Turkish government prepares to reopen schools as pandemic escalates

Barış Demir

As in countries around the world, the coronavirus pandemic is out of control in Turkey after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government reopened the economy with support of the political establishment and trade unions in the interests of the ruling class. The total official number of cases in Turkey reached 286,455 yesterday, with 6,895 deaths. The number of daily cases was 1,761 on September 8, the highest since May 15.

The actual figures are undoubtedly much higher. While health care workers from various provinces state on social media that the situation in hospitals is the worst it has been since the pandemic began, official figures are well below the worst period recorded in Turkey.

Under these deadly conditions, the government is preparing to reopen schools across Turkey on September 21, supported by the official opposition parties and their allied trade unions. There are nearly 18 million students and 1 million teachers in K-12 schools in Turkey. The Education and Science Workers’ Union (Eğitim-Sen) declared that it had already detected positive cases at schools among teachers preparing for the new year at the end of August.

However, the very same pro-opposition union declared its support for government on Monday, stating, “Eğitim-Sen thinks that face-to-face education should be started in schools as soon as possible.” This is yet another example of the reactionary collaboration between the government, so-called opposition parties and trade unions against workers and their families.

Turkish Medical Association (TTB) President Sinan Adıyaman drew attention last week to the growing coronavirus crisis, stressing the contradiction between the statements by local governors and figures announced by the government.

Speaking to RS FM, he said: “Tests are done in 214 centers now. But doctors cannot learn the test results of their patients. The results go to a center in the ministry and only two or three people know them. If you talk about ‘transparency,’ why this privacy? Why do you sign a confidentiality agreement with these centers? What are you hiding? It turned out that these numbers do not reflect the truth ...”

He pointed out the disastrous situation in the capital, denouncing the government: “I have dentist friends working in the public hospitals in Ankara. They do contact tracing and these tests. According to their information, there are around 2,000 daily cases in Ankara. What are you hiding? People are dying. Physicians and health care professionals are dying. Tell the facts so that people take precautions accordingly.” Within just one week, the TTB’s Ankara office claimed Wednesday that new cases in Ankara had reached 4,000 daily.

At the end of August, the TTB also declared: “The proportion of infected and dying health workers is in first place among the world’s countries,” calling for immediate implementation of security measures. According to Adıyaman’s latest statement, at least 80 health care workers, including 32 doctors, have lost their lives.

Last week, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said 29,865 health care workers have been infected and 52 of them have died.

The government’s deadly response to the pandemic is provoking anger among all sections of the working class. After another doctor died on August 31, a doctor took to Twitter to stress the growing willingness to fight among health care workers: “My classmates are in anger, not sadness. These deaths are not destiny. I hear calls from health care workers to stop working collectively.”

With the reopened economy, the increasing numbers of cases and deaths are particularly concentrated among workers sent to work in factories and plants to produce super-profits for the banks. The pandemic is affecting too many factories and workplaces around Turkey to report on each one. However, appliance maker Vestel, Turkey’s largest factory and one of the largest in Europe, exemplifies the criminal policy of the ruling class. While it increased its profit 17-fold in the first half of the year, there are nearly 1,000 cases, and at least 8 workers have lost their lives in the factory.

The TTB prepared a report on the pandemic in the factory, located in the Manisa Organized Industrial Zone, where 16,000 workers work in total. Vestel management asked and received a court order banning news coverage of the report. The report stated that workers who showed symptoms were prevented from going to the hospital, that measures were insufficient and that workers worked 12 hours daily. Moreover, it declared that a workplace doctor at the Vestel factory was fired on charges of “leaking information about the workplace.”

According to Dr. Şahut Duran, chair of the TTB’s Manisa branch, workers in the Vestel factory formed “platforms to speak up and reached them via these platforms.” This points to increasing militancy and willingness to struggle among the workers and vindicates the calls by the World Socialist Web Site for workers to build independent the rank-and-file safety committees internationally.

On the other hand, the coronavirus crisis further exposes the collaboration between the government, big business and trade unions at workers’ expense.

The wage arrangement protocol signed by Turkish Airlines (THY) and the Turkish Civil Aviation Trade Union (Hava-İş) reveals the massive assault on the rights of workers, and the role of trade unions in these attacks amid a raging pandemic. Vast attacks are underway against airline workers internationally, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the protocol, by the end of 2021, 50 percent of the wages of cockpit personnel, 35 percent of the wages of cabin personnel and 30 percent of the wages of others will be cut. Workers will feel the impact of these huge cuts much more due to depreciation of the Turkish lira, causing high inflation.

The trade union states that the protection of employment is its top priority and that it agrees with the employer on this issue. This is a lie, however. The protocol does not state that there will be no dismissal or that unpaid leave cannot be imposed.

Moreover, in an email to the workers, the THY reportedly declared that those who do not accept the terms of the protocol would be forced to leave, supposedly of “their own consent.” Those who do not accept or do not make any choice will be forced to take unpaid leave, receiving only 1,170 Turkish liras (about US$160) per month from the state unemployment fund.

With the votes of the bourgeois opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), President Erdoğan’s government extended the forced “unpaid leave” process, meaning hunger conditions until July 2021 for hundreds of thousands or millions of workers. While minimum wage in Turkey is about 2,300 liras, a family of four goes hungry if it earns less than 2,400 liras per month.

The trade unions are not only collaborating with the ruling class in attacks on the working class, but also to ensure that the deadly back-to-work campaign is implemented without any social opposition from workers. Indeed, they are complicit in the death of workers and their families from COVID-19 in the workplaces.

The pro-opposition Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions (DİSK) declared at the end of March that in 48 hours it might invoke the constitutional right to not work in unsafe conditions. However, it has never called strikes up to this day.

US universities emerge as battlegrounds as students and faculty fight back against reckless reopening plans

Genevieve Leigh

Hundreds of college and university campuses throughout the US are emerging as central battlegrounds in the fight to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. In this fight, teachers, students, faculty, and staff stand on one side of the barricade, fighting for an end to the reckless policies of in-person learning, for resources to be allocated for safety measures and online learning, and for policies based on science, that put life over profit.

On the other side of this fight stands the university administrations, the corporate-controlled trade unions and both the Democrats and Republicans.

Striking University of Michigan grad students

The sharpest expression of this struggle is unfolding on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan where nearly 2,000 graduate student instructors are in the midst of a strike against in-person learning. The strike has the backing of thousands of undergraduates, lecturers, university staff, and workers from the community. Support from other campuses facing similar situations has also started to pour in, including from Columbia University, where grad students issued an open letter Wednesday in support of the Michigan students.

Despite the brave stand taken by students and workers, the University of Michigan administration has refused to meet the grad students’ demands. During a contentious general membership meeting of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) on Wednesday night, strikers voted 700 to 400 to reject the university’s proposal—which ignored their demands for remote learning only—and to continue their strike. There is no doubt that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the parent organization of the GEO, exerted pressure to end the strike before it became a catalyst for a broader movement against the reckless back-to-school policy, including in the public schools, where at least six teachers have died from COVID-19 over the last few weeks.

In fact, the expansion of the strike beyond the campus is exactly what is required for the struggle to be successful and lives to be saved. And there are already similar strikes brewing among students and faculty throughout the country.

The situation at the University of Michigan is far from unique. In almost every case, campuses that have reopened around the country have turned into hotspots for the virus. Students, faculty, and teachers are beginning to fight back.

California

The University of California, San Diego (UCSD), is working to implement its “Return to Learn” program, which includes a plan to offer 12 percent of fall 2020 courses using an in-person or hybrid modality. The 12 percent figure is deceptive; some 14,000 students will be brought back to campus under this plan.

UCSD has announced that at least 47 students, 21 campus employees and 184 healthcare employees have already tested positive for COVID-19. Despite these alarming figures, the university is planning to re-open for the fall quarter at the end of the month.

In opposition to this reckless policy nearly 600 UCSD students, faculty, and staff have signed an open letter to the university. The letter demands that administrators cancel in-person classes, limit housing to those with no other options, and cancel layoffs and furloughs.

The mounting opposition at UCSD comes as San Diego State University (SDSU) has announced a staggering 440 positive COVID-19 cases so far this semester, with 110 cases being added in the course of just two days. The positive cases are among students living both on and off-campus, and have increased exponentially since the surge was reported one week ago, from 64 to 440.

There are many indications of widespread hostility to SDSU’s reopening policies among the students and faculty. Students have spoken out on social media, exposing the inadequate response from the administration. One student post on Reddit outlines many of the issues in great detail, and gives a sense of the sentiments of students toward the administration’s policies. The student writes, “They ONLY care about taking our money, but will act under the guise of ‘caring’ about our health and safety, and do everything to avoid the easy and obvious solution because it doesn’t bring in money. And where is our money actually going? Does anyone really know?” The post has been “upvoted” over 500 times.

It should also be noted that SDSU is planning to allow contact sports such as football to continue, despite the obvious health risks, while canceling other non-contact sports. The lucrative nature of college sports is one major factor driving these decisions.

New York

New York University (NYU) opened its doors at various buildings throughout New York City to over 10,000 students for in-person learning on September 2. The university is endangering the lives not only of thousands of students, faculty and staff, but also countless city residents who will inevitably come into contact with students and faculty as they go about their lives. NYU has been at the forefront of the relentless campaign to reopen colleges in the fall since mid-March. The university has launched a plan titled “NYU Returns” in order to promote the illusion that the reopening is safe. As part of the plan, NYU promised a COVID-19 tracking dashboard that has still not been launched more than a week into the reopening. It is clear that the real aim of “NYU Returns” is to absolve NYU of any responsibility for an outbreak of COVID-19 and exempt it from having to reimburse tuition by placing all the blame for infections on students, faculty and staff.

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at NYU has called for mobilization of students, faculty and other workers to oppose the reckless reopening.

Columbia University began in-person classes on Tuesday. About 1,000 students are on campus, and about 13,000 are living off-campus, with 4,400 living in Columbia-owned housing and the rest in other apartments, according to President Lee Bollinger. While there has yet to emerge any organized opposition at Columbia, the Columbia grad students issued a statement of support for striking University of Michigan graduate students on Wednesday.

At Cornell University, Resident Assistants went on a one-day strike in opposition to unsafe reopening.

Texas

Baylor University reported the most COVID-19 cases yet for Texas schools, a total of 824, with around a five percent positivity rate. As of Thursday evening, there were 256 active cases in the Baylor University community, according to the school’s COVID-19 dashboard. Baylor, the school with the most infections, is suspending students who violate the rules and increasing off-campus university police patrols.

And the University of Texas, Austin reported 103 new cases between September 1 and 3 alone. The university’s confirmed cases increased by 109 on Wednesday and now totals 282 student cases after the school began adding off-campus cases to its official tally. Students at UT Austin are not routinely tested. However, college athletes are reportedly tested three times a week.

UT Austin students have also reported that not all residents in dorms with confirmed cases were made aware of the outbreaks by school officials through any medium. Instead, students found out about the cases through the school newspaper, The Daily Texan, which spread the word through Twitter.

Students have started a petition at UT Austin demanding that all residents, faculty and staff working and living on campus be notified when COVID-19 cases are confirmed. At the time of writing 1,167 people had signed the petition.

Many other schools have seen outbreaks.

This week West Virginia University was forced to suspend in-person undergrad classes amid a spike in COVID-19 cases. West Virginia University enrolls nearly 30,000 students across all its campuses and programs. The state had a staggering 11,600 confirmed cases as of Monday. Similarly, University of Wisconsin, Madison was forced to temporarily move classes online after a spike in cases. However, both WVU and UW-Madison are planning to reopen campus after just a two-week break.

Despite overwhelming scientific evidence and the most recent experiences at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Notre Dame, scores of universities are still pushing forward with reopening plans. According to the College Crisis Initiative, a research project at Davidson College in North Carolina, more than 1,000 four-year colleges and universities in the United States planned to bring students back to campus in some form this fall, with 45 planning to operate “fully in person.”

The cost of these decisions is now playing out in real time. They will result in more cases, more hospitalizations and more death if not stopped. The Socialist Equality Party and its youth and student wing, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, urge students, teachers and staff to link up their struggles to put an end to the sacrifice of human life for corporate profit.

Colombian security forces massacre 10 youth protesting police murder

Andrea Lobo

On Wednesday night, Colombian police used gunfire to massacre at least 10 people protesting the police killing of Javier Ordóñez, a 43-year-old lawyer and taxi driver, the previous night in the capital city of Bogotá.

A video posted online showed Ordóñez being repeatedly beaten and tortured with tasers by police officers, who detained him for allegedly violating the COVID-19 quarantine. The scenes, with Ordóñez pleading for his life, saying “I’m choking,” and witnesses asking the officials to stop, recalled for many the police murder of George Floyd in the United States.

Motorcycle police in Bogota.

In employing deadly force against protesters, the Colombian government of far-right President Iván Duque is following the lead of its imperialist patron in Washington, the Trump administration, which has used the federal forces to kidnap protesters in unmarked vans and carry out the targeted killing of a demonstrator in Seattle.

The massacre in Bogotá has only fueled more anger. Numerous protests are being planned for the rest of the week in Bogotá, Medellín and Barranquilla, marking a resurgence of the mass protests against social inequality that erupted across Latin America last year. Colombia itself witnessed an initial wave of protests across university campuses and strikes in the public sector.

Since the early afternoon Wednesday, as the video of Ordoñez’s murder went viral, protests led by youth began spreading across predominantly working class neighborhoods in the Bogotá metropolitan area and other cities of the country. Focusing their anger on the police, demonstrators, according to police reports, burned down 22 local police stations and defaced 49 others.

After initially employing tear gas, stun grenades and charges with batons and vehicles, after dusk, the National Police began using live ammunition in various parts of the city, in a clearly coordinated and systematic fashion against unarmed protesters.

The Bogotá district authorities have reported that seven civilians were killed and 248 were injured, 66 of them from gunfire. In the working class municipality of Soacha, which belongs to the Bogotá metropolitan area, the mayor confirmed that three additional demonstrators were killed. At least three of those wounded are still in intensive care.

The police killing of Javier Ordóñez

Videos shared on social media show groups of police officers employing their firearms to enforce an undeclared curfew. Others are seen chasing down lone protesters and executing them. Without any potential danger nearby, police in uniform and plainclothes indiscriminately shot volleys of gunfire in at least three separate locations, as confirmed by Semana. Police were also filmed damaging businesses to scapegoat demonstrators.

In a radio interview, the partner of the youngest of the victims, 17-year-old Jaider Fonseca, described the incident: “The police began shooting in the air and then forward at people who were protesting with rocks. [Javier] ran as soon as the shots started; his only defense was a door, he hid, but still was hit with four shots; he was riddled.”

“They were not killing anyone, they were not stealing, they were demanding their rights,” she concluded.

The Duque regime and police authorities have unabashedly initiated an intensification of the crackdown, including the deployment of 300 more troops to Bogotá to assist the police in the repression.

Duque himself has shown absolutely no remorse. Instead, he threatened anyone who dared call the police “killers,” and denounced “the violence, vandalism and hatred … any incitement to act above the law.”

Despite that, the one-sided and criminal character of the onslaught was clear from widely seen videos, the chief of the National Police, Gustavo Alberto Moreno, ominously defended the role of the police, declaring: “This police, with humility, recognizes its errors, but also celebrates the heroic work of thousands of police.” Moreno has received training from the Secret Service and FBI and worked as a police attaché in Washington D.C.

Javier Ordóñez with his two children

The Minister of Defense, Carlos Holmes Trujillo, who oversees the military operations of the Pentagon’s closest ally in the region, threatened demonstrators with further police-state measures. “Regarding those who participated in the violent acts and vandalism yesterday, we have identified profiles on social media that made publications against the police … all of them aimed at discrediting the performance and service of the National Police.”

He then offered bounties of $13,500 for information that helps “to find and identify” the participants in the protests.

Bogotá Mayor Claudia López of the Green Alliance acknowledged that she was presiding over repressive operations Wednesday from police headquarters, but claimed on Twitter that no order was given to employ firearms. Amid confrontations between the heavily armed police and the unarmed youth, however, López continuously denounced the “vandalism” and “violence.”

Later on Thursday, López sought to deflect any blame by pointing her finger at “the commander of the National Police, that is, the President of the Republic,” while adding, “ we have serious and solid evidence of the indiscriminate use of firearms by members of the police.”

These responses from the political establishment confirm that the ruling class is rushing headlong toward dictatorial forms of rule. Any calls for administrative wrist-slapping are aimed at diverting mass social anger, relying on the corporate media, the “opposition” politicians and the trade unions to continue appealing for “police reform.”

This was already exemplified earlier this year, when a handful of suspensions and internal “inquiries” were used to quiet down a scandal over a profiling and spying operation by military intelligence against over 100 journalists, activists and politicians.

The Colombian ruling class is well aware that it sits on a social powder keg. The Duque government recently extended until June 2021 a $43 monthly stipend per household, which has barely kept about 2.6 million of the poorest households from starvation during the pandemic crisis.

Employer associations have welcomed this program, with the small cost of $2 billion, as a means of averting mass upheavals. However, this miserly amount has done little or nothing to protect the growing layers of impoverished workers and unemployed from the virus and economic desperation.

According to the state statistical agency DANE, 90.3 percent of confirmed coronavirus deaths correspond to the poorest three strata of the population, which qualify for subsidies for utilities, while the richest sixth stratum accounts for just 1 percent of COVID-19 fatalities.

Juan Daniel Oviedo, director of DANE, told El Tiempo, “Poor households, with elderly and less educated adults, unable to abide by isolation rules due to the need to find their sustenance, were more exposed to the pandemic, which is reflected in their higher mortality.”

Colombia has the sixth highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the world (686,851) and the 11th highest confirmed death toll (22,053). DANE, however reported that as of August 23, there were 7,257 suspected COVID-19 deaths that were never tested, and more than 10,000 excess deaths above the official count. Bogota is the country’s pandemic epicenter with a third of the cases.

Meanwhile, the wealth of Colombia’s billionaires listed by Forbes has only increased during the pandemic to over $13.7 billion. Now, the Colombian oligarchy, in partnership with its financial and corporate backers on Wall Street and in Europe, is moving to greatly intensify the exploitation of Colombia’s working class and natural resources.

The Duque government lifted most lockdown measures on September 1, except for schools, social gatherings and indoor entertainment.

The massacre of protesters in Bogotá signals the willingness of the Colombian ruling class to employ deadly violence and authoritarian rule to crush opposition from below to its criminal response to the pandemic. It has already showed its indifference to the lives of workers claimed by COVID-19.

The turn to authoritarianism by capitalist governments in Colombia and internationally derives from the efforts of the capitalist class to defend its massive wealth amid record levels of inequality and widespread social devastation.

Spanish government demands schools reopen as COVID-19 deaths surge

Alice Summers

The Spanish government’s politically criminal decision to reopen schools amid a massive wave of COVID-19 infections will lead to countless unnecessary deaths. Both ruling parties, the “left populist” Podemos and the social-democratic Socialist Party (PSOE), are acting with complete indifference to the health and lives of millions of teachers, children and their families.

Spain remains the epicentre of the coronavirus resurgence in Western Europe. This weekend, the country reached a grim milestone, passing half a million infections after recording 26,560 new cases between Friday and Sunday. The officially tally now stands at 543,379. Friday also saw 184 new deaths, the highest number of daily fatalities since the end of May. While the manipulated official death toll stands at 29,516, analyses by major newspapers indicate that at least 45,000 people have died of the virus in Spain.

A student studying (Credit: pixabay.com)

The ruling class is gloating, however, that the school re-openings will allow them to implement its fascistic “herd immunity” policy—allowing the virus to run its course through the population with no regard for the death and destruction that will follow.

On Wednesday, the right-wing regional premier of Madrid, Isabel Ayuso, told Es Radio: “It is likely that practically all children, one way or another, will be infected with coronavirus.”

Ayuso made clear her contempt to the fate of schoolchildren and their families. “Perhaps they will become infected over the weekend at a family meeting,” she stated dismissively, “or in the afternoon in the park or catch it from a classmate. We just don’t know, because the virus can be anywhere.” Nevertheless, she stressed “children must return to school,” to “be with children of their own age,” get back to “their routines,” and “be socialised.”

Aware of explosive opposition among teachers and parents, Ayuso arrogantly demanded that there be “no strikes or threats,” claiming that “This is not the time for ‘me, me, me’ ” from workers.

Ayuso’s fascistic rant is, however, the key to understanding the policy of the PSOE-Podemos government. Speaking to the daily El País, PSOE Education Minister Isabel Celaá parroted anti-scientific, discredited claims that opening schools will not lead to an increase in infections. “Today it is being established in the field of science that closing schools does not bring any benefit to the evolution of the pandemic in terms of the reduction of cases,” she stated. “And the benefits of school are far greater than the risks. …”

In a separate interview with Radio Nacional de España (RNE), Celaá declared that for children, “the safest place is at school,” insisting that school re-opening will go ahead as planned against all scientific evidence and popular opposition.

“As long as there is no uncontrolled transmission,” she stated, “which will have to be determined by the Ministry of Health, schools must remain open because we are all living with the pandemic.”

On this basis, the PSOE-Podemos government is threatening to sue all parents who do not send their children to school to be infected with COVID-19. The Attorney General’s office announced on Thursday that it will initiate “criminal proceedings” against any parent of a child aged 6 to 16 who does not attend school. It declared that in-person school attendance is an “inescapable obligation,” accusing parents who wish to keep their children at home of neglect.

It threatened that parental “voluntary, unjustified and persistent neglect will lead to legal consequences stemming from their failure to fulfil the inherent duties of parental authority.”

The PSOE-Podemos government is acting with open contempt for the lives and health of teachers as well as of students and their families.

Ayuso’s prediction that almost all Spanish children will contract COVID-19 testifies to a staggering contempt for the health and lives of not only their parents and older relatives, who more often contract deadly forms of the illness, but also of the children themselves. It is now scientifically documented that COVID-19 can frequently cause serious and lasting heart damage and diseases such as Kawasaki’s syndrome in children.

Moreover, Spain has one of the highest proportions of older teachers in Western Europe, with 38.2 percent of teachers over 50 and with an average age of 46. There are 22,127 teachers over age 60 in Spain (nearly 5 percent of all education workers); nearly 2,000 of these are over 65. Thousands of educators are therefore being put in severe risk, as individuals above 60 are known to be one of the groups most vulnerable to dying of coronavirus.

The virus is spreading rapidly across Spain. In an indication of the widespread community transmission in Spain, between 2,000 and 2,500 of the 67,000 educators tested (over 3.5 percent) came back with a positive antibody test. Those with a positive result now must be checked to ascertain whether they remain infectious.

Limited measures that have been announced in some of Spain’s 17 regions, such as reducing class sizes, requiring children over age six to wear masks, and implementing social distancing measures, are derisory on the face of it, and in many cases have not even been implemented.

Last week, Ayuso announced at the 11th hour that all teachers in the Madrid region should undergo a coronavirus antibody test before the start of term. Educators were summoned by e-mail on less than 24 hours’ notice to undergo testing, leading to chaotic scenes of thousands of people queuing on the streets of Madrid, with social distancing measures all but impossible.

On Saturday, it was announced that 30 percent of classrooms in Catalan primary schools have as yet failed to meet class-size reduction policies, less than a week before schools are set to reopen. The government of Catalonia had pledged that no more than 20 pupils would be allowed in each classroom, but this ratio, in itself insufficient to prevent the spread of the virus, has not been met in many public schools. There is no pupil limit at all for secondary school classrooms.

The Association of Families for a Safe Education Choice, a Catalan-based parents’ group, condemned the Catalan government for the lack of safety measures in schools, denouncing them for “turning education centres into slaughterhouses.” Schools, the Association declared, “are the ideal setting for a new general outbreak in terms of public health,” with the “use of masks serving no purpose at all in enclosed, restricted spaces, without ventilation or cleaning equipment.”

Around 39,000 more teachers will be needed across the country to keep to the Ministry of Education’s recommendation that class sizes should not exceed 20 children, according to Spain’s regional governments. The Workers Commissions (CCOO) union estimates this figure to be around 70,000. Many regions are far from reaching these hiring requirements.

In an early indication of the disaster which is about to sweep across Spain as schools reopen, one nursery in Seville, in the province of Andalucía, has already been forced to close after a staff member tested positive. Sixty infants between the ages of zero and three who attended the nursery must now self-isolate at home.

Parents who cannot work or bring in an income while their children are quarantining will receive nothing from the state. Despite previously pledging to cover sick leave costs for parents staying at home to care for quarantining or infected children, PSOE Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has now backtracked, declaring that parents would have to rely on existing unpaid sick leave programmes.

On Friday, Sánchez declared that “there is no zero risk” with opening schools, but that he wanted to convey a message of “reasonable safety” to educators. Spain’s 17 autonomous regions must not close schools “unilaterally,” he stated, whatever the public health dangers.

Over 10,500 Florida children test positive for COVID-19 after schools reopen

Matthew MacEgan

According to a report published in the Washington Post earlier this week, cases of COVID-19 among school-aged children in Florida have increased by 34 percent since schools started to reopen in early August. More than 10,500 children under the age of 18 have tested positive since August 10, when about half of the state’s 4,500 public schools began ushering students back into their buildings.

On Wednesday, the Orlando Sentinel reported that more than 800 students and staff in Central Florida schools were now under quarantine orders after potentially being exposed to COVID-19. On Tuesday, a separate report emerged that 500 students and staff in Pinellas County schools also faced a possible quarantine after similar exposures.

Students in class (Credit: pixy.org)

Olympia High School in Orange County, Golfview Elementary School in Brevard County, and Harmony Middle School in Osceola County have all recently been closed after reports surfaced that teachers tested positive for COVID-19. At least nine Manatee County schools reported positive cases between Friday and Tuesday.

Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, has not held an in-person Cabinet meeting since February. The Capitol in Tallahassee has remained shut to the public, despite DeSantis’ rabid efforts to reopen schools and loosen restrictions on businesses throughout Florida in the middle of a raging pandemic.

A spokesperson for DeSantis recently stated that “the state’s economic engine needs to start running again. While the symbolism of the Capitol opening will be welcome, the fact is, essential work is getting done with essential personnel. In the meantime, we are starting our economic engines.”

On Thursday morning, Florida reported 2,583 new cases of COVID-19 and 211 new deaths from the virus. This brings the state’s official totals to more than 654,000 confirmed cases and over 12,300 deaths. The new deaths reported Thursday include 49 in Miami-Dade County, 14 in Broward County, and 9 in Palm Beach County—all southern counties hardest hit by COVID-19.

The declining number of positive cases over the past two months is entirely the result of a similar decline in testing statewide. In July, the daily average of tests given was 54,400; in August it was 32,000; and so far in September it is 23,000. This is about half of the number of daily tests given two months ago, when the daily number of new cases was also more than twice as high. About 4.8 million people have been tested in Florida—not even a quarter of the recorded 2019 population of 21.48 million.

When it comes to schools, the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) has been directing some districts to shut down their individual COVID-19 dashboards, effectively leaving entire communities in the dark about new cases and deaths in their region. This includes Duval County, where a group of courageous educators and parents have launched a rank-and-file safety committee to demand that schools be closed immediately.

Source: Florida Department of Health

The Duval committee invited two local doctors to speak at a virtual meeting this past Tuesday: Dr. Mohammed B. Reza, an infectious disease specialist in Atlantic Beach who is affiliated with the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, and Dr. Nancy Staats, a retired anesthesiologist who has been active in pressuring local politicians and administrators to enforce CDC policies. The meeting was attended by teachers, parents, school counselors, and other workers from Duval and surrounding counties.

Dr. Reza began by exposing the official positivity rate currently being reported by the State of Florida—between four and six percent depending on the day—as a sham. He pointed to a resource independent of the influence of the state that shows the real positive test rate is 13.5 percent, a number which indicates insufficient testing.

“Hiding information like the rate of infection and the positive test rate is just mind-blowing to me,” Reza stated. “Not only this, but the governor has cut down the number of tests being given since the recent hurricane by half. We all know it’s going to get worse. It’s like watching a train crash.”

When asked to discuss some of the science behind how the virus infects people, Dr. Reza explained that there is no defined data on how much of a “viral load” is necessary to cause infection. “In other viruses, there is a certain ‘load’ that you need to be exposed to that can cause you to become infected. With HIV, for instance, you need a viral load of about 200 copies to be able to transmit it to another person. Since COVID-19 is aerosolized, the viral load is likely thousands of copies in just a single cough or sneeze from one infected person to another.”

Dr. Reza also explained that excessive cleaning means very little when students, teachers, and staff are being forced into shared spaces. “Cleaning is of course a good idea, but when you have 500 people coming together, that cleaning goes out the door. We’re not even sure if it’s really surfaces that are the main transmitter of the virus. It’s more likely that most infections come from face-to-face interactions. On top of this, children are known to be petri dishes of infections. They touch their faces; they sneeze and cough. Trying to keep a mask on is just not possible in these school settings.”

Dr. Staats reported to those present at the Duval committee meeting that one county inadvertently released data showing that the rate of staff-to-student cases is in the range of 60 to 80 percent. “What this means is that most of the positive cases are among staff and faculty, which tells us that students are not being tested. This could be due to the children being asymptomatic or parents not wanting their kids to be tested.”

“Sadly, children are the Trojan horse in this situation,” Dr. Reza added.

Parents and educators in Osceola County, like their compatriots in Duval, have also been making efforts to fight their school reopenings. Several community members, including Christina Stewart, who sent a statement to the World Socialist Web Site last week, attended their school board meeting on Tuesday to denounce the reopening policies and relate how frightened educators are to speak out on conditions for fear of losing their jobs.

Megan Carter, a daycare worker, chastised the school board: “I think it’s very disingenuous to pretend that opening schools was going to be less disruptive than going into schools knowing that there were going to be cases and knowing that there were going to be people who would get infected and have to quarantine. With a little creativity, we could’ve gone back to school 100 percent virtually. We could’ve planned for this. It’s a shame that we haven’t.”

Carter demanded that the school board explain why Poinciana High School had its entire cafeteria staff absent from school that day without any explanation or notice that they were being quarantined. She was never answered except with a boiler-plate response later in the meeting from the board and Superintendent Debra Pace that “we are putting all the information that we legally can put on [our] web site.”

The FDOH, which has suppressed public knowledge of COVID-19 infections in schools, has told news outlets that it is working to release data about schools and daycare centers, but has not given a timetable on when this vital information will be made public, saying vaguely that it could take days or weeks. The state’s existing COVID-19 dashboard has been mired in controversy throughout the year. In May, Rebekah Jones, the state’s top COVID-19 researcher who developed the dashboard, was fired after she refused to manipulate data.

Despite having the highest numbers of cases and deaths in the state, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, which remain in “Phase 1” of reopening, are also discussing a deadly return to in-person learning. Broward County School Superintendent Robert Runcie held a news conference Tuesday saying that schools in his county will be reopening in October “if the current trends continue,” a reference to the incomplete data being issued by the state.

“We need to be prepared for a challenging school year which could be a roller coaster when it comes to the virus,” Runcie stated. His comparison of this deadly situation to an amusement park ride sums up the disdain of the ruling class and its lackeys for the lives of students, teachers, staff, and their loved ones.

The human cost of school reopenings: Six teachers dead in the US in the past month

Renae Cassimeda

As a result of the widespread reopening of K-12 schools across the US, at least six teachers have died from COVID-19 over the past month, bring the death toll among educators to at least 210 since the start of the pandemic. All of these deaths were absolutely unnecessary and are the direct result of criminal policies carried out by Democratic and Republican politicians at every level in the interest of protecting the profits of the financial oligarchy.

The recently leaked recordings of telephone interviews between US President Donald Trump and senior Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward have made clear that the Trump administration was fully aware of the massive and deadly danger posed by COVID-19 as early as January. The White House, both big business parties, and the corporate media have conspired to downplay the threat of COVID-19 and try to inure the population to mass death.

A large proportion of the deaths of educators are from New York City, an earlier major epicenter of the virus, where at least 31 teachers and 44 staff members have died from COVID-19, mainly in March and April. Underscoring the fact that the conspiracy against the working class continues today, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is colluding with the United Federation of Teachers to once again reopen schools in the largest school district in the country, with the aim of forcing 1.1 million students back into classrooms in order to set a precedent for Democrat-led districts across the country that have begun with online instruction.

The six reported deaths linked to school reopenings mark the beginning of what will become a flood of such reports, barring the independent intervention of educators, parents and students to force the closure of schools. The Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee is fighting to organize the immense opposition to the deadly school reopenings, helping already to form committees in Florida, Texas, Michigan and New York.

Demetria “Demi” Bannister (Credit: Leevy's Funeral Home)

In Columbia, South Carolina, Demetria “Demi” Bannister, only 28 years old, died Monday, September 7, just three days after being diagnosed with COVID-19. Bannister was a third grade teacher at Windsor Elementary School and had worked there for five years. In addition to teaching, Bannister was passionate about music and worked with the school choir, as well as a student club for aspiring singers.

The district began the school year virtually on August 31, and Bannister began the year teaching from home. However, she had been forced to work from her school site the week prior for teacher training. South Carolina has had more than 126,000 infections and over 2,900 deaths since the onset of the pandemic.

In Potosi, Missouri, 34-year-old AshLee DeMarinis, a special education teacher at John Evans Middle School, died Sunday, September 6, after a three-week battle with complications from COVID-19. Coronavirus cases have been rising in Missouri since early August.

St. Louis County health officials said last week that 39 students and 34 staff members at public and private schools tested positive in August, with most of the students attending middle or high schools. The state reported 773 new cases on Tuesday, surpassing 95,000 in total. According to Johns Hopkins University, Missouri is now tied with Oklahoma for the fifth-highest rate of new confirmed cases per 1,000 residents. St. Louis County is in the top 50 counties for total COVID-19 case numbers.

In Vancleave, Mississippi, Tom Slade, 53, tested positive for COVID-19 on August 24 and died Sunday. Since 1991, Slade taught US history and World Civilizations at Vancleave High School. According to the Jackson County School District’s reopening guidelines, teachers had returned to the classroom on August 3, with in-person instruction beginning August 6, but reports indicated that Slade contracted the virus from a church gathering.

In Oxford, Mississippi, 42-year-old Nacoma James, a teacher at Lafayette Middle School, died in early August during the first week that students returned to campus. James, also the Lafayette High School Football coach for over 16 years, spent the summer coaching at football practices until he was forced to self-quarantine after contracting COVID-19. Mississippi alone has reported 604 COVID-19 cases among school teachers and staff since the start of the pandemic, with the majority happening over the past six weeks.

In Tahlequah, Oklahoma, Teresa Horn, 62, died August 28 from a heart attack after testing positive for COVID-19 just four days prior. She was a special education teacher at Tahlequah High School for 26 years. Horn had been teaching on site until August 21, when she called in sick.

The sixth death is a still unnamed special education teacher in the Des Moines Public Schools in Iowa, who died on Tuesday, September 1. District spokesman Phil Roeder said the teacher, who worked at the Ruby Van Meter School for intellectually disabled students, fell ill after an out-of-state trip and died this week. Nearly 1,500 district employees have underlying health conditions that could put them at higher risk, not including those who are over age 60.

One in four teachers in the US, or nearly 1.5 million people, are at increased risk for serious illness if they become infected with the coronavirus, according to a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). This figure includes educators who are over the age of 65 or who have an underlying health condition that makes them more vulnerable to complications from COVID-19.

Infections have exploded in Florida, one of the five states with state-mandated in-person instruction available part-time or full-time for K-12 students. According to a report published in the Washington Post earlier this week, cases of COVID-19 among school-aged children in Florida have increased by 34 percent since schools started to reopen in August. This means that more than 10,500 children under the age of 18 have tested positive since August 10, when about half of the state’s 4,500 public schools began herding students back into their buildings.

Amid such stark conditions, K-12 schools and colleges have continued to reopen their campuses with in-person instruction in recent weeks, producing a rapid spike in COVID-19 cases in these communities. In places where major opposition is mounting, local and state governments have leaned on contracts and the courts to retaliate against opposition to in-person reopening plans.

In Polk County, Iowa, the Des Moines Public School District filed for an injunction after the Iowa Department of Education denied its waiver to begin the school year fully online. The district’s counsel claimed, “social distancing would be impossible because most of Des Moines’ schools are already at capacity, putting students and staff at risk for COVID-19.” A district court judge denied the motion on Tuesday, siding with the state, and argued that in-person school attendance was a matter of state law, not local control. The ruling came one week after confirmation of the above-mentioned Des Moines teacher’s death was released.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds issued a criminal state mandate in July that every student must spend at least half of their schooling inside classrooms. Temporary or continuous remote learning for an entire school or district can only be requested if the COVID-19 positivity rate averages 15 to 20 percent countywide over the course of 14 days.

Polk County’s current positivity rate is just under 10 percent, itself a highly-elevated figure that indicates widespread community transmission and inadequate testing. It has the highest number of cases and deaths in the state with 14,313 cases and 248 deaths, while cases have surged throughout the state with major outbreaks at the universities.

On August 31, teachers in Andover, Massachusetts protested unsafe working conditions by refusing to work inside their school buildings for a professional development day. Teachers had cited concerns about poor ventilation and safety and decided to work outside the school buildings instead. School district officials denounced the action as an “illegal strike” and took legal action against teachers, who were then ordered back to work by the union.

The Commonwealth Employment Relations Board (CERB) ruled Wednesday that Andover teachers participated in an illegal strike when they refused to enter school buildings for a professional development day last week.

Andover Public Schools are set to begin the school year with a hybrid learning plan on September 16, with each student attending in-person two full days per week. The court ruling indicates that teachers have no right to choose where they work, regardless of safety concerns, and the teachers unions have long agreed to these mandates.

Alongside hundreds of thousands of workers throughout the world, educators are being sacrificed in the interests of private profit. Workers and youth are waking up to this reality across the globe and entering struggles to close their campuses and protect their teachers and students. This fight is currently spearheaded by the strike of graduate students at the University of Michigan, which portends a major upsurge of the class struggle in the US and internationally.

The fight to ensure not a single further death is inflicted on the population lies in the struggle of teachers, school workers, and students to protect their lives by forming independent, rank-and-file safety committees which they control. Such committees have begun forming throughout the US, with committees in Detroit, Texas, and New York City established within the past week.

The coronavirus conspiracy: What did they know, and when did they know it?

Andre Damon

The release by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward of tapes showing that Trump deliberately misled the public over the COVID-19 pandemic has cast light on a massive conspiracy at the highest levels of the American state to cover up the threat posed by the disease.

In the tapes published by Woodward, the president admits to lying to the public as part of a criminal policy that has already taken the lives of nearly 200,000 people. But it is clear that he did not act alone.

Richard Nixon’s abortive effort to break into the Watergate hotel to ransack Democratic Party files pales in comparison with the present crime, which involves preventable death on a massive scale. But the bigger the crime, the bigger must be the group of conspirators. Unlike the Watergate conspiracy, which involved just a handful of people, the coverup surrounding the pandemic involves not just the president, but his cabinet, the federal bureaucracy, the intelligence agencies, Congress, and the media.

The watchword of the Watergate investigation that led to the resignation of Nixon in 1964 was, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Today, the same question must be asked of every institution of the American political establishment: “What did they know, and when did they know it?”

January

Throughout the month of January, the number of new COVID-19 cases in the Chinese province of Hubei grew steadily, reaching a peak at the end of the month. The city of Wuhan, with its hospital system totally overrun, was put under lockdown, with residents only allowed out to buy groceries.

As demonstrated by Trump’s description of his phone call with Chinese president Xi Jinping, Chinese authorities were as transparent with US officials as they were with the public health community, precisely explaining the disease’s method of transmission, its fatality rate, and the measures necessary to contain it.

According to subsequent studies, community transmission was likely already occurring in the United States by early January. But despite the availability of a COVID-19 test from the World Health Organization, no tests were conducted in the US during the entire month of January, according to figures from the COVID Tracking Project.

On January 24, the Senate Health Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a closed-door briefing, open to all senators, on the COVID-19 outbreak. Committee staffers told the WSWS that no records were kept of the content of or attendance at the meeting. However, media reports indicate that Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr and Senator Kelly Loeffler attended.

A photo of the January 24 hearing published by the Senate Health committee on Twitter. Beyond this photo, there is no public record of attendance of the meeting or the statements made there.

Emerging from the hearing, Dr. Anthony Fauci told reporters, “I don't think this is something that the United States public should be worried or frightened about.” He added, “I think the risk is very low right now for the United States.”

Whatever was said in private at the hearing, Loeffler did not get the same message as Fauci communicated publicly. Beginning immediately after the hearing, Loeffler began selling stock in the first of 29 stock transactions lasting several weeks. While she dumped stocks that lost value, she purchased shares in the online meeting firm Citrix, whose business boomed during the pandemic.

On January 28, according to Woodward's account, Trump was told by his national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, “This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency... This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”

Woodward’s reporting is consistent with an account published in the Washington Post on March 20, which reported that lawmakers were repeatedly and extensively briefed about the danger posed by the pandemic.

U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting.

The report continued:

Taken together, the reports and warnings painted an early picture of a virus that showed the characteristics of a globe-encircling pandemic that could require governments to take swift actions to contain it. But despite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans. Lawmakers, too, did not grapple with the virus in earnest until this month [that is, March]…

Intelligence agencies “have been warning on this since January,” said a U.S. official who had access to intelligence reporting that was disseminated to members of Congress and their staffs as well as to officials in the Trump administration, and who, along with others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive information.

February

No systematic testing for COVID-19 took place until the very end of February, despite the fact that the first US fatality had already occurred. During the month, Reuters reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee was receiving “daily” updates “monitoring the spread of the illness around the world.”

Between January 31 and February 18, Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, sold between $1.5 million to $6 million worth of stock. On February 13, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr sold between $628,000 and $1.72 million in stock, unloading shares in hotel chains that would see their shares plunge as a result of the pandemic.

On February 27, Burr secretly told a group of affluent Washington insiders at a private club known as the Tar Heel Circle, who paid as much as $10,000 per year for membership, that the pandemic would be much more severe than the public was being told. “There’s one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history,” he said, according to a secret recording of the remarks obtained by NPR. “It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”

These statements flatly contradicted the tone of a public op-ed he wrote just three days earlier, in which he declared the US is “better prepared than ever before” to respond to a pandemic. Burr would subsequently resign as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in response to the revelation.

As the senators were dumping their stock, there was still no testing occurring, even with widespread community transmission in the US. The first batch of COVID-19 tests occurred on February 29.

Throughout the months of January and February, leading figures within the Democratic Party observed an airtight silence on the pandemic. This was in line with the posture of the New York Times, which did not write a single editorial on the subject between January 29 and February 29.

The embargo appears to have been lifted approximately on February 25-27. The Twitter accounts of Nancy Pelosi, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which had not posted a single statement about the outbreak for the first seven weeks of the year, all tweeted about the virus during that timespan. Joe Biden also tweeted, declaring, “If I were president today, I would not be taking China's word when it comes to the coronavirus.”

March

In March, the floodgates opened, as testing began to come online, and the number of documented US cases surged from less than a hundred to more than 200,000. But it was not until approximately March 14 that widespread lockdowns began in the United States. If lockdowns had had begun just two weeks earlier, on March 1, Columbia University estimated that 83 percent of the country’s COVID-19 deaths could have been avoided.

On March 19, Trump told journalist Bob Woodward that he was deliberately misleading the American public about the danger. “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

On March 14, the Socialist Equality Party published a statement entitled, “Shut down the auto industry to halt the spread of coronavirus!” which circulated widely inside the auto plants of the American Midwest.

Autoworkers stage a walkout at Dundee Engine south of Ann Arbor

Over the following week, a series of wildcat strikes forced the shutdown of the entire US auto industry, with Fiat Chrysler announcing the end of production on March 18. Trump’s interview with Woodward occurred the next day, as the markets were near their lows for the year after the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped close to 10,000 points.

The first procedural vote on what would become the CARES Act took place on March 22. After that vote failed, the Dow futures hit their down limit. Another procedural vote failed on March 23, after which the markets reached their low for the year.

On March 25, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced an agreement on the CARES Act. The Senate unanimously passed the bill that evening, and the House followed with an unrecorded voice vote. The bill was signed by Trump within just four days of the first procedural vote.

On the same day as the first procedural vote for the CARES Act, and within just a week of the beginning of widespread lockdowns, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman published “A Plan to Get America Back to Work,” arguing for letting the virus run rampant through the population and a policy of “herd immunity.”

Trump immediately began agitating for an end to lockdowns, just one week after they began in earnest, using Friedman’s phrase, “The cure can’t be worse than the disease.” Immediately, states began the campaign to end lockdowns, aided by media accounts that declared that Americans were sick of restrictions and demanding a return to work, despite polls to the contrary.

By mid-May, manufacturing activity had resumed in every state, and over the subsequent months, effectively all restrictions were dropped, culminating with the reopening of indoor dining in New York and gyms in Michigan this week, alongside the nationwide reopening of schools and universities.

Public health officials blamed the major resurgence of the pandemic on the premature ending of lockdowns, which, according to Fauci and others, were far shallower and shorter than they were in Europe.

                                                 * * *

By the beginning of next week, more than 200,000 people will have died in the United Sates from COVID-19. These deaths were the result of a conspiracy to place profits over human lives.

It is clear that everyone was in on this conspiracy except the broad mass of the population. The intelligence agencies warned the politicians, both in the White House and in Congress. The politicians warned their well-heeled backers.

Among those deceived were Trump’s deluded followers among sections of the middle class and working class, who Trump secretly despises and whose lives mean nothing to him. The people now lying in mass graves on Ellis Island, the human beings whose bodies were defiled by being piled in refrigerated trucks in the Bronx, or in the spare rooms of Sinai Grace hospital in Detroit—they were left out.

In an editorial published Thursday, the New York Times, responding to the Woodward tapes, commented, “Imagine what this picture could look like today had the president been honest with the American public on Feb. 7.”

Obviously, Trump was not “honest” with the American people. But neither was the Times editorial board. Everything of which they accuse Trump, they themselves are guilty.

The World Socialist Web Site was not a party to this conspiracy.

Unlike Congress, we were not receiving daily briefings on the pandemic from the intelligence agencies. But we were able to make the necessary warnings because our aim was to reveal, not to conceal. On January 28, we warned, “The outbreak has exposed the enormous vulnerability of contemporary society to new strains of infectious disease, dangers for which no capitalist government has adequately prepared.”

We added, “While the governments of the world, particularly the United States, have made meticulous plans for large-scale war during the past quarter-century, no such resources or forethought have been devoted to combating the rash of epidemics that have plagued the planet over the same period.”

The next month, the WSWS rang the alarm louder. “The danger cannot be overstated,” the International Committee of the Fourth International warned on February 28. “[T]he US government is completely unprepared for a major outbreak,” the statement declared, calling for “a massive allocation of resources for health care and treatment.”

Those that lied about the pandemic in January, February and March are still lying to this day. Every claim made by the government, including of an imminent vaccine, must be treated with extreme suspicion.

The conspiracy continues. Students are being herded into classrooms at universities and schools throughout the country, fueling what is universally expected to be a major resurgence of the pandemic. According to one projection from the University of Washington, another 200,000 people are expected to die by the end of the year, doubling the current death toll.