Ireland, England and Wales. By Sunday, this homicidal policy had already resulted in coronavirus infections in at least 1 40 schools.

In Italy, where 35,534 have died of COVID-19, the number of daily cases is edging towards 2,000. Last week, former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi was hospitalized in Milan after testing positive for COVID-19.

During the first week of September, intensive care hospital admissions for COVID—a key figure, both for hospital capacity and for the likely future virus death toll—rose by 62 percent nationally, with 1,733 new cases. A report published by Italy’s evidence-based medicine foundation, GIMBE, said these statistics are a key indication that the epidemic has returned to Italy on the eve of the crucial moment of the reopening of schools.

In the face of the resurgence, Franco Locatelli, president of Italy’s Higher Health Council and a member of the government’s technical scientific committee, declared, “We will reopen the schools at any cost.”

A survey by Save the Children found that seven out of 10 parents are worried about the consequences of sending their children back to school. Italy’s health minister Roberto Speranza, who participated in a World Health Organization video conference with 53 countries on August 31, tweeted, “Right to health and right to education must go together. Today, representing Italy, I promoted a conference with WHO on the safe reopening of schools. This is the real priority for the coming weeks in all countries of the world.”

In Rome, St. George’s School delayed opening due to the high number of reported coronavirus cases within the school community, and Marymount school was forced to close, and go online instead, after 60 of their students and staff had to be quarantined because of a massive outbreak on campus.

In Germany, health authorities reported 988 new infections in one day, according to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) early Sunday morning. Experience has shown that on Sundays the reported case numbers are often lower because not all health authorities transmit data to the RKI over the weekend.

On Sunday, the district of Oldenburg in Lower Saxony reported another coronavirus outbreak involving 14 people in a meat processing plant in Hatten.

New infections of students and teachers are reported daily in states that already went back to school. In Essen, the second largest city of the Ruhr, new cases were reported at two schools—at Bockmühle Comprehensive and Bertha Krupp Secondary school. In Winterhude, in Hamburg, eight classes were sent into quarantine after new cases. Since the return to school 106 students or teachers have tested positive. Schools are set to reopen in Bavaria, the second most populous German state where infection rates are among the highest.

With its recent surge in new cases and deaths, Russia has now passed 1 million cases and has 17,820 fatalities. Over 15,000 cases and almost 300 deaths were recorded in just the three days since Friday.

On Saturday, 798 cases were recorded in the Czech Republic, as Hungary reported a record 510 new cases. Slovakia, which has a population of just 5.4 million and total cases of 4,526, reported a record spike of 226 cases Saturday—the highest one-day rise since the start of the pandemic.