Canada’s health care system buckling as governments reject measures to contain COVID-19

Roger Jordan

As COVID-19 infections continue to rise across Canada, dire warnings about the health care system’s inability to cope are growing. The number of intensive care patients in Ontario’s hospitals surpassed the peak of the first wave of the pandemic Monday and is fast approaching the level at which Doug Ford’s provincial government has acknowledged that it will be impossible to maintain adequate health care for those suffering from other illnesses or injuries.

There were 285 COVID-19 patients in Ontario intensive care units as of December 21, more than the 283 recorded at the high point during the spring. When COVID-19 intensive care patients surpass 300, which is set to occur within the next 10 days, health authorities say that they will no longer be able to guarantee regular levels of care for other patients.

The crisis is particularly stark in Peel Region, where approximately half of all intensive care patients at two hospitals in Brampton and Mississauga have COVID-19.

Although the province claims 400 intensive care beds remain available for patients, health care professionals point out that not all of these can be used due to staff shortages. “Only 15 per cent of the work that we do is elective. 85 per cent of the stuff that comes to our door we can’t alter. That is traumas, cardiac surgery, cancer surgery, transplants and we can’t cancel those,” explained Dr. Michael Warner, the medical director of critical care at Michael Garron Hospital. “So our ability to flex up is limited primarily by the number of highly trained nurses we have and those nurses are in critically short supply right now. We have to get this thing under control.”

The situation is equally serious in Alberta, where the United Conservative Party government announced earlier this month plans to establish field hospitals capable of treating up to 750 patients. In Edmonton, the intensive care unit at the Stollery Children’s Hospital has been transformed into a unit caring for adult patients with COVID-19, with the children moved to a cardiac intensive care unit. Alberta Health Services also reported that four COVID-19 outbreaks are ongoing at hospitals in the Calgary zone, and that Fort Saskatchewan Community Hospital will close its labour and delivery unit to free up bed space. Pregnant patients will have to travel over 30 kilometres to the nearest health care facility.

In Quebec, Health Minister Christian Dubé announced that beds are being added in “non-traditional” settings, including hotels, to cope with an increase in demand that has seen coronavirus patients rise by 50 percent over the past three weeks. With the number of COVID-19 patients receiving hospital care now exceeding 1,000, ten of the province’s hospitals are on the verge of overflowing, Dubé said.

In British Columbia, the government is sending three “alternative care units” to the Vancouver Island, Northern Health, and Fraser Health regions to cope with the crushing demand for hospital beds. The units are shipping containers comprised of 40 beds that can be used to establish basic emergency care centres in gymnasiums, community centres, and other buildings. Last week, the province registered a new high of 361 patients in hospital, 93 of whom were in intensive care, another tragic record.

As horrendous as the health care crisis is, estimates suggest that the situation will deteriorate drastically in coming weeks. New modelling from Ontario shows that by January 24, Ontario will have 5,000 daily COVID-19 infections per day, more than double the current 7-day average of 2,100, if infections continue to increase by on average 1 percent per day. A 5 percent increase, which epidemiologists are warning is highly possible absent urgent action, would result in a staggering 14,000 new daily infections by late January.

Given that a delay of several weeks is usually observed between infection and hospitalization, the demands on already overstretched hospitals are all but certain to increase.

These developments are not inevitable. Rather, they are the direct product of the criminal policies that the entire political establishment are pursuing. From Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberal government on down, the main concern of Canada’s ruling elite has been to protect the profits of big business and the wealth of the super-rich, while forcing workers to remain on the job amid a raging pandemic.

After the Liberals engineered vast bailouts for the banks and financial oligarchy in the spring totaling more than $650 billion, Trudeau worked closely with big business lobby groups and his allies in the trade unions to enforce the reckless reopening of the economy. He was supported in this homicidal endeavour by the hard-right provincial governments of François Legault in Quebec, Ford in Ontario, and Jason Kenney in Alberta, as well as the New Democratic Party-led government of John Horgan in BC. A critical part of reopening the economy was ensuring that schools were opened for in-person classes so they could function as child minding services for parents, who were forced back into dangerous workplaces.

Provincial governments are continuing this policy of placing profits before human lives even as the terrible consequences, expressed above all in the mounting death toll and threatened collapse of the health care system, become ever clearer. On Monday, the Ford government announced what it termed a “lockdown” for the whole of Ontario, as of December 26. Yet the lockdown order contained so many loopholes and exceptions that Globe and Mail health correspondent André Picard aptly characterized it as a “mockdown.” The exemptions will above all impact large worksites, which have been one of the main vectors for transmission of the virus.

Many workplaces that have experienced major outbreaks, including food processing plants and warehouses, will remain open. Businesses allowed to continue operating include “all construction activities and services,” “supply chains, including businesses that work in processing, packaging, warehousing, distribution, delivery, and maintenance,” “manufacturing,” “courier, postal, shipping, moving and delivery services,” “staffing services including providing temporary help,” and “hotels, cottages, resorts and motels.” Large retail stores like Costco and Walmart will also be allowed to remain open because they stock groceries or pharmacy products.

The “lockdown” order fixes January 11 as the date when elementary schools will reopen. Secondary schools will follow two weeks later. An earlier version of the order which included the restricting of childcare services to essential workers was scrapped so as to ensure childcare remains accessible to all. Given that virtually all businesses outside of the retail sector remain open, the vast majority of parents will continue to send their children to daycare in order to continue going to work.

Health experts have attacked the Ford government’s decision to delay the imposition of the lockdown until December 26. This means that family gatherings over Christmas can take place before the restriction on social gatherings to members of the same household comes into force. Anthony Dale, president of the Ontario Health Association, said that hospital directors and health care leaders were “shocked” that the restrictions have been delayed until after Christmas.

A similar process is under way in neighbouring Quebec. In mid-November, Legault announced with great fanfare that family gatherings of up to three households and 10 people would be permitted for a four-day period around Christmas. As the devastating consequences of the province’s back-to-work and back-to-school policies became clear, however, the government was forced to perform an about-face and abandon the planned relaxation of social distancing measures.

At a joint press conference with opposition leaders Tuesday, the same day as the province announced a record daily high of 2,183 new infections, Legault sought to blame the population at large for the catastrophe produced by his government’s policies. “It’s time to be responsible,” he lectured Quebec residents, insisting that they should limit gatherings to members of their own household. Manon Massé, co-leader of the pseudo-left Quebec Solidaire, declared at the joint press conference that she was putting aside her “political differences” with Legault to ensure that Quebecers “work together.”

While the restrictions on social gatherings are necessary, the Legault government’s determination to reopen schools on January 11 will contribute to a further escalation of infections. The entire manufacturing sector will also be allowed to operate normally between December 25 and January 10.

The disastrous conditions produced by the ruling elite’s criminal mishandling of the pandemic underscore the urgency of the working class intervening with its own solution to the crisis. If thousands of lives are to be saved and the collapse of the health care system averted, workers must mount a political struggle for the complete shutdown of all nonessential production with full pay for all workers affected, the closure of in-person learning at all schools until the pandemic is brought under control, and the provision of tens of billions of dollars for health care and social services. These measures are all the more necessary given that the successful development of a vaccine means that the vast majority of the population could be immunized in a matter of a few months.

To fund the measures needed to halt the spread of COVID-19 and save lives, the ruling elite’s vast wealth must be impounded and the hundreds of billions in bailout money the federal government and Bank of Canada funneled into the banks and financial markets redirected into protecting workers’ incomes and providing quality health care to all. This can only be realized as part of the mass mobilization of the working class in the struggle for a workers’ government committed to the socialist reorganization of socio-economic life.

Canadian Cargill plant closed after more than 80 employees test positive for coronavirus

Cordell Gascoigne

Last week, on Thursday, December 17, a Cargill meat-processing plant in Guelph, Ontario, was forced to close after a major outbreak of coronavirus. Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph (WDG) Public Health announced that day that 87 cases had been confirmed, concentrated to the Guelph facility, while an additional 42 were considered to have been exposed and instructed to self-quarantine.

According to the WDG Public Health website, there have been 2,175 confirmed cases and 44 fatalities in the WDG area, a population of approximately 272,000. The area was moved into the “red zone” by the government of Ontario on December 11, triggering stricter social distancing protocols, including limiting large gatherings.

In an email to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Kitchener-Waterloo, a Cargill spokesperson wrote, “We are taking this step out of an abundance of caution as our local workforce deals with the community-wide impacts of COVID-19. As we work in partnership with the union, our employees will be paid the 36 hours per week as outlined in our collective agreement.”

In a statement issued by the company, Cargill “stressed the importance” that “any employees who are sick or have been exposed to anyone with COVID-19 in the last 14 days to stay home.”

However, despite the outbreak in the plant and the spread of the virus in the community, Cargill has announced that it plans to reopen on December 29, less than two weeks after the shutdown began and well before the WDG area leaves “red zone” status.

Moreover, before shutting production Cargill required workers finish their shifts to process what unprocessed meats remained in the facility.

Tim Deelstra, spokesman for United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Locals 175 and 633, says the union has been speaking on a daily basis with Cargill about the coronavirus outbreak. “Employees are going to be covered as per the collective agreement for this week. And we’re having ongoing conversations with the employer about what the future will look like. Certainly, again, our role as the union is not only to protect their physical health and safety, but also to look after their economic health and safety, too.”

However, the UFCW allowed the plant to continue operating for weeks after the outbreak first became known. Two weeks prior to shutdown, 21 employees at the plant had already tested positive, along with approximately 80 additional workers who were exposed and sent home to self-quarantine, with no action being taken by the UFCW.

In fact, the Guelph plant experienced its first cases back in May. Deelstra feigned concern for the workers, saying, “It’s a big concern. People are trying to go to work, and we want them to be safe and we want them to go home safe.”

In reality, the UFCW on both sides of the US-Canada border has played a crucial role in allowing management to maintain production in the teeth of the pandemic. When JBS beef workers in Greeley, Colorado walked off the job in July after 6 of their co-workers had died, UFCW Local 7 responded by circulating a flyer instructing workers to remain on the job. It has limited itself to toothless publicity stunts, such as renting a billboard with the names and pictures of the dead JBS workers and driving a billboard truck with slogans demanding hazard pay around to local grocery stories.

The local union in Waterloo, Iowa even worked with management at a Tyson Foods pork plant to cook up an incentive program for perfect attendance even as managers took bets on how many workers would eventually become infected. Over 1,000 workers in the facility have fallen ill and five have died.

Jon Nash, Cargill Protein North America President, issued a statement claiming it was a “difficult decision” to idle production at the plant “because, as part of the food supply chain, it is an essential service.” In reality, what is “essential” for Cargill and other meatpacking companies is keeping workers on the job to continue producing profits. While the company has not released its financial results for 2020, the Minnesota-based company typically makes around $115 billion in revenue and $3 bill in profits annually.

Trump pardons Blackwater killers for Nisour Square massacre

Patrick Martin

President Trump’s pardon of four Blackwater mercenaries, tried and convicted of mass murder in Baghdad during the Iraq War, is a clear signal that American soldiers and the paramilitary thugs who assist them can kill with impunity in wars of aggression launched by US imperialism. And it sends a message about domestic as well as foreign policy. Trump is seeking to develop fascist forces, including sections of the police and military, who will be prepared to carry out similar massacres against American workers and youth.

Trump has been threatening to pardon the Nisour Square killers for several years, in the course of which he has pardoned several other convicted war criminals from Iraq and Afghanistan. The Blackwater guards have high-level support, both among Fox News pundits watched by Trump, and within his own cabinet—his billionaire Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, Blackwater’s founder.

Trump pardoned Blackwater ontractor Nicholas Slatten from life in prison for his role in the 2007 shooting of unarmed civilians in Iraq. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File)

The circumstances of the 2007 Nisour Square massacre are not in doubt, following exhaustive investigations by the US military, the FBI and the Iraqi authorities. A squad of Blackwater mercenaries, deployed as guards for US State Department officials, left their base in the Green Zone, the US government’s compound in central Baghdad, on the morning of September 16, 2007, equipped with heavy weapons. At the first city square they entered, the mercenaries halted traffic, then opened fire indiscriminately with automatic weapons and grenade launchers on cars, taxis and buses carrying hundreds of ordinary Iraqis going about their daily business. No Iraqis fired shots, displayed weapons, or in any way threatened the Blackwater agents.

When the bloodbath was over, at least 14 Iraqis lay dead and 17 were wounded. None of the Americans suffered so much as a scratch. The death list demonstrates the essentially random character of the victims, 10 men, two women, and two boys, hit in the hail of gunfire and explosives. There is no reference to these names in the pardon declaration issued by the White House:

• Ahmad Haitham Ahmad al-Rubai, 20, a medical student
• Mahassin Mohssen Kadhum Al-Khazali, 46, Ahmad’s mother and a dermatologist
• Ghaniyah Hassan Ali, 55, mother of eight, who died on a bus shielding her daughter Afrah from the bullets
• Ali Mohammed Hafedh Abdul Razzaq, 9, killed in the car his father was driving
• Mohamed Abbas Mahmoud, 47, a delivery truck driver
• Qasim Mohamed Abbas Mahmoud, 12, the truck driver’s son
• Mushtaq Karim Abd Al-Razzaq, 18, an Iraqi soldier standing at a military checkpoint
• Osama Fadhil Abbas, 52, a car dealer
• Ali Khalil Abdul Hussein, 54, a blacksmith commuting to work on his motorcycle
• Ibrahim Abid Ayash, 77, a gardener and passenger on a bus
• Mahdi Sahib Nasir, 26, a taxi driver
• Hamoud Sa’eed Abttan, 33, an unemployed job seeker, father of seven
• Uday Ismail Ibrahiem, 27, Hamoud’s cousin, also unemployed and a father of three
• Sa’adi Ali Abbas Alkarkh, 52, a businessman

The Nisour Square massacre came at the high point of the bloodletting in Iraq, when President George W. Bush had ordered a “surge” in troop deployments and operations throughout Iraq to forestall an impending disintegration of the Iraqi puppet regime established by the 2003 US invasion. The death toll skyrocketed with the ongoing clashes with Iraqi insurgent forces. It was impossible for US officials to move outside the Green Zone without heavily armed escorts, mainly provided by Blackwater, which held a $1 billion contract for guard services in the war zones. Mainly drawn from ex-military men turned highly paid mercenaries, Blackwater was characterized by a colonialist disdain for the “natives” and a penchant for shooting first and never asking questions.

The 2014 trial in the United States included 30 eyewitnesses flown in from Iraq to give testimony, the largest number ever to come to America for such a purpose. Their accounts were graphic and heart-wrenching. “Anything that moved in Nisour Square was shot. Women, children, young people, they shot everyone,” said Hassan Jaber Salman, a lawyer who survived the attack with his son. Blackwater claimed that the convoy had come under attack, that the witness accounts were fabricated, and the killings were justified. However, a congressional report found that in 80 percent of the cases where Blackwater guards used their weapons in Iraq between 2005 and 2007, they had fired first.

Despite repeated interventions on behalf of the Blackwater mercenaries by US politicians, and court rulings that overturned several guilty verdicts, four were finally convicted. Nicholas Slatten was the first to open fire, killing Dr. Al-Khazali and her son Ahmad, who was driving her to a medical appointment in a white Kia. Slatten was sentenced to life imprisonment. Three others, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty and Paul Slough, joined in the killing. They received prison sentences ranging from 11 to 15 years.

At the time that the Blackwater killers were first convicted and sentenced, the WSWS wrote:

The Blackwater mercenaries were among the most flagrant killers in Iraq but hardly unique. There are numerous reported incidents of mass murder conducted by US soldiers, special forces operatives and private contractors. Many more such incidents are unrecorded because no victims survived. But some of these were among the hundreds of atrocities made public by Private Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, who released logs of military reports to WikiLeaks, some made public under the title “Collateral Murder.”

More importantly, the politicians and generals who organized and led the US war in Iraq have gotten off scot-free. Under the principles laid down by the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II, the leaders of the US government during the Iraq War—George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, George Tenet, Paul Wolfowitz—and top military commanders from Tommy Franks to David Petraeus are guilty of the crime of planning and executing a war of aggression. They are collectively responsible for all the deaths that ensued as a result of their actions.

Today, many more names would be added to that list, including all the leading personnel of the Obama administration: Obama, Biden (now the president-elect and future distributor of pardons), as well as those who supervised drone warfare and larger-scale acts of military aggression in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and other countries.

There were perfunctory statements of outrage from congressional Democrats over the Trump pardons. “If you murder civilians while at war, you get a pardon,” said Representative Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

But Trump’s suppression of the Nisour Square convictions is only the crudest expression of a policy embraced by Democratic administrations as well as Republican. No one can forget that it was Obama who blocked all prosecutions of CIA officers for running secret torture chambers around the world, claiming that he wanted to “look forward, not backward.” What he looked “forward” to was using the CIA to carry out drone-missile assassinations all over the world, with American citizens among the victims.

President-elect Biden, who was Obama’s vice president, has already indicated that he will pursue the same policy, opposing prosecutions of Trump administration officials for such crimes as separating thousands of immigrant children from their parents, brutalizing and even killing migrants at the border, and carrying out flagrant violations of international law like the drone-missile killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.

And while paying lip service to having learned the lessons of the bloodbaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, Biden has filled the national security positions in his cabinet and on his White House staff with advocates of and participants in these wars. He selected as his nominee to head the Pentagon, retired General Lloyd Austin, who was deputy to David Petraeus in 2008, during one of the bloodiest stretches of the war, and then held the top military command in Baghdad in 2010-2011, overseeing the final stages of the US withdrawal. Austin later headed the US Central Command as US troops poured back into Iraq to combat ISIS forces that were overrunning the Iraqi military.

The principal charge raised by the Democratic Party against Trump over the past four years was that he was insufficiently aggressive in prosecuting military operations in Syria and carrying forward the US military-intelligence onslaught against Russia initiated by the Obama administration. The replacement of Trump by Biden next month will not mean any lessening in the belligerence of American imperialism, only new dangers.

The struggle against imperialist war and barbarism requires the political mobilization of the working class, against both parties of imperialism, the Democrats as much as the Republicans, on the basis of a socialist and antiwar program.

Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government defends “herd immunity” policy in The Lancet

Alice Summers

At the start of December, as COVID-19 ravaged Spain, Fernando Simón, a top health official of the Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government, wrote to the medical journal The Lancet defending his government’s politically criminal handling of the pandemic.

The signatories included Simón, the director of the Centre for the Coordination of Health Alerts and Emergencies (CCAES), his deputy María José Sierra Moros, and 11 other signatories from the CCAES.

The letter bemoans the fact that an “earlier start to the second COVID-19 epidemic wave in Spain compared with other European countries has raised overt criticism [of the] public health administrations’ response.” It seeks to dispel these criticisms, referring to the increased “response capacities” Spain supposedly developed after the first wave of the pandemic.

Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias speaks as Spain's caretaker Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez looks on after signing an agreement at the parliament in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Paul White)

Simón’s apologia came as coronavirus cases surged once again, after a month in which positive test rates had been on the decline. After reaching a peak of roughly 25,000 daily infections in early November, positive cases fell to around 7,000 a day by the start of December, before sharply rising again over the last two weeks as limited restrictions were largely abandoned in the run-up to Christmas.

Spain is now the ninth-worst affected country in the world by officially recorded infection numbers, and tenth by total fatalities, with 1.8 million positive cases and 48,926 deaths. Across the globe, Spain ranks eighth for deaths per capita, with 104.71 fatalities per 100,000 people, according to John Hopkins University—roughly one death for every thousand inhabitants of Spain.

Alarmed at the growing political radicalisation produced by the pandemic, Simón’s letter is an abject attempt to cover up the government’s responsibility for the tens of thousands of deaths. The letter dishonestly asserts that “Spain greatly increased its response capacities after the first wave of this virus.”

“All strategies and protocols were integrated into an updated early response plan,” it continues, “… including provisions for increasing epidemiological surveillance, test-trace-isolate procedures, strategic reserves, and health-care capacity, among others, which was adopted in July.”

Simón’s self-congratulatory reference to measures introduced after the first wave of the pandemic sidesteps the contagion which ravaged Spain in the early months of 2020 and the consequent appalling loss of life. Hospitals were overwhelmed by the onslaught of the virus, as the elderly were left to die in care homes and morgues were overflowing with COVID-19 victims.

According to the government’s own figures, roughly 29,000 people died of the virus in the first five months of 2020 alone. These figures only include those who died after testing positive for the virus. With systematic coronavirus testing largely unavailable at the start of the pandemic, they are a significant and deliberate underestimate of the true scale of the catastrophe.

In fact, according to Spain’s National Institute of Statistics (INE), 45,684 people died from suspected or confirmed COVID-19 in the first wave of the pandemic alone, most between March and May this year.

INE data also revealed that a further 4,218 fatalities occurred during this period in which coronavirus was not the primary cause, but nonetheless contributed to death as a comorbidity. These include people who had suffered from conditions like cancer and ultimately died from complications linked to the coronavirus.

Taken together, these figures indicate that around 50,000 deaths can be linked to COVID-19 in the first five months of 2020 alone. This makes the virus the leading cause of death in Spain in this period. INE data shows it killed as many people in Spain as all types of cancers combined, caused twice as many deaths as respiratory diseases and roughly seven times the number of fatalities as those caused by external events such as murders, traffic accidents, suicides and accidental deaths.

As to the suggestion that Spain’s response since the first wave has been exemplary, this year the country suffered its deadliest autumn in over four decades. Across the months of September, October and November, Spain recorded over 110,000 deaths from any cause, the most fatalities in this period since consistent records began in 1975, with the end of the Franco regime. Spain has never registered more than 100,000 deaths in this period in the 45 years since the transition to democracy.

In fact, according to figures from state Mortality Monitoring System, of the 30 days with the highest total mortality since 1975, 28 of them have been during the coronavirus pandemic. Figures from the INE also show that across the year there have been over 75,000 “excess deaths” in Spain, compared to the average yearly deaths recorded across the 2016–19 period.

This is the direct product of the government’s refusal to enact any serious measures to contain the second wave of the pandemic. In early November, in a press conference for the Ministry of Health, Simón made this criminal policy clear: “What we have right now in Spain is not a [stay-at-home] lock-down, and this will probably not be necessary.”

He continued: “If we carry out a real and full confinement and nobody leaves their house for any reason, within around 15 days we would have this under control, or perhaps within a month. But this is impossible. There are people who need to work, to buy things, who need to leave… Total confinement is impossible.”

Simón’s December letter also praised the “[e]xtensive and transparent information for daily epidemic monitoring” made available by the Spanish government, which is “based on exhaustive individual case information received daily at the national level.”

Like those reported by its counterparts across Europe, Spanish government figures have been far from “exhaustive” and “transparent.” In fact, official statistics undercount total fatalities by a margin of tens of thousands. The government reports a total death toll of 29,000 in the first wave of the pandemic, against the roughly 50,000 fatalities estimated by the INE. While the INE puts excess deaths at over 75,000 in 2020, the PSOE-Podemos government acknowledged a total COVID-19 death toll of roughly 50,000.

Regional governments also obscured the scale of the catastrophe. Reports emerged in October that the Madrid regional government was tampering with daily figures. It omitted thousands of cases from its daily tallies, before retroactively modifying the infection figures as much as a fortnight later, without notifying the public.

Also, in October, professionals from Catalan research centres and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, wrote to The Lancet criticising the Spanish government for failing to provide detailed data on the pandemic, broken down by age, sex and area. “In Spain,” the letter stated, “COVID-19 data currently published at the country and regional levels are insufficient to understand the dynamics of COVID-19 and to take action.”

Later in his December letter, Simón admits: “However, weaknesses persist in the system, with chronic underinvestment in primary health care, public health, digitalisation, research and innovation, bureaucratic procedures, and with little availability of trained professionals.” Simón avoids mentioning that these “weaknesses” are the result of austerity policies pursued over decades by governments across the political spectrum, leaving Spain woefully ill-prepared to face the COVID-19 pandemic.

Concluding his letter, Simón attempts to shift the blame for Spain’s massive death toll onto the working class, claiming that the government’s failure to stem the pandemic is in fact due to the population’s “pandemic fatigue.”

“Politicisation and an unfortunate climate of confrontation permeating different sectors,” he writes, “makes effective crisis communication challenging and is likely to impair response efforts.” That is, the widespread, legitimate anger in the working class at a murderous “herd immunity” policy will not be tolerated. On this basis, earlier this year, the PSOE-Podemos government sent riot police to assault steelworkers striking for the right to shelter at home.

The letter to The Lancet is a foul attempt to let the PSOE-Podemos government of the hook for a criminal policy it has pursued.

Rubber glove factories become COVID-19 epicentres in Malaysia

Robert Campion

Workers are fighting the world’s largest medical glove manufacturer, Top Glove, over unsanitary working conditions that have led to the largest, active coronavirus hotspots in Malaysia. Damning exposures by workers have revealed sweltering and unsafe conditions, with lack of protections, no social distancing and packed dormitories.

According to statistics from Malaysia’s Ministry of Health, 5,700 of Top Glove’s 11,215 employees at just one of its manufacturing centres have tested positive for coronavirus since November. For a number of days, the company’s 21,000 employees accounted for over half of Malaysia’s new cases. The company was forced to submit to staggered shutdowns of its factories, largely in the Meru region.

Entrance to Top Glove Tower in Selangor, Malaysia (Photo: Wikimedia)

Responsible for 60 percent of the world’s disposable gloves, the company reported on December 16 that it had tested 10,000 employees, of whom 93 percent had recovered, but declined to specify how many had tested positive. It also announced the reopening of its factories despite days earlier confirming its first COVID-19 death, 29-year-old security guard Yam Narayan Chaudhary, who was based at a manufacturing facility in Klang, 40 kilometres west of the capital Kuala Lumpur.

Chaudhary died in a Selangor province hospital due to COVID-related pneumonia and lung fibrosis but was not admitted to the hospital for three days owing to the decisions of management. Why this occurred has not been explained, although it is of piece with Top Glove’s exploitative conditions.

No condolences or information were passed on to his family in western Nepal.

“Our whole family was very much shocked,” his brother Bhabindra told the New York Times. “He always tried to assure us that he is quite young and healthy, so nothing could happen to him with COVID. We feel it’s Top Glove’s failure that they are not able to protect their workers.”

The outbreaks emerged after months of the company posting record profits. Top Glove took advantage of being exempted from Malaysia’s lockdown earlier this year, at the insistence of European and other governments. From September to November, its net profits surged to 2.38 billion ringgit ($US584 million)—more than 20 times higher than the equivalent period last year.

Top Glove also became the second-largest listed company on the Malaysian stock market. Its share price rose 300 percent. Its shareholders include Malaysian and Norwegian state pension funds, as well as US-based Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager.

This has come at the direct expense of its workers, who are subjected to low wages and long stretches of overtime. Collectively, Top Glove employees produce 200 million disposable gloves a day, but each receive roughly $300 a month in salary, and are forced to work 72-hour work weeks on occasion, making them tired and more vulnerable to the virus.

Employees reported becoming soaked in sweat after working only an hour due to the lack of air conditioning. Instead of being given replacement masks, they are supplied only with one a day.

Even to gain work at Top Glove in the first place, some migrant workers are forced into debt bondage by having to pay fees of $5,000, which can take months or years to recoup. Dormitories are crowded, with as many as 20 in one room on bunk beds.

Throughout the pandemic, the company has ignored safety protocols, suppressed information and intimidated its largely migrant workforce.

One whistleblower, another migrant worker from Nepal, Yubaraj Khadka, took photos as far back as May of workers crowding into the factory. According to Reuters, photos show dozens of workers less than a metre apart waiting for their temperature checks before starting their night shifts.

“There was no one-metre distancing. That’s what I wanted to show,” Khadka told the New York Times, “even at the factory, after the first few months (of infections in Malaysia), the social distancing markers were thrown out.”

Khadka commented: “The Top Glove management’s mentality is that migrant labourers are very low. If I could talk to the bosses, I would say, ‘Treat us better, like humans.’”

Instead, Khadka was fired in September after the company scoured its CCTV footage for months. Upon his termination, the management confiscated his phone.

Workers also reported being denied the results from their COVID tests. According to the newspaper, six were not given their results this month, even though one of them was hospitalised for six days.

Malaysia is in the midst of its third and largest wave of coronavirus cases. There were 2,018 recorded infections on Monday—roughly double the daily average in November—bringing the total confirmed cases to 95,327. One death occurred, taking the toll to 438.

Top Glove is just the tip of the iceberg. Conditions are reportedly worse at smaller Malaysian glove makers. One company, Brightway Holdings, had its factory in Kajang district raided by government officials. They found workers living in cramped, dirty shipping containers stacked behind the premises. Most were migrant workers.

Smaller glove maker Kossan Rubber Industries this week announced the results of testing since December 4, which recorded 990 COVID-19 cases at a plant in Klang. Employees are now undergoing quarantine and the plant has been closed until December 30.

Along with factories, clusters are emerging in similar conditions in prisons and detention centres.

The Malaysian authorities have launched 19 investigations to determine whether Top Glove has violated labour standards, but this just an effort to save face and stifle popular discontent.

In neighbouring Singapore, the government announced last week that 47 percent of its migrant workforce, or 152,000 workers, had contracted the virus, as compared to about 4,000 of Singapore’s citizens.

The fight against the virus in Malaysia and internationally requires the ending of the unsafe and exploitative conditions that become vectors for the pandemic. This requires a globally unified struggle of the international working class, not just against individual companies but against the profit system itself.

US Federal Reserve backstops rising corporate debt mountain

Nick Beams

As the WSWS noted, there was one notable feature of the passage of the $900 billion relief bill through the US Congress earlier this week that demonstrated the absolute loyalty of the Democrats to the Wall Street financial oligarchy.

After abandoning aid for cash-strapped cities and states to provide services and agreeing to a grossly inadequate one-time payment of $600 to most working people, they rose up in arms against at attempt to restrict operations by the Fed to bolster major companies.

The Federal Reserve headquarters in Washington, DC (Source: Wikimedia/Rdsmith4)

Republican Senator Pat Toomey moved to prevent the Fed reviving an operation in which it receives money from the US Treasury, which it then leverages to make ultra-cheap loans to businesses and to buy corporate debt.

The Fed had raised objections when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called for the winding down of the program in November warning that it could impede its operations to sustain Wall Street and other financial markets.

The importance of that support, which was lifted to new heights following the market freeze in mid-March, has been underscored by data on the level of corporate borrowing this year compiled by the Bank of America and reported in the Financial Times earlier in the week.

US companies have borrowed a record $2.5 trillion in the bond market this year. This has meant that leverage—the ratio between debt and earnings—for investment grade companies has gone to new heights after reaching record levels in 2019.

The actions taken by the Fed in response to the March crisis have provided crucial support for these operations. The Fed took the unprecedented decision to buy investment-grade corporate bonds as well as buying exchange traded funds, including those that tracked riskier assets.

Unlike the purchases of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities, which form the backbone of the Fed’s market intervention—currently running at $120 billion a month more than $1.4 trillion a year—the move into corporate bond purchases involved backing from the US Treasury, which the Toomey measure sought to restrict in the future.

The Fed’s corporate bond intervention after March had an immediate impact. As the Financial Times noted: “Without even purchasing a single bond, prices began to recover, bolstered by the Fed’s support. Investor confidence in corporate America returned and the floodgates opened to fresh corporate debt raising.”

Initially debt was raised to cover the loss of income due to the pandemic. But what the Financial Times called “the largest corporate borrowing spree on record” has developed as companies have used the ultra-low interest rates facilitated by the Fed to build up their cash holdings in order to take advantage of any favourable buying operations.

The significance of the Fed’s intervention into the corporate debt market, which the Democrats were so desperate to ensure continued unimpeded, was underscored by Jonny Fine, the USA head of debt syndicate at Goldman Sachs. He described it as “the most important piece of central bank policymaking I have seen in my career.”

Despite leverage ratios reaching record highs, indicating an escalation of risks, and the number of zombie companies—those where interest payments are higher than profits—climbing close to historic highs, the debt bubble has continued to inflate.

Rating agencies have downgraded ratings and a record number of firms have this year been rated at triple C, one of the lowest levels, and almost double the number last year.

They key factor at work in this extraordinary situation is the role of the Fed.

As Alex Veroude, chief investment officer at Insight Investment, commented to the Financial Times: “The Fed has created an expectation of a bailout.”

He said it almost did not matter “what other indicators or debt or leverage show” and that ‘if you think about it, it is insane. It’s exactly what critics would say capitalism has created. But it’s the reality.”

Increased Fed intervention has also aided the private equity market where vast profits are accumulated through takeover deals and buyouts. The value of private equity deals this year has risen to the highest levels since 2007. Buyouts were worth $559 billion this year, an increase of 20 percent over last year, according to figures compiled by Refinitiv.

When the pandemic struck at the beginning of the year it appeared that the mergers and acquisitions market was going to take a major hit. But the intervention of the Fed provided a boost to this form of financial parasitism, as it did to many others.

Commenting on a rise of private equity deals, Bryce Klemper at the consultant firm McKinsey noted: “Ultimately the lifeblood of private equity is cheap debt. When you have the Fed saying debt will stay cheap for years… the numbers look buoyant.”

There are a number of conclusions to be drawn from these developments.

On the economic front, the growth of debt parasitism makes clear what lies behind the bipartisan refusal in the US to implement the necessary measures to deal with the pandemic because of the impact they would have on the stock market and the financial system more broadly.

Politically, the events of this year have delivered the death blow to whatever remained of the doctrine of the “free market” which has functioned as one of the essential ideological pillars of the capitalist order.

The financial oligarchy has continued to prosper to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, benefiting from death and destruction, through the direct intervention of the machinery of the capitalist state, of which the Fed is a crucial arm. And as events of the past week have revealed there is no greater supporter of the institutionalised mechanisms for siphoning wealth into the coffers of the financial oligarchy than the Democratic Party.

COVID-19 hospitalizations, deaths worldwide reach record highs

Bryan Dyne

All over the world, the 2020 holiday season is dominated by the tragic reality that 1.7 million human beings, cut down by the coronavirus pandemic, will never again have the opportunity to visit and celebrate with loved ones.

More than three people have died each minute from the disease since the first case of COVID-19 was reported to the World Health Organization. They include grandparents forced to say goodbye to their loved ones via computer, workers whose last moments were spent struggling to breathe on a ventilator, young adults whose lives had barely begun, and infants as young as two months old who were barely aware of the world before their lives were snuffed out.

Dr. Rafik Abdou and respiratory therapist Babu Paramban check on a COVID-19 patient at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center, LA, Nov. 19, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File]

Nearly a year on, the pandemic is accelerating. More than 11,500 people are dying every day, almost double the highest death rate recorded during the first wave in April. It took four months for the first 100,000 lives to be lost. Now, 100,000 people are killed every nine days.

The United States remains the most hard-hit country. President Donald Trump’s policy of herd immunity, aided and abetted by the Democrats, has so far slain more than one in every 1,000 people living in the country. Every day nearly 3,000 deaths are reported, along with 220,000 new infections, as schools and workplaces are forced to remain open, further spreading the deadly disease.

The most recent surge has prompted a variety of ominous comments, particularly from President-elect Biden’s coronavirus advisory board. Dr. Celine Gounder, a professor at New York University, told MSNBC that a “surge on top of a surge on top of a surge” is coming in the next few weeks. She warned that hospital workers will “have to be making some very difficult decisions about triaging, unfortunately, who gets what care and who does not.”

This will be most true in states such as California, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, where hospital systems are nearing capacity. “If we have another surge after Christmas and New Year’s like we did after Thanksgiving, it will completely break our hospitals,” Tennessee Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey told National Public Radio.

Comments along these lines were made by another member of Biden’s advisory board, Dr. Atul Gawande. He told CNBC that “hospitals in more than a third of the country are already full to overflowing,” setting the stage for an even more catastrophic situation than that which already exists. There are more than 115,000 coronavirus-related hospitalizations in the US, double the peak numbers in both July and April, and the daily hospitalization rate is rising,

When asked about how to avoid an even worse scenario, Gawande responded, “What do we do about it? It is still the same practices that really work,” before adding, “The next 100,000 deaths are baked in.”

The statement that nothing can be done to save 100,000 lives amounts to an admission of the bankruptcy of the “practices” of the entire American ruling class. It is, moreover, untrue.

It is well known that specific emergency measures can be taken to contain and eventually halt the spread of the virus and end the wave of death. In those countries, such as China and Vietnam, that have carried out serious and sustained lockdowns, including nonessential workplaces and schools, the virus has been contained and almost eliminated.

China, where the virus first emerged, has a population of 1.4 billion, more than four times that of the United States. Its total COVID-19 death toll is 4,634, and no deaths from the virus have been recorded since April. The United States, which, like the industrialized countries of Europe, has insisted on keeping non-essential production going and forcing schools to stay open, is now suffering on average some 19,600 COVID fatalities a week—more than four times the total in China over the entire course of the year. It is not an endorsement of the Chinese regime to acknowledge these facts.

Emergency measures that would contain and control the virus and end the wave of deaths are not taken for one basic reason: they cut across the economic interests of the financial oligarchies that dominate capitalist society. Corporate profits, stock prices and the wealth of the super-rich take absolute priority over human life. And to force workers into virus-infested plants and workplaces, and students and educators into unsafe schools, so as to keep the flow of corporate profits going, the same ruling classes refuse to provide income protection for the growing ranks of the unemployed. Workers are presented with the “choice” of risking death or becoming homeless and destitute.

As the derisory “relief” bill just passed by the US Congress underscores, the ruling class—most brazenly in the US—is using the pandemic to further enrich itself and drive down even more the wages and social conditions of the working class.

That is why the struggle against the pandemic, mass death and mass impoverishment is a political struggle against the capitalist system. It depends on the independent intervention of the working class to force the shutdown of non-essential production and the schools, provide full income protection for the workers affected, establish safe conditions in essential workplaces, hire thousands more nurses and doctors, provide ample medical and health resources, including PPE, and guarantee high-speed internet and other resources for home learning during the pandemic. The vast resources required for these social necessities can and must be acquired through the expropriation of the obscene wealth of the corporate-financial elite and the establishment of public ownership of the major corporations and banks, under the democratic control of the working class.

The incoming Biden administration has already rejected any such measures, declaring instead that there must be no shutdown and the schools must be fully reopened—in all essentials, the same homicidal herd immunity policy pursued by Trump. Those condemned to die should roll over and accept their fate, perhaps with a $600 consolation prize.

Biden and Trump’s approach to the pandemic is mirrored by every major capitalist government. In Great Britain, where a new and more infectious strain of the coronavirus was recently detected, the National Health Service predicts that its hospitals will be treating more coronavirus patients on Christmas Day than at any point in the pandemic. The country has suffered more than 69,000 deaths and is currently facing a record number of new infections.

In Brazil, which has the second highest coronavirus death toll in the world, more than 189,000, fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro is promoting hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the pandemic. The drug, touted by Trump as well, has been proven to have no effect on COVID-19 mortality rates. This has not stopped Bolsonaro from stepping up his own herd immunity policy by pushing this and other ineffective drugs to end the few remaining lockdown and other public health measures in Brazil.

Across the Pacific, the policies of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have been equally disastrous. After imposing a lockdown across the country with little warning or planning, which left tens of millions stranded, Modi used the social crisis generated in the aftermath to launch an all-out back-to-work drive. This resulted in a surge in cases that started in May and continues to this day, resulting in more than 10.1 million cases and more than 146,000 recorded deaths.

If the warnings of public health officials, as well as the World Socialist Web Site, had been heeded back in February and March, millions who are now dead would still be alive and the holidays this year would not be overshadowed by the specter of death.

Australian COVID-19 outbreak underscores danger of corporate drive to lift safety restrictions

Mike Head

Under obvious big business and media pressure, the government of Australia’s most populous state yesterday partially lifted some of the limited safety restrictions it had implemented in Sydney, despite warnings from infectious diseases experts that it is far too early to know how far the city’s COVID-19 outbreak has spread.

Long lines of cars at inner-west Sydney COVID-19 testing station [Photo: WSWS Media]

After a “crisis” cabinet meeting of the state’s Liberal-National government, New South Wales (NSW) Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced that restrictions would be relaxed in half the city’s northern beaches region—the current epicentre of the virus resurgence. Unlimited numbers of under-12 aged children can be included in household gatherings there, and across Greater Sydney during a three-day Christmas period.

Contrary to the results of scientific studies globally, Berejiklian claimed that young children were not infectious. Gatherings of up to 10 people, plus children, are permitted throughout the metropolitan area, home to five million people, and up to 50 elsewhere across the state. Inexplicably, residents of the southern half of the northern beaches are still not allowed to leave their infected zone, yet can host visitors from anywhere.

The resulting danger, as epidemiologists have warned, is that Christmas and subsequent New Year celebrations could become “super-spreader” events. This underscores the risk of another disaster like the recent four-month outbreak in the neighbouring state of Victoria, where the premature business-driven lifting of restrictions and a failed hotel quarantine system led to more than 800 of the country’s 908 virus deaths.

The spread of the Sydney outbreak over the past week highlights the global character of the coronavirus pandemic, which has so far claimed more than 1.7 million lives. Once again, the resurgence has exposed the government- and media-cultivated myth that Australia and nearby New Zealand have “beaten” or even contained COVID-19.

The rejection by the government of pleas by medical scientists for basic precautionary measures, such as temporary lockdowns and mandatory mask-wearing, underscores the domination of corporate profit-making interests over the lives, health and livelihoods of the population.

Today, like every day this week, new recorded cases have been added to the Sydney outbreak. The official total currently exceeds 100, including one interstate in Melbourne. The list of feared infection sites posted by the health authorities—featuring supermarkets, shopping malls, gyms, clubs and restaurants—has been continually extended as well. It already covers working-class suburbs throughout the metropolitan area and towns across NSW. Today, residents of 36 suburbs in the state’s Central Coast region were urged to get tested because of COVID traces in the sewage system.

Many of those wanting COVID-19 test have had to wait more than five hours [Photo: WSWS Media]

Despite the claims of “gold-standard” testing and contact tracing facilities, residents of potential hotspot suburbs have queued for up to six hours at testing sites. “Patient Zero” has not been identified either, although genomic testing has shown the infection to be a US variant. That means the virus could have escaped more widely before the first local cases were reportedly “seeded” on December 11.

The contrast could not be greater between the profit-driven corporate and government response, and the public responsibility displayed by the tens of thousands of residents who have lined up patiently to get tested this week, and then self-isolate for 48 hours or more while awaiting results.

Yesterday, the federal Liberal-National government revealed, via Chief Health Officer Paul Kelly, a doubling to four in the number of arriving international travellers infected with the new more contagious COVID-19 variant that is “out of control” in Britain. Nevertheless, flights from the UK have not been blocked, on the false premise that Australia’s hotel quarantine system has proven effective in preventing coronavirus transmissions.

Epidemiologists and public health experts have said it remains “critical” for the health authorities to track down the first case that led to the outbreak, as well as expand the testing, make mask wearing compulsory and extend movement and gathering restrictions throughout Sydney.

Among the experts whose advice the state government rejected is World Health Organisation adviser and professor of epidemiology at the University of NSW, Mary-Louise McLaws. Speaking before Berejiklian’s announcement of reduced restrictions, she said the existing rules should remain over the Christmas break, because it was too early to make any sort of judgment from an outbreak management perspective.

“We look for at least one to two day incubation periods, preferably that is 14 days of zero to ensure that this large cluster has finished at the northern beaches,” McLaws told the “Today Show” television program. “We have multiple sites outside of Sydney that haven’t quite had a full incubation period.”

McLaws said the unknown source person could have been asymptomatic and might have been in contact with people who travelled interstate for the holidays a couple of weeks ago, before other state and territory governments reimposed border restrictions this week in response to the Sydney outbreak.

The voice of the capitalist class was sounded when the Business Council of Australia (BCA), representing the largest companies operating in Australia, joined other business groups on Tuesday to demand an “urgent” national cabinet meeting to end border shutdowns and set “predictable” rules to manage “inevitable local outbreaks.”

As published in the Nine Network newspapers, BCA chief executive Jennifer Westacott wrote: “We cannot continue going on with a stop-start economy, where families and businesses fall victim to inconsistent rules.” While claiming that they agreed with “safeguarding Australians,” the business chiefs insisted that the population had to “live with” the virus, in the interests of economic “recovery,” because a vaccine rollout “won’t happen overnight.”

The underlying agenda of the financial elite was spelled out in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review editorial. It told Prime Minister Scott Morrison he “must not waste this crisis.” Instead, he had to “get on with injecting reform into the recovery.” This is precisely what big business has been doing for months exploiting the pandemic to justify sweeping workplace changes that slash wages, jobs and conditions.

The editorial declared: “Creating herd immunity globally by vaccination may take years if ever, and the virus may spring back in new mutations.” It said the “virus shock” must be used to impose “serious tax reform” and changes to “byzantine industrial relations system.”

After offering the Morrison government “constructive” support throughout the year, federal Labor leader Anthony Albanese yesterday tried to appease public unrest by calling for earlier delivery of a vaccine. But that is no substitute for immediate action to protect lives.

The sole concern of the ruling class, like its counterparts in every country, is to boost the share prices of the major corporations and enlarge the bank accounts of the super-rich. Health and lives are being sacrificed to “economic revival”—that is, to the drive for corporate profit.

Working people must insist that measures be put in place immediately, based on the best scientific advice, to protect the population and guarantee a decent standard of living for all.

Instead of governments pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into corporate pockets via “support packages” and into military war preparations, society’s resources must be invested in health care infrastructure to treat, contain and eradicate COVID-19. That means reversing the chronic under-funding of medical research, public hospitals and aged care homes in order to ensure people are protected from the threat of infectious disease.

This is above all a political issue not just a health issue. The massive sums monopolised by the financial elite must be seized and used to meet these and other essential social needs as part of the socialist reorganisation of society as a whole. Matters cannot be left in the hands of the corporate elite and their political servants. Workers need to intervene independently in the political struggle for a workers’ government.