Full classes, full buses—German schools are becoming a coronavirus trap

Marianne Arens

In Germany, the total number of people infected with coronavirus exceeded a quarter of a million this week. At present, almost 17,000 acute cases of COVID-19 are officially registered, which is about four times as many as in the summer months. The largest group of newly infected people is now 20- to 24-year-olds.

The seven-day average has been around 1,200 newly infected people per day for weeks. On Tuesday, almost 1,500 new infections were recorded—the highest figure since the end of April. On Wednesday, it was 1,176 and on Thursday almost 1,900, an alarming new high since spring. In Germany so far, 9,400 people have paid for the pandemic with their lives.

While the number of cases is currently rising rapidly again in France, Spain and other European countries, Germany, with its rigorous policy of reopening schools, is resolutely steering towards a second coronavirus wave. At the same time, politicians from all parties in the Bundestag (parliament) and state governments are ignoring the warnings of serious virologists.

In the Fuldaer Zeitung, Prof. Philipp Markart, director of pneumology at Fulda Hospital, warned, “Currently, the number of infections is rising again. And not only that, but the number of patients is increasing again. At Fulda Hospital, we are again treating people with COVID-19 who are so seriously ill that they need in-patient treatment and oxygen.”

The pulmonary physician reported “dramatic individual developments,” including a number of “relatively young patients without serious pre-existing conditions, who, while completely healthy, suffered severe, sometimes fatal, complications.” Prof. Markart cited the lack of a vaccine against COVID-19, the “high infectivity, the transmissibility even by asymptomatic infected persons and the sometimes very severe course of the disease” as factors that make it so dangerous.

Despite all this, politicians are determined to force teachers, educators and over 10 million pupils back into the same dilapidated and overcrowded schools as before the pandemic. After the start of school in Bavaria on September 8 for 1.6 million pupils, regular classes are also to begin for a further 1.5 million pupils next Monday in the last federal state, Baden-Württemberg.

Despite a highly reluctant information policy on the part of the authorities, which is already bordering on an information blackout, sporadic reports of more and more cases of coronavirus at schools are appearing.

In Berlin, the Senate [state ministry] Department for Education announced on Monday that 25 Berlin schools are currently infected with COVID-19. A total of 70 learning groups are affected. However, how many pupils and teachers tested positive, how many are in quarantine and how many are seriously ill are being concealed.

In Dresden, 110 people have been in quarantine for one week. There is coronavirus in Torgau in Saxony, too; one primary school, one secondary school and one after-school care centre had to close, and in Pirna there was a COVID 19 case at a grammar school. On the Baltic Sea coast (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania), new cases are known at schools in Güstrow and Rostock. In Güstrow, more than 70 people from the state support centre “Hören” and pupils and teachers from the “Küstenschule” in Toitenwinkel were sent into quarantine for 14 days after two pupils tested positive for coronavirus

In the southern and western federal states, too, more and more new cases are becoming known. In Olching (Upper Bavaria), there was a case at a grammar school on the first day of school on Wednesday, and 103 pupils were sent into quarantine. In Lower Saxony, according to a brief communication from the ministry, there are “just under 50 schools with coronavirus-related restrictions.” Twenty-four pupils and four teachers had tested positive.

In Wiesbaden, more than 100 pupils from two schools in Erbenheim are in quarantine after cases of coronavirus, and at a third Wiesbaden school, the suspicion of infection so far has been neither confirmed nor eliminated.

In North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), several schools in the districts of Holsterhausen and Frintrop in Essen, among others, are newly affected, with two pupils and one caregiver testing positive for COVID-19 on Tuesday. Since the end of the summer holidays, the number of Essen schools affected has thus risen to 15.

In Düsseldorf, there was a particularly severe case: on September 3, 20 pupils from Freiherr-vom-Stein-Realschule tested positive for COVID-19 after taking part in a four-day class trip to Chiemsee. Although one pupil fell acutely ill there, the 54 pupils drove home together in a 10-hour trip by coach. In Bavaria, school trips are not yet permitted.

This probably illustrates best how carelessly and irresponsibly the authorities are dealing with the pandemic and that they are not warning, preparing and protecting teachers and pupils from infection.

All the safety concepts that were painstakingly worked out before the holidays are being discarded. Almost everywhere, there are explicit rulings against wearing a face mask in class. In Wiesbaden, an administrative court has even expressly prohibited the “urgent recommendation” to wear a mask in class.

The education politicians responsible are apparently deliberately trying to risk new so-called superspreading events.

Schools are in no way equipped to deal with coronavirus. The summer holidays were not used to install modern ventilation systems, air filters and CO2 measuring devices or to renovate sanitary facilities. The politicians’ contempt for the life and health of teachers and pupils was summed up by NRW Education Minister Yvonne Gebauer (Free Democratic Party, FDP) when she remarked that €100 per child for the purchase of air filters in classrooms was “a good idea, but too expensive.”

The same government, which is paying €3.2 billion from the coronavirus programme alone for better digitisation in the federal armed forces, among other things, has failed to equip schools with the necessary IT equipment for online learning. As a result, teachers and pupils are forced to spend many hours a day in full classrooms whose windows often cannot even be opened. And on their way to school, they are forced to squeeze into crowded buses and trains.

In several federal states, e.g., Berlin and Baden-Württemberg, handouts have been distributed to parents, according to which children should also be sent to school “if they have a cold, a slight or occasional cough or a scratchy throat.” If a child does indeed test positive, often only this one child is sent home without those they have been in contact with being identified, isolated and tested.

In the meantime, it has been established beyond doubt that children can be highly contagious even if they are infected but asymptomatic or show only minor symptoms. “Trace, isolate and test, test, test” has been the World Health Organisation’s recommendation for six months now.

At the same time, teachers, educators and school employees who belong to the risk groups or have relatives at home at risk are morally pressured or forced by the courts to take part in face-to-face teaching. And the parents of previously ill pupils are left completely alone. Hundreds of posts by indignant parents are now blazing across social media.

“Ma En” from Lower Saxony writes that what is going on in schools is “inhuman”: “Family members from risk groups with whom a pupil lives together are worth absolutely nothing! Russian roulette is being played with us!”

Taty, the mother of a previously ill 13-year-old and two 4-year-old twins, writes: “I am so incredibly angry right now. So terribly angry. ...” As she writes, the special schools in Märkischer Kreis (NRW) have just been stripped of everything: “School psychologists, toys, playground equipment, because it’s too expensive.”

As the twin siblings of the “big one” were also previously ill with pseudo-croup, the latter had been at home since March. “I reported my first home-schooling to the school without any problems. It was immediately decided that I would receive a permit until 31.07.2020. ... I contacted the school management during this time and asked for an extension—but they refused immediately.”

Taty describes an odyssey that lasted for weeks until she finally succeeded in releasing her 13-year-old son from attending classes with the help of a medical certificate. “One day before the start of school we got the permit. I am grateful for this. But I don’t want other pupils or parents to have to experience such fears and desperation.”

There are lots of reports like this. Jennifer tells about her aunt, a 61-year-old teacher who has survived cancer and is currently being forced into attending classes. She states: “Problems in the education system have existed for a long time. Now it’s all blowing up in our faces! When you consider how many teachers belong to the risk group.” The pedagogical staff would have to “line up in rows at the company doctors to check whether they are really at risk”.

And when asked why the state and federal authorities do not publicly report coronavirus infections in schools, Eva answers: “Because then it would also be clear as hell to the general public that reopening schools without a concept is a no-go. This must be prevented so that the money rolls in.”

As these contributions show, the politicians’ lies, manoeuvres, and motives are increasingly being exposed. The impetus behind the reopening of schools is the drive to reopen all businesses for profit. Corporations and banks insist that parents are at the disposal of production. For this reason, politicians in unison categorically rule out a new lockdown.

The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) is the only party that takes the CoV-Sars-2 virus seriously and gives top priority to the fight against it.

Hundreds of new COVID-19 cases raise fears of uncontrolled outbreaks across the Pacific

John Braddock

A surge of COVID-19 cases in several Pacific states has sparked fears of uncontrolled outbreaks across the region. Hundreds of new cases have emerged in the past month, with many governments relaxing previous measures to control the virus, in order to “open up” their disintegrating economies.

The far-flung islands of the Pacific previously escaped high levels of COVID-19. However, the contributing factors—remoteness, small and scattered populations and the difficulties of travel and transport—have proved to be no defence against a rapidly worsening health and social crisis.

On July 15, French Polynesia re-opened to international visitors, in a desperate bid to resurrect its moribund tourism industry. The first COVID-19 outbreak between March and June, which affected 62 people, had been brought under control with a lockdown and border closures.

Now, with some 3,000 people landing in Tahiti each week, the number of cases has ballooned by 891 since early August to 953. They are mostly in urban areas, but also in Bora Bora, Raiatea, Huahine and Hao.

Flights from Los Angeles arrived after US tourists, among others, were cleared to enter without needing to quarantine. President Edouard Fritch acknowledged that the COVID-19 crisis had worsened in the US, and would do so in the French territory as well, but claimed that if French Polynesia failed to open up the consequences would be “catastrophic.”

Five Tahitian trade unions last week dropped empty threats of a general strike after the government remained adamant it would not reintroduce a two-week quarantine for arriving travellers.

A union spokesman said they were told that the authorities hoped there would be eventually “collective immunity,” i.e. the criminal policy of “herd immunity” demanded internationally by business interests. School attendance remains compulsory, despite strike calls by teachers for tougher containment measures, and fruitless appeals by teacher unions.

The largest number of cases is in the US state of Hawai’i, with nearly 7,000 infections and 49 deaths. In late August, Governor David Ige imposed a 2-week lockdown for the island of Oahu to stem a spike in cases, which had risen to more than 200 a day. A similar order, declared in March, had previously pushed daily infection numbers down.

The US Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, who was in Hawai’i, described the move as only a “temporary reset” while contact tracing and isolation measures were enacted. Designated “essential businesses” have remained open, including child-care, construction, healthcare, grocery stores, gas stations, banks and financial institutions, and hardware stores. Public schools, and the University of Hawai’i still have in-person classes, but private schools have been able to conduct studies online.

In the Western Pacific, the US territory of Guam has close to 700 active cases, including 53 in hospital and 12 in intensive care, with 21 deaths. Scores of infections have been traced to US military personnel, as deployments to major bases have continued, with the Trump administration allowing the virus to run rampant in military facilities.

The aircraft carrier, USS Theodore Roosevelt, docked in Guam in March, in the midst of a mass outbreak of COVID-19 on board. Hundreds of sailors were quarantined in local hotels and crowded into the naval base gym. Some 1,156 infections among the crew were not counted in Guam’s figures, but local officials have detailed nearly 200 military-linked cases on the island, including 35 personnel from the Andersen Air Force base, who broke quarantine to visit local restaurants.

Guam’s governor, Lou Leon Guerrero, has extended a public health emergency until the end of September, saying: “We are in very dire straits. We are in very desperate times. Our island right now is sick.” The Guardian quoted Felix Cabrera, of the governor’s physicians advisory group, who warned that with the fragile healthcare system stressed to the limit, the situation is “going to get worse before it gets better.”

In Papua New Guinea (PNG), the Pacific’s largest country, the number of confirmed infections has escalated from 11 in mid-July to 488, including five deaths. The cases, which first appeared among health workers at the Port Moresby General Hospital, have now spread from the capital to half the country’s 22 provinces. With fewer than 16,000 tests conducted among the population of 9 million, the real infection rate is likely many times higher than the official figures.

A recent lockdown of Port Moresby was lifted after just a fortnight and domestic travel re-opened. Prime Minister James Marape declared PNG would not go back into lockdown, despite the escalating case numbers. “COVID-19 not only affects us health-wise but also economically,” Marape said. “That is why we will not have another lockdown. We must adjust to living with the COVID-19… we will not shut down our country again,” he insisted.

This deadly decision portends a social disaster in one of the world’s most impoverished countries. The ramshackle health system is already being overwhelmed.

According to the Pacific Community development agency, only 55 percent of people in the Pacific have access to clean drinking water. World Vision’s PNG director, Heather MacLeod, told the Guardian that without clean water people cannot protect themselves, and the likely result will be “a spread of the disease on a massive scale.”

The PNG government last month blocked the arrival of a flight carrying 180 workers from China, after Chinese mine operator Ramu NiCo., which runs the Ramu Nickel mine, revealed 48 employees were given a coronavirus vaccine in a possible unauthorized trial.

PNG’s pandemic response controller, David Manning, banned the workers “in the best interests of our people.” Demanding explanations from Beijing, Health Minister Jelta Wong said that if the shoe was on the other foot, China would be up in arms. “The relationship has been tested here,” she warned.

The incident underscores the deepening geo-strategic tensions generated across the region as the COVID-19 crisis intensifies. At the forefront is Washington’s stepped-up confrontation with, and preparations for war against China.

US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper made a flying visit to Hawai’i, Palau and Guam last month, condemning China’s purported “malign activities” in the region, and seeking to buttress American influence. Esper had earlier promised Palau’s president, Tommy Remengesau Jr, that the Trump administration would help secure COVID-19 vaccines for the country, when one became available.

Palau, with a population of 20,000, 1,500 kms east of the Philippines, is currently re-negotiating its so-called “compact of free association” with Washington. Remengesau has used assertions of growing Chinese influence to call for greater US involvement. Ahead of a meeting with Trump last year, he urged “a stronger US presence in the Pacific, we want to see that happen.”

While Palau has welcomed Chinese tourists and investment, the former US trust territory remains firmly under the wing of Washington, which provides defence, funding, and access to social services. Palau is one of four remaining Pacific nations that recognise Taiwan, after Solomon Islands and Kiribati switched diplomatic recognition to Beijing last year.

Following Esper’s August visit, Remengesau revealed that, in a hand-delivered letter, he told Esper he was eager to host land bases, port facilities and airfields for the US military, as well as a US Coast Guard presence.

Mexico runs out of death certificates with 122,765 “excess deaths” reported during pandemic

Norissa Santa Cruz & Carlos Reed

On Saturday, the Mexican government reported that there have been at least 122,765 “excess deaths” between mid-March and August 1.

The “excess death” count, representing the increase in the overall number of deaths in a given country over the historical average number of deaths during the same period, serves to expose the gross underreporting of COVID-19 deaths, not only in Mexico, but in countries across the globe. Epidemiologists agree that estimating excess deaths is the best way to assess the impact of the pandemic.

Mexico has reported some 69,095 confirmed COVID-19 deaths and 629,409 cases. The country has the world’s fourth highest death toll, trailing India (75,062 deaths), Brazil (128,694 deaths), and the United States, which ranks first, with 194,367 deaths.

Given that at least 600 people are dying on a daily basis, the excess deaths estimated up to August 1 would place Mexico’s real death toll today ahead of the officially recorded toll in Brazil and near that of the United States.

Between 15 to 20 days ago, many states began running out of death certificates. This has particularly been the case in impoverished and working class communities in the State of Mexico—the most populous state—as well as in Mexico City and Baja California, according to Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell, who leads the government’s pandemic response.

Mexican health workers protest; sign reads, “I'm COVID-19 positive and they ordered me to work” [Credit: Facebook]

Despite the rapid spread of the deadly virus, the majority of Mexico’s population has not been able to stop working. While many workers fear becoming infected, the catchphrase for the poor has become that their choice is to “die of COVID or die of hunger.” Half of Mexico’s 127 million residents do not earn enough to meet their basic needs, and one in five suffers from hunger. Over half of Mexico’s children live in poverty, and a United Nations study found that 14 percent of children suffer from stunted growth as a result of malnutrition.

A study by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) found that at least 16 million more people will fall into extreme poverty. According to the UNAM, the Mexican government needs to spend 15 billion pesos (about $670 million) per month to ensure the provision of the basic food basket for the 32 million people in extreme poverty in the coming months.

Compounding the problem, the Mexican population receives little to no state relief in the form of unemployment compensation or social assistance in a country where at least 58 percent of the Mexican working class relies on the informal economy, which comprises 30 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). Another 25 percent of Mexico’s GDP is derived from the vast maquiladora industry run largely by multinational corporations on the US-Mexican border. This industrial sector remained open during the pandemic, due to pressure from international finance capital, particularly within the US.

Sergio Moctezuma, the state labor secretary for Baja California said that in the state, “The vast majority of infected people are factory workers.” In mid-May the health secretary of Northern Baja California announced that, at the time, 83 percent of official deaths (432 of 519) were maquiladora workers, in an industry where the majority of workers are between the ages of 25 and 45.

The vast degree of social inequality in Mexico, involving poor living conditions and public infrastructure for masses of the population, means that the virus has found ideal conditions for its spread. An April 2020 report by the World Bank found that 51.2 million people are considered at or below the poverty line. The report adds that “inequality in Mexico ... is among the highest in OECD countries.”

Additionally, 6.2 percent of the population, or some 1.8 million people, have “no access to limited standard sanitation.” This same condition affects an estimated 35 percent of the world’s population or some 2.5 billion people, according to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) has done nothing to prevent the virus’s devastating toll on the working class and the poor of Mexico.

His government, moreover, has agreed to using the Mexican population as guinea pigs for pharmaceutical companies in the US, Russia and China to test their vaccines on a massive scale. While not necessarily protecting the Mexican population from the virus and potentially causing harmful effects, AMLO hopes to use these trials to suppress popular concerns as the coronavirus spreads out of control.

The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) announced in a statement this week that it had reached a deal with Landsteiner Scientific and the AMLO administration to distribute 32 million doses of its Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine in November. “Deliveries are expected to start in November 2020 subject to approval by Mexico’s regulators,” according to the RDIF representative. Mexico has also committed to participating in late-stage clinical trials for vaccines developed by US company Johnson & Johnson and two Chinese companies.

Last month, AMLO announced in a disingenuous fashion that Mexico’s poor would receive equal access to health care and free vaccines, stating that “All the citizens will have access to the vaccine, and there should be no concern for poor people as they will be vaccinated with the same urgency. They will not be the last people to receive it.”

While AMLO paints a fantasy world where the poor have equal access to health care, the reality on the ground is that tens of thousands of poor are dying because they cannot afford to stay home from work or social distance, and lack access to basic sanitation. According to data by the IMF, Mexico has only spent 0.2 percent of its GDP in 2020 to address the pandemic, while other nations have dedicated 2.1 percent of their GDP on average.

According to public records of Mexico’s epidemiological oversight database, in at least 75 percent of Mexico’s coronavirus deaths, amounting to 51,924 people, the patients never received any treatment with a ventilator before they died or any form of intensive care treatment, which could have saved their lives.

The catastrophic COVID-19 health crisis has demonstrated the criminal negligence and incompetence of the Mexican bourgeoisie. According to the OECD, Mexico occupies the last place in implementing large-scale testing. On average, 0.4 tests are done per thousand people in Mexico, while the other 36 OECD member nations have carried out on average 22.9 tests per thousand inhabitants.

The large death toll has also had a devastating effect on frontline workers. Amnesty International reported last week that Mexico has the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths among medical personnel in the world. A total of 1,410 health care workers have died and 104,590 have tested positive. El Financiero reported that there have been more than 100 street protests by health care workers from various institutions, demanding safe working conditions to face the pandemic.

AMLO and his Morena party came to power employing populist phraseology to cast themselves as the much needed “change” for Mexico. However, his government is the continuation of the longstanding reactionary rule of the Mexican national bourgeoisie, oriented to protecting its class interests and those of the transnational corporations.

Along with every government worldwide, the Morena administration has made clear its indifference to the deaths of tens of thousands of workers that have resulted from its pro-capitalist policies. It is essential that, as a response, the working class unites on an international basis to fight for socialism.

Why did so many poor New Yorkers die of COVID-19?

Josh Varlin

New York City was the global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic for several weeks in March and April, during which time tens of thousands of people were infected and thousands perished. Recent studies and reports have revealed more fully the role economic inequality has played in determining the virus’s toll, particularly in “disparities in hospital care,” as a July article in the New York Times describes.

Over and above the many other factors contributing to the high infection rate and death toll in New York City (the largest of which being the weeks-long delay in shutting down nonessential businesses), the simple fact that people received different standards of care at different health care facilities—determined largely by their class—often determined whether someone would live or die once they got sick.

This is contrary to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s April 7 claim: “I don’t believe we’ve lost a single person because we couldn’t provide care. People we lost we couldn’t save despite our best efforts.”

In fact, as the New York Times report as well as other interviews with health care workers demonstrate, people did indeed die for lack of care. Had the health care system in New York City been better resourced, many fewer people would have died in emergency room waiting areas before they were seen, alone in understaffed hospital wings or asphyxiating on hospital bathroom floors.

Overall, nearly 24,000 people have been killed by COVID-19 in New York City, according to city data on confirmed and probable deaths. About two-thirds of those who have lost their lives due to COVID-19 “lived in ZIP codes with median household incomes below the city median,” according to a Times analysis of city data.

Death rates per capita in the working class “outer boroughs” were larger than in Manhattan in every age group of adults, with the Bronx suffering the highest rates (2,239 of every 100,000 people over 75 died in the Bronx, a staggering figure) followed by Queens and Brooklyn, which were essentially tied. Staten Island also had higher death rates than Manhattan.

Within Manhattan, deaths were disproportionately in the poorer neighborhoods in the northern part of the borough, rather than in wealthier neighborhoods like the Upper West Side, which saw many of its residents decamp to summer homes in March and April.

With a second wave in New York City all but inevitable if schools reopen later this month—an open question given the immense opposition among educators—an understanding of how the pandemic unfolded in its first wave is necessary.

Before proceeding further into how disparities in care affected patient mortality, it is necessary to review the conditions leading to the high number of infections in the first place.

How the virus spread

New York City is the largest city in the US, with 8.3 million residents and some 20 million in its metropolitan area. In addition to being the home of Wall Street and global finance, it is an international center of culture and travel.

New York is also one of the most unequal cities on the planet, with the most millionaires of any city in the country along with millions living in or near poverty only a short subway ride away from each other.

All of these factors, along with the largest public school system in the country, educating over a million children, and a public transit system used by millions every day, created perfect conditions for the virus to spread rampantly, especially given the fact that basic public health measures were delayed for weeks—which alone killed tens of thousands, including in areas the virus spread to from New York City.

A preprint study from Columbia University researchers concluded that 55 percent of deaths from March 15 to May 3 could have been prevented had lockdown measures been implemented one or two weeks earlier than they actually began, starting in mid-March. New York City was the global epicenter for much of this period.

There is already some popular understanding of how the coronavirus infected workers and the poor disproportionately. The pandemic tore through working class neighborhoods in the Bronx and Queens in particular. Neighborhoods with large immigrant populations, like Queens’ Elmhurst and Corona, were severely affected.

Many factors played a hand in this: high poverty rates, dense and often multigenerational housing, many people working in low-wage jobs that can only be done in person and are considered “essential,” and reluctance to seek medical help due to a lack of insurance. Add to this the high percentage of immigrants in these neighborhoods—many of whom are afraid to seek services due to fear of deportation—and it is clear that this situation presented a “perfect storm” of susceptibility of infection.

It should be stressed that, while the conditions in New York City’s working-class neighborhoods were Petri dishes for the coronavirus, its rampant spread was only made possible by systematic public health failures at the municipal, state and federal levels. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Cuomo, both Democrats, were united with President Donald Trump, a Republican, in initially downplaying the pandemic and delaying public health measures.

Indeed, the Financial Times has reported that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a top adviser, discouraged testing in the early stages of the pandemic to avoid spooking the markets. This resulted in a situation where the early spread of the pandemic was totally missed in New York City, and even in March confirmed cases were underestimations by a factor of at least 100 of the true spread of the disease.

How the virus killed

There are many factors contributing to the large number of people who have died from COVID-19, beginning with the disease’s basic features. It attacks the respiratory system and prompts a severe immune system reaction called a “cytokine storm,” which wreaks havoc on the patient’s lungs. However, the disease also impacts other organs and inflames blood vessels in ways that are only beginning to be understood.

COVID-19 is particularly deadly to elderly patients, as well as those with preexisting conditions such as obesity, hypertension and diabetes. However, young patients in their 20s and 30s have suffered strokes and died due to the disease as well, and even very young children have perished.

Just as the illness increases the danger of and reveals preexisting individual health conditions, so does the pandemic itself highlight preexisting social conditions, particularly inequality and all that comes with it.

In the first place, those with lower incomes are more likely to have preexisting conditions making them more likely to die from the disease, including hypertension, obesity and diabetes, all of which are often caused by lifestyle and dietary issues exacerbated by poverty.

An investigation in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that COVID-19 patients hospitalized in March and early April at Northwell Health facilities in the New York City area very often had comorbidities: 56.6 percent had hypertension, 41.7 percent were obese and 33.8 percent had diabetes. Hypertension and diabetes were thus much more prevalent among those who needed hospitalization due to COVID-19 than among the population at large, while obesity has been found to adversely affect patient outcomes.

However, even these social factors, as important as they are, do not paint the full picture. The quality of care received—and, consequently, whether a patient lived or died—often came down to which hospital received the patient, or, in other words, where the patient lived.

Inequality of care and COVID-19 mortality

As thousands were languishing in overcrowded and understaffed hospitals in March and April, patients in well-resourced private hospitals received much better care and suffered a lower death rate, even when considering factors like comorbidities.

The New York Times found that, in April, “patients at some community hospitals were three times more likely to die as patients at medical centers in the wealthiest parts of the city.”

Inequality of care, particularly in patient-to-staff ratios, is at the root of this disparity. A nurse at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center explained to the World Socialist Web Site:

The link between nurse staffing ratios and patient safety is well-researched, measured by increased rates of morbidity, fall incidents, medication errors, overall patient satisfaction and other adverse events. It’s logical that assigning increasing numbers of patients will eventually compromise a nurse’s ability to provide safe care and stay vigilant. I’ve worked in a smaller hospital in Queens that consistently pushed us to 1:8 ratio on a medical-surgical unit, whereas NYP/Cornell doesn’t typically go above 1:5; 1:6 is the absolute max. There’s always been a difference in quality of nursing care between these two hospitals; the pandemic has simply exacerbated it. Breakdowns in the quality of care are often due to staff fatigue. For example, nurses may cut corners with PPE protocol under stress. I’ve also seen housekeepers improperly cleaning COVID rooms because they are understaffed and exhausted.

The WSWS has previously noted in relation to a planned strike at the University of Illinois Hospital that “[t]he odds of a patient dying increased by 7 percent for every additional patient a nurse had to take on.”

Indeed, a study by Karen Lasater of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing found that “each additional patient per nurse was associated with significant increases in the odds of nurses reporting poor outcomes,” including burnout, poor patient safety, work interruptions and nurses not recommending their own hospitals.

The most glaring examples of inequality were between the wealthy private hospital systems on the one side—which treat mostly insured patients and have substantial endowments—and small independent hospitals and the public hospital system, New York City Health + Hospitals—which treat many uninsured patients, or those on public insurance—on the other.

Health care workers told the New York Times that the patient-to-staff ratio in emergency rooms “hit 23 to 1 at Queens Hospital Center and 15 to 1 at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, both public hospitals, and 20 to 1 at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, an independent facility in Brooklyn.” The recommended maximum is four patients per nurse.

Indeed, staff distribution in the health care system was so irrational that by the end of April, with many hospitals inundated and in need of assistance, some hospitals had the problem of over staffing.

Victoria Gregg, a traveling nurse from North Dakota who worked at the smaller non-profit St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx from April 23 to June 11, told the Bismarck Tribune that a nurse from a wealthy part of the city asked if Gregg’s hospital was experiencing overstaffing, which had been a problem at that nurse’s hospital.

Other glaring inequalities abounded during the height of the pandemic: access to experimental drugs, access to ventilators with proper settings, sufficient dialysis machines and access to advanced treatments. All of these factors, combined with the aforementioned public health factors, combined into significantly higher death rates for working class patients.

For example, the mortality rate for COVID-19 patients at Bellevue Hospital Center, a public hospital in Manhattan, was double the rate at New York University Langone Health’s flagship a mere 1,000 feet away.

One of the most disturbing phenomena at understaffed hospitals was what Dr. Dawn Maldonado, a resident doctor at Elmhurst Hospital, termed “bathroom codes.” Dr. Maldonado relayed to the Times that multiple patients would remove their oxygen masks to go to the bathroom and then collapse.

In April, a nurse at Elmhurst told the WSWS that the patient-to-nurse ratio in her unit had doubled from six patients per nurse to 11 or 12. “A single nurse is doing the work of two nurses,” she said. This was under conditions where she had not received full training as a critical care nurse and where nurses in March “had very limited supplies” and had just begun receiving masks at the time of the interview.

Inequality also killed patients within the same hospital systems, including NewYork-Presbyterian and NYU Langone. Workers in both systems wrote letters warning about disparities in care leading to people dying unnecessarily because they ended up at a poorer-resourced hospital within that particular private network.

While networks have denied that inequality resulted in different access to care, some of them reallocated resources and staff after internal staff protests, but only weeks into the pandemic and after much damage had been done.

For example, at the private Mount Sinai network, 17 percent of patients at its Manhattan flagship died, whereas 33 and 34 percent died at its Queens and Brooklyn facilities, respectively. A staggering 41 percent of admitted COVID-19 patients died at Coney Island Hospital, a public hospital in the same network as Bellevue with its 22 percent mortality rate.

It should be noted that even wealthier hospitals still had to make what have euphemistically been called “crisis” decisions, such as rationing personal protective equipment (PPE) such as N95 masks.

The NewYork-Presbyterian nurse told the WSWS: “PPE was scarce and aggressively rationed. … [M]y coworkers and I have saved all of our N95s and keep 20+ used ones in each of our lockers in case NYP can’t provide to us in the future.”

Even under conditions where Weill Cornell did not run out of masks (having rationed them aggressively), its PPE policies produced irrational side effects, like having “to treat each PPE item differently rather than just disposing everything, which would arguably be easier (i.e., saving N95s and sanitizing face shields, but discarding outer surgical masks, hair covers and shoe covers, while sanitizing your hands between every step) in a particular order.”

At the same time, the nurse-to-patient ratio in the intensive care unit (ICU) doubled from 1:2 to 1:4 during the pandemic, with nurses training each other for other positions rapidly in order to increase capacity by 50 percent. “So there were a lot of unprepared nurses in roles they weren't familiar with,” the nurse told the WSWS.

This was the situation at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell, which, she said, “is considered one of the most well-financed and well-resourced hospitals in New York, and I believe our staff and patients directly benefited from this privilege.”

In contrast, at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens, the nurse-to-patient ratio in the ICU quadrupled, meaning each nurse was dealing with up to eight patients requiring constant attention and monitoring.

A central remedy to overcome the disparity in staff and other resources, transferring patients, was only implemented belatedly. In late March, even as Elmhurst Hospital was inundated with patients, stretching workers there past their breaking point, nearby hospitals had excess capacity.

In the early period of the first wave, state officials left the public and private networks, which compete with each other, to their own devices, only intervening to facilitate patient transfers after reports and videos emerged from Elmhurst Hospital revealing the dire conditions there. Much like the belated lockdowns, this action saved lives, but patients died before it was done due to the unconscionable delay and reliance on the profit motives of private hospital chains.

How the virus can be defeated

This overview of how the pandemic proceeded in New York City makes clear that combating and defeating the pandemic is not primarily, let alone only, a medical question, but instead a political question. Nor can it be approached on a local or even national level—the same basic processes are playing out everywhere, and the spread of the virus anywhere is a threat to public health everywhere.

While the pandemic has subsided substantially from the mid-April peak of the first wave in New York City, the resumption of both public schools and indoor dining later this month, combined with the broader back-to-work and back-to-school drives, make a serious second wave coinciding with the fall and flu season inevitable—unless measures are taken to finally mount a serious response.

Workers already know what is needed and, indeed, have been demanding a serious response to the pandemic for months. The fundamentals of an effective public health approach to the pandemic must include the shutdown of nonessential businesses and schools; full compensation to workers and small business owners during the pandemic; a massive investment in the health care system, creating equality of care; and a program of mass testing, effective contact tracing and quarantining of infected and exposed individuals.

The resources to implement these measures will not be handed over by the super-rich, who monopolize them, merely through moral appeals. Indeed, even as the pandemic was raging, Cuomo pushed for a budget that will cut $2.5 billion from Medicaid in the state once the pandemic ends—with this delay only a ploy to ensure that the state gets a one-time infusion from the federal CARES Act.

The ruling-class austerity drive is not confined to Medicaid. Psychiatric wards are on the chopping block in multiple hospitals, including NewYork-Presbyterian’s Allen Hospital and Brooklyn Methodist Hospital and Northwell Health’s Syosset Hospital, which is on Long Island. The wards, which had been closed to convert into COVID-19 units and have been targeted for closure due to unprofitability, have not been reopened, whereas other parts of the hospitals have been.

At the federal level, the Democrats and Republicans allowed the $600 per week unemployment supplement to expire in July and have not been in any hurry to renew it. If they eventually do, it will be halved or worse.

To implement the necessary life-and-death measures to combat the pandemic, new organizations and a socialist perspective are needed. The unions have accepted and implemented the homicidal back-to-work policy, spearheaded by Democratic and Republican politicians alike.

Educators in New York City have already taken the lead by forming the New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee to oppose the reckless reopening of schools, and educators, students and auto workers in the US and internationally have begun forming similar organs of struggle.

Health care workers and others in New York City and elsewhere must follow this lead and build new organizations capable of opposing the pandemic and defending their lives and standards of living, both of which are under relentless attack.

Infected students denounce administration guidelines, amidst rising COVID-19 cases at Southern California universities

Melody Isley & Emiri Ochiai

The reckless and deadly drive to resume in-person classes at universities has already resulted in over 51,000 positive cases of COVID-19, spanning at least a thousand universities. In California, despite reporting 4,800 new cases each day, many universities are still offering in-person classes and allowing student residence in dormitories and on-campus housing, endangering thousands of students, their families and the broader community.

In Southern California, San Diego State University (SDSU) has recently made national headlines for its outstandingly negligent reopening policies that are resulting in an unmitigated outbreak. At least 513 known positive cases have been confirmed on the campus so far.

A nightmare is unfolding at SDSU, with disturbing reports on social media of infected students given ten minutes to gather belongings before being thrown into isolation dormitories. The infected students are reportedly being housed with strangers and without bedsheets, food or sanitizing equipment.

Students post “HELP US” signs in windows in isolation dorms [Credit: Twitter @sharkey_markey17]

Students are not being told whether and when they will receive medical care. Desperate students are crying out for help on social media and have even posted “Help Us” signs on room windows. Many Twitter posts reveal that isolation dormitories are already reaching capacity, particularly of first and second year students who may not have any available friends or family to help them with supplies while they are quarantined.

After just two weeks of reopening, 64 positive cases of COVID-19 were reported at SDSU, and by the following week, the virus had spread exponentially with 513 known cases and one student hospitalization.

Initially, administrators denied the extent of the spread. Officials not only failed to notify students of cases and offer proper resources like mandatory testing, social distancing and mask wearing, but its public data of coronavirus cases had been manipulated to convey a lower case count.

In a now viral Twitter thread, with over 105,000 likes and 27,000 retweets, an SDSU student and Resident Assistant (RA) in an on-campus dormitory exposed the administration’s health policies as negligent and dangerous. The thread reveals that asymptomatic testing is not mandatory, masks are not being provided, and infected students isolating on campus have largely been left to their own devices.

The university also effectively disincentivizes testing by creating a living environment that is so devoid of resources and proper safety measures that it makes students prefer anxious ignorance than to be forced into university-mandated quarantine dormitories.

Students are advised along the CDC guidelines, and they are told to quarantine at home upon exposure and isolate by self-diagnosis. Officially, SDSU is advising students to remain in on-campus housing if they are exposed or contract the virus, but the university states that if their family home is within “driving distance” then they can return home and almost certainly spread the disease even further.

The growing spread in the region is being felt throughout San Diego County. About 15 miles north of SDSU in La Jolla, California, at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the administration has released plans to reintroduce 7,500 undergraduate students into dormitories at the end of September. The school has been explicit in its expectation that dozens of students who return to campus may have the virus.

Currently, UCSD plans to test incoming students upon arrival with a second re-test after two weeks with daily self-screening of symptoms. UCSD began a voluntary testing regime in May for graduate students living on campus, which was meant to be the core of the school’s reopening initiative. However, only a fraction of students were able to be tested. Even before the year officially starts, the school is already soliciting the public for donations in order to continue its testing plans.

UCSD will offer 12 percent of its regular courses with in-person instruction, and an estimated 14,500 students will be living on campus for the fall quarter. Two weeks ago, with official reopening still a month away, UCSD revealed that over 40 students have already tested positive for COVID-19 since April, along with 21 campus employees and 184 staff and faculty in the health sciences program.

Over 600 UCSD students and faculty have signed an open letter written by students demanding that the administration cease all in-person instruction and the reopening of undergraduate dormitories.

The insistence on reopening despite the disastrous consequences is driven both by the profitability of student housing and the starving of state and federal funding for education. The least expensive housing options at SDSU are over $11,000 for all grade levels except first year students whose cheapest housing option is over $17,000 for nine months.

As a result of the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the Democratic Party-dominated California legislature voted to approve a state budget for the 2020–21 fiscal year with over $54 billion in state spending cuts. This includes cuts to the University of California and California State University systems of $260 million and $300 million, respectively.

Opposition is growing throughout the country to the unsafe opening of schools and universities. In August, students and faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Georgia staged “die-in” protests against unsafe reopening plans, and at least 700 students at the University of Iowa participated in a “sick-out” protest in early September.

Students and faculty at Texas A&M, Pennsylvania State University, Kutztown University, Northwestern University, Boston University and numerous other colleges have written their own open letters and garnered support from hundreds of students.

Beginning on Tuesday, over 1,000 graduate student instructors went on strike at the University of Michigan. The demands include completely online instruction, robust testing and contact tracing, a universal right to work remotely without documentation, rent freezes, emergency funds for students and the demilitarization of the campus.

US jobless claims top 884,000 for second week in a row

Jacob Crosse

For the second week in row, the US Department of Labor on Thursday reported initial jobless claims of 884,000, a huge number that is nearly 200,000 higher than the pre-pandemic record of 695,000 set during the 1982 recession.

Generally seen as a rough measure of how many people are losing their jobs, this mammoth total gives the lie to claims of an economic recovery. Over 60 million workers have applied for benefits since mid-March.

A woman looks at signs at a store in Niles, Illinois [Credit: AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh]

The Labor Department reports that the four-week average jobless claim number is just under a million a week, at 992,500. So-called “gig” workers and independent contractors continue to apply for benefits under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program and this week’s report shows 838,916 PUA claims, an increase of more than 90,000 compared to the previous week.

A comparison of this week’s and last week’s initial and PUA claims reveals that over 100,000 more workers, or 1.7 million total, filed for government assistance.

The Labor Department reported that the seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 9.2 percent for the week ending August 29. In all, the government estimates the total number of people claiming unemployment benefits to be 29,605,064, an increase of over 380,000 from the week prior.

The increasingly desperate situation confronting laid-off workers is underscored by the news that the Lost Wages Assistance (LWA) Program, enacted through an executive order issued by President Trump last month, stopped accepting state applications as of September 10. An estimated $30 billion out of the $44 billion in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) grant program has been distributed to 48 states as well as Guam and the District of Columbia.

With funding for the program quickly drying up, many states have already announced that that they will stop sending payments to beneficiaries over the next month, despite the fact that millions have yet to receive anything due either to backlogs or ineligibility. For instance, workers who are receiving less than $100 in state unemployment benefits are ineligible to receive LWA grants, while several states, such as Mississippi, have yet to distribute any funds as of this writing.

After six months it is clear that of the 22 million jobs that disappeared when lockdowns began in earnest toward the end of March, a majority are not coming back.

A September 4 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics exemplifies the gaps in employment based on education, with 12.6 percent of workers without a high school diploma unemployed compared to just 5.3 percent of workers with a Bachelor’s degree or greater. For those with just a high school diploma, the unemployment rate is at 9.8 percent, while for those with an Associate’s degree or some college the figure is eight percent.

Despite widespread joblessness and all the misery that entails under capitalism, the US Congress, widely populated by millionaires, failed this week to come to terms on a “skinny” $300 billion Republican coronavirus relief bill that included an extension of the $300 per week federal jobless supplement until the end of the year. That is half the size of the federal jobless aid enacted as part of the CARES Act. That benefit expired on July 31.

The Republican Senate bill, which included hundreds of billions of dollars in previously allocated but unspent aid, also provided more than $250 billion in additional small business loans, $105 billion to reopen the schools, $16 billion for coronavirus testing and tracing, $31 billion for vaccine development and distribution, $20 billion for farm assistance, $10 billion for child care support and $10 billion for the US Postal Service.

Right-wing provisions in the bill included legal immunity for businesses from potential suits from workers impacted by unsafe conditions during the pandemic and a two-year “school choice” tax credit to promote private schools at the expense of the public education system.

It did not include any additional funding for cash-strapped states and local governments, or a new cash stipend. The CARES Act provided a $1,200 stipend for most American adults.

The bill failed to muster the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster and proceed to a floor vote, with 52 (all Republicans) voting in favor and 47 against. Every Democratic senator except vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who was not present, voted against the bill, along with Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky.

The defeat of the Republican measure, a foregone conclusion after the Democratic congressional leadership declared it “dead on arrival,” appears to mark the end of a protracted exercise in political theater in which both parties postured as advocates for workers devastated by the pandemic, but neither made any serious effort to actually provide relief.

The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed a $3.2 trillion relief bill last May, knowing it would never be taken up by the Senate. That bill included restoration of the full $600-per-week unemployment benefit through the end of 2020, plus $1 trillion in federal aid to deficit-ridden state governments and money for food stamps, hospitals and pandemic-related needs.

Negotiations between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer on one side and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on the other continued in desultory fashion throughout August, finally collapsing at the end of the month.

While Republicans and Democrats rushed to pass the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street by a near-unanimous vote in last March’s CARES Act, neither party was serious about enacting legislation to address the worst social crisis since the Great Depression.

This is underscored by the Democrats’ agreement with Mnuchin to pass a “clean” continuing resolution before the end of the fiscal year on September 30 to keep funding the federal government and prevent a shutdown. House Speaker Pelosi, in making this agreement, signaled that the Democrats would not attempt to use the threat of a shutdown in the midst of the pandemic and mounting social unrest, and just weeks ahead of Election Day, as leverage to force the White House and the Republican Senate to provide some degree of serious relief for laid off workers.

As the World Socialist Web Site wrote on September 9, the two parties of American capitalism “have a common interest in using the threat of destitution and homelessness to pressure workers into returning to COVID-19-infected factories and teachers to unsafe schools in order to ‘reopen the economy,’ i.e., resume the pumping out of profits to back up the massive debt incurred in the bailout of the corporate-financial oligarchy. This homicidal policy is being spearheaded by the Trump administration, but it has the full support of the Democrats, who are implementing it at the state and local level.”

Democratic governors and mayors, facing combined budget shortfalls in the hundreds of billions of dollars, are planning massive layoffs of teachers, health care workers and other public employees, along with brutal cuts in basic social services and pensions. Not a single Democratic governor or mayor has suggested raising taxes on the wealthy to avoid cuts that will only increase the coming wave of evictions and the growth of hunger and poverty.

Latin America, epicenter of COVID-19 pandemic, on the brink of social explosion

Tomas Castanheira

The COVID-19 pandemic has created devastating conditions for the whole of Latin America. On Tuesday, the region reached the grim milestone of 300,000 COVID-19 deaths and, on Thursday, surpassed 8 million infections.

The most affected country, in absolute numbers, is Brazil, the most populous in the region. It ranks third in the world in terms of total recorded cases, trailing only India and the United States, and has the second highest number of deaths, exceeded only by the US. It has already confirmed more than 4.2 million cases and 130,000 deaths. Following Brazil comes Mexico, which has registered about 650,000 cases and almost 70,000 deaths, the fourth highest COVID-19 death toll in the world.

Cemetery workers place crosses over a common grave after burying five people at the Nossa Senhora Aparecida cemetery in Manaus, Brazil [Credit: AP Photo/Felipe Dana]

The coronavirus mortality rate in the region is terrifying. Although it represents 10 percent of the world’s population, Latin America accounts for one-third of all COVID-19 deaths. Peru has achieved the lamentable status as the country with the highest number of COVID-19 deaths per capita, with more than 30,000 deaths among a population of about 32 million. The global list of the ten countries with the highest rates of COVID-19 deaths per inhabitant also includes Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador.

This horrific toll is the result of absolutely criminal policies by capitalist governments in confronting the virus, combined with abysmal preexisting structural conditions.

Testing rates in the region are among the lowest in the world, precluding both contact tracing and realistic estimates of the spread of the virus. Mexico has conducted only 11,462 tests per million inhabitants and Argentina 32,816, according to Worldometer. The United States, which has far from an adequate testing level, has conducted 271,552 tests per million inhabitants.

Precarious health care systems, with doctors and nurses working without proper personal protective equipment, resulted in severe rates of infection among health care workers. Mexico is the country with the highest number of health professionals killed by COVID-19 in the world, over 1,400. Brazil is fourth, with more than 600. Bolivia’s Ministry of Health speaks of 200 health professionals killed, but there are estimates of four times that number.

The lack of infrastructure in hospitals, especially of adequate ventilators for COVID-19 treatment, has been aggravated by the criminal diversion of funds appropriated to fight the pandemic. Cases of government corruption, linked to gross overbilling for the purchase of health care equipment, have come to light in Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia and Ecuador.

In the face of school closures, which affected 165 million students throughout Latin America, governments were unable to provide adequate structures for distance learning. Only eight of the region’s 33 countries have provided some technological devices to students. Among the poorest families in the region, only 10 to 20 percent have access to a computer, according to the United Nations Economic Committee for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

The immense suffering caused by the disease has accelerated a brutal downgrading of the living conditions of large sections of Latin America’s working masses. An ECLAC report points to an explosion of poverty in the region in 2020. More than a third of the population will face unemployment and food insecurity.

The official level of unemployment in Latin America will reach 13.5 percent by the end of the year, an increase of 5.4 percent compared to 2019. The total number of unemployed will increase from 26.1 million to 44 million. This is a massively higher impact than that recorded after the 2008 global financial crash, when unemployment increased by 0.6 percent, from 6.7 percent in 2008 to 7.3 percent in 2009.

The total number of Latin Americans living in poverty is expected to rise from 186 million to 231 million. “We calculated that eight out of 10 people in the region—and we’re talking about 491 million people—will live on an income that is up to three times the poverty line. And that means that 491 million people will live on under $500 a month,” ECLAC executive secretary Alicia Bárcena told Foreign Policy.

The shock to the Latin American economy will produce a 9.1 percent contraction of its GDP by the end of 2020. The tourism sector alone has already suffered US$230 billion in losses as borders closed. This is the equivalent of two-and-a-half times the GDP of a country like Bolivia.

While for Latin America’s working population the present period has spelled terrible privations, for the capitalist oligarchy it is a time of celebration. From March, when the pandemic hit the region, until July, the fortunes of 73 Latin American billionaires have grown by US$48.2 billion, the international aid group Oxfam reported.

In Brazil, as nearly 10 million workers lost their jobs and millions more suffered deep wage cuts, the combined income of Brazil’s 42 billionaires grew from US$123.1 billion to US$157.1 billion. What this parasitic oligarchy accumulated over a five-month period of pandemic, US$34 billion, is US$11 billion more than the Brazilian government invested in health care in the whole of 2019.

Itapevi, São Paulo, Brazil [Credit: Felipe Barros/ExLibris/PMI]

The International Committee of the Fourth International defined the COVID-19 pandemic as a trigger event, which brought out the deep economic, social and political contradictions of the world capitalist system. Social inequality, a dominant feature of this system, is being exacerbated internationally and, in particular, in Latin America, the most unequal region on the planet.

At the same time, the international working class is manifesting its discontent with the situation in a growing wave of political radicalization. The mass protests against social inequality that took place in Chile and Ecuador between October and November of 2019 announced a political trend that will increasingly dominate the region and the world.

Latin American workers responded to the conditions imposed by the ruling elites and their governments in the face of the pandemic with a series of wildcat strikes in different sectors of the working class, from app delivery workers to nurses, which spread throughout the region, from Mexico to Brazil.

Workers and peasants took to the streets in Bolivia and clashed with Jeanine Áñez’s coup regime, demanding its fall and an end to the hunger conditions imposed by its violent and disastrous quarantine. Revolts against hunger policies also broke out in Chile’s impoverished working-class neighborhoods.

This week, the murder of a worker by the Colombian police provoked the eruption of militant protests across the country. The brutal repression unleashed by the extreme-right government of President Iván Duque, leaving ten dead and hundreds wounded, has only increased popular anger.

The escalation of state violence is the desperate response of Latin American ruling elites to the growth of social conflicts that present themselves, more and more, as an open confrontation between two social classes with irreconcilable interests. On the one hand, there is a billionaire elite and its corrupt and violent states, and on the other, the working masses increasingly impoverished and dissatisfied with the prevailing social order.

In this battle, apparent bourgeois political antagonists such as Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, representative of the “Pink Tide” governments and an idol of the pseudo-left, join hands against the working class, spreading lies and disorganizing the fight against the pandemic, while forcing workers into contaminated workplaces to generate profits and guarantee the privileges of the capitalist oligarchy.

But the strength of the working class united as an independent political force is far greater. The fundamental question posed for the Latin American workers is the construction of a revolutionary leadership that unifies them among themselves and with their brothers and sisters internationally and leads them in struggle to overthrow the capitalist system and reorganize society based on socialist policies.