Australia: Deaths in Perth nursing home underscore aged care crisis

John Harris

Police are reportedly investigating the death, on April 6, of an 89-year-old female resident at Regis Healthcare Limited’s Nedlands Aged Care home in the Western Australian capital of Perth. The death followed those of two other residents in the past three months that were the subject of police investigation and reports of neglect and abuse.

One was 86-year-old Brian Hunter, who died on January 20. Two days before Christmas, according to an investigation by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “7.30” program, he was discovered to have been left on the rooftop terrace of the nursing home, unsupervised, for nearly two hours in the middle of a heatwave where temperatures peaked at 40 degrees Celsius.

Hunter was rescued around 3:05 p.m. when a visitor saw him on the roof unconscious. Hunter was a double amputee having lost both of his legs from complications arising from diabetes, suffered serious blisters and burns, and was found to be dehydrated and in a state of delirium.

Police reported that CCTV footage showed Hunter sitting in a wheelchair inside by the doors when, at 1:10 p.m., a Regis staff member entered the access code and opened the doors, letting Hunter on to the roof terrace.

Hunter’s daughter, Lea Hammond, said her father’s cognition was failing due to a fall at Regis the month before that left him with a black eye and a brain injury. Remarkably, after the fall Regis had not sent Hunter to hospital. It was only at the insistence of his daughter that this was done.

After being found burned and unconscious, Hunter was bedridden in hospital for four weeks. According to Hammond, nobody from Regis called her while her father was hospitalised. “At the end of his life, Dad barely spoke,” she told “7.30.” “He wasn’t speaking at all. They had to feed-tube him because he couldn’t swallow. And he barely recognised us.”

Hammond commented: “He was just a great father, wonderful grandfather, fantastic husband. This is just so distressing to see him being treated in that manner. I think he was just totally neglected, it’s awful.”

Hammond wrote to Regis CEO Linda Mellors. On the day her father died, she received a reply. The letter apologised “for your experience, and that we did not meet expected care standards.” Mellors promised an internal investigation.

A week later, the police from Western Australia’s Major Crime Squad reported that there was “no evidence of criminality.” Hammond told “7.30” she “was really shocked… to me this is criminal abuse… but there’s no charges laid against anyone.”

In the days before Hunter’s death, six nursing students from Edith Cowan University were sent to Regis Nedlands for their first clinical placements. Between January 11 and 13, the students reported abuse, widespread neglect, rough handling and sexually inappropriate behaviour at the nursing home.

One case the students reported was that of Dik Lee, whose family had paid $500,000 in March last year for his residence at the centre. Lee, 94, died the day after Brian Hunter’s death. He had allegedly been abused and improperly cared for by staff. One of the trainee nurses reported that she had “found Mr Lee (who is always in a wheelchair) on the floor near the entrance of his room completely unclothed and sitting in his faeces with [a carer] standing over him.”

A few days later, Lee came down with a fever and was bedridden. The doctors attending the home prescribed antibiotics and rest. Lee was taken to hospital where he fell into a five-day coma and suffered liver failure. He was dead within 24 hours.

Lisa Chan, Lee’s daughter, told “7.30:” “Just imagine if a child is being abused at school—that teacher would be held accountable for the abuse of the child… but my dad actually died due to the abuse, so why can’t it be a criminal investigation?”

In November 2019, the Regis Nedlands facility was placed under sanctions for putting the health and safety of residents at “serious risk.” However, in February 2020, the facility was given a 100 percent score by the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission.

Regis Healthcare Limited is one of the country’s largest sharemarket-listed aged care companies. According to its 2020 annual report, it has been “dedicated to aged care with dignity for over 25 years.” It has grown to own more than 7,000 “operational places” at 65 residential aged care homes, as well as six home-care services, five day-therapy centres and eight retirement villages across Australia.

The annual report says the company’s profit after tax was $3,764,000, a sharp fall from $50,897,000 in 2019. According to “7.30,” Regis’s 65 nursing homes last year received a total of $471 million in government subsidies, “its two co-founders are worth more than $1 billion and its CEO is on the federal government’s Aged Care Advisory Group.”

Families hoping to provide high-quality medical care and support for their elderly loved ones are required to make down-payments of up to $1.4 million to secure a residency at Regis Nedlands. However, these huge prices do not ensure adequate staffing levels.

A Regis worker at a different facility told 7NEWS that it was so severely understaffed that residents were sometimes left in soiled clothing for 12 hours. “We try to attend as much as we can but still we don’t have time,” she said. “Two staff looking after 50 residents—it’s not possible.”

7NEWS last month reported the death of 89-year-old Norma Palmer—a resident of the Regis Birkdale facility in Brisbane, Queensland—last July. She was reportedly neglected while suffering from sepsis, which led to terrible tissue degeneration in sores on her lower leg and back.

The latest federal government Royal Commission into Aged Care—the 24th such inquiry in the past three decades—revealed dangerous levels of understaffing, low rates of registered nurses and inadequate training of personal carers, which has created a disaster for residents and their families, producing the conditions where the alleged neglect and abuse can take place.

Over the past 30 years, chronically low staffing levels have become part of the business model of the profit-driven aged care sector. The consequences have been seen most sharply in the COVID-19 pandemic. Aged care homes became death-traps for vulnerable residents. So far, 678 have died from the coronavirus, amounting to 75 percent of the national total of 910 reported deaths.

Successive Liberal-National Coalition and Labor Party governments have enforced this corporate-dominated aged care regime, brushed aside all the previous inquiry recommendations and slashed funding. The Royal Commission calculated that “efficiency dividends” and rationing of nursing home places since 1997 had reduced federal government aged care spending by almost 50 percent, or $9.8 billion a year by 2018–19.

This will not change as a result of the latest Royal Commission, none of whose 65 recommendations are even enforceable. Residents’ care will continue to be sacrificed in the interests of private profit.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Coalition government reportedly plans to allocate $10 billion over four years in this year’s May 11 budget for as-yet unspecified “reforms” to the sector. That amount is far less than the $10 to $20 billion a year estimated by the Royal Commission to be needed to implement its recommendations.

Biden’s Anti-China Ambitions

Dilip Hiro

Like his immediate predecessor, Joe Biden is committed to a distinctly anti-China global strategy and has sworn that China will not “become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world… on my watch.” In the topsy-turvy universe created by the Covid-19 pandemic, it was, however, Jamie Dimon, the CEO and chairman of JP Morgan Chase, a banking giant with assets of $3.4 trillion, who spoke truth to Biden on the subject.

While predicting an immediate boom in the U.S. economy “that could easily run into 2023,” Dimon had grimmer news on the future as well. “China’s leaders believe that America is in decline,” he wrote in his annual letter to the company’s shareholders. While the U.S. had faced tough times in the past, he added, today “the Chinese see an America that is losing ground in technology, infrastructure, and education — a nation torn and crippled by politics, as well as racial and income inequality — and a country unable to coordinate government policies (fiscal, monetary, industrial, regulatory) in any coherent way to accomplish national goals.” He was forthright enough to say, “Unfortunately, recently, there is a lot of truth to this.”

As for China, Dimon could also have added, its government possesses at least two powerful levers in areas where the United States is likely to prove vulnerable: dominant control of container ports worldwide and the supplies of rare earth metals critical not just to the information-technology sector but also to the production of electric and hybrid cars, jet fighters, and missile guidance systems. And that’s only a partial list of the areas where China is poised to become dominant in the foreseeable future. Here’s a likely scenario.

The Digital Yuan Versus the (Missing) Digital Dollar

Within the broad headline of the globe’s “second-largest economy,” China has already either surpassed the United States or is running neck-and-neck with it in certain specific sectors.

With a global smartphone market share of 20% in the second quarter of 2020, China’s Huawei Technologies topped the charts, marginally exceeding South Korea’s Samsung, and well ahead of Apple, according to the International Data Corporation. This happened despite a concerted drive by President Donald Trump’s administration to damage Huawei that culminated, in May 2020, with Washington barring companies worldwide from using U.S.-made machinery or software to design or produce chips for that company or its entities from that September on. Nonetheless, with a 47% share of China’s booming 5G smartphone market, Huawei topped the list there while it kept up its investment in future-oriented, cutting-edge technologies and basic research to the tune of a striking $3 billion to $5 billion annually.

Broadly speaking, China continues to make impressive strides when it comes to developing its information and communications technology sector. Its Fintech (Financial Technology) report, published in October 2020, showed that an estimated 87% of Chinese consumers used fintech services. With a vast mobile-payment system that hit $29 trillion (200 trillion yuan) worth of payments in 2019, China is shaping up to become the globe’s first “cashless society” and its largest financial-technology ecosystem by the end of this decade.

Less than 10% of Americans use mobile payments, which means a similar scenario for the United States is nowhere on the horizon. With mobile transactions in China already accounting for at least four out of every five payments and more than half the value of all non-cash retail payments, that country is poised to leave the U.S., a comparative laggard in fintech, shackled to a cash-dominated system.

In their relentless drive for innovation, the Chinese authorities started pushing the development of a digital currency in certain regions in August 2020. Their specific goals were to make daily life easier for citizens and digital payments more secure. While non-bank payment platforms like Alipay and WeChat Pay required users to link to bank accounts, a digital wallet with an e-currency deposit could be opened with a unique personal identification — a driver’s license or a mobile phone number — enabling the un-banked population of China to embrace the digital world.

As a result, the People’s Bank of China became the first major central bank to issue a virtual currency. A broader roll-out is expected for the Winter Olympics in Beijing in February 2022, which will give the digital yuan international exposure.

This has alarmed the Biden administration. Officials at the Treasury Department, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council are frantically trying to comprehend the potential implications of a virtual yuan system. They are particularly eager to understand how it would be distributed, and whether it could be used to bypass Washington’s international sanctions as applied to Iran. What distresses some American officials and experts is the notion that someday China’s virtual yuan could replace the U.S. dollar as the world’s dominant reserve currency.

At the Federal Reserve, Chairman Jerome Powell insisted that the central bank was involved in a large-scale research and development project on a possible future digital dollar, though pointing out that such a project could only be launched via a law that would have to be passed by a deeply divided Congress. In short, irrespective of the future of China’s virtual currency, a digital dollar is not likely, not in the near future anyway.

Building Infrastructure (or Not)

As for recent economic history, even a cursory look at the performances of the United States and China in combating the 2008 financial meltdown tells a striking tale.

China made an indelible mark in meeting that financial challenge. Its government sharply increased its infrastructure spending, resulting in higher imports that helped counter flagging global demand. While this move increased Beijing’s debt, it also helped build a foundation to further transform the country’s economy into a productivity-led growth model. A decade after that great recession, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, China’s infrastructure ranking jumped from 66th place to 36th place out of 152 countries.

Although infrastructure building on a large scale requires significant upfront investment, it’s guaranteed to yield productivity gains in the long run. Time and cost savings for commuters, improved market access, healthier competition, increased exchange of ideas, and enlarged innovation capacity, all aided by modern infrastructure, are a springboard for economic development.

During the decade following the 2008 crisis, the number of Chinese cities with metro services jumped from 10 to 34 and 1.1 million kilometers of highways were built, raising the total to 4.8 million kilometers. The length of its high-speed rail system shot up by 52,000 kilometers to 132,000 kilometers. Introduced on the eve of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, it’s now by far the world’s longest system, accounting for two-thirds of the globe’s high-speed rail. Its advances in information-and computer-technology were equally impressive. On average, mobile-phone subscriptions came to exceed one per person — about the same as in the United States.

High-speed rail (of which the United States has none) reduces journey times, while linking dense urban areas with less crowded cities. In doing so, it allows for a more balanced distribution of labor and business development without sacrificing the benefits of an increasingly urbanized economy. Economies of scale in turn mean that productivity rises as rail usage increases.

Little wonder, then, that President Barack Obama and his team promoted the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 as an infrastructure-building program in response to the 2008 economic crisis. In reality, however, only $80 billion, a tenth of the money Congress sanctioned, would be devoted to actual infrastructure. Of that, about a third was spent on roads and bridges, improving about 67,600 kilometers of roads and 2,700 bridges. The program also included investment in modern infrastructure like smart grids and broadband development.

In 2010, Obama announced what was to be the “largest investment in infrastructure since the Interstate Highway System,” the creation of a high-speed rail network that would rival China’s. More than a decade later, the only visible progress is a much-delayed and still incomplete 275-kilometer Central Valley California line from Bakersfield to Merced. And in the Trump years, when essentially no government money went into such projects, “infrastructure week” became a standing joke. President Biden seems determined to rectify this, but how successful he’ll be with his $2 trillion infrastructure proposal in the face of a rigidly divided Congress remains to be seen.

For its part, the Chinese government combined its program of rapid infrastructure development with upgrading of the labor force. It did so by implementing an educational system that stressed science, technology, engineering, and math, known as STEM. By achieving higher productivity in this way, the government planned to compensate for a projected shrinkage in its work force.

To promote STEM, the government issued guidelines in 2016 to create a national development strategy aimed at advancing China to the forefront of innovative countries by 2030. In February 2017, the Ministry of Education officially added STEM education to the primary-school curriculum. Since then, encouraged by official policies, schools in both the public and private sectors have implemented such programs.

In 2019, the government allocated 100% of its research funding to top universities to the ones that concentrated on STEM disciplines. By comparison, South Korea allocated 62% of such funding that way. By contrast, U.S. universities ranked in the top 100 maintained a greater balance in funding among STEM fields, humanities, and social sciences.

In October 2019, three of China’s biggest mobile-phone carriers launched advanced 5G services, giving it the world’s largest 5G mobile network. A year later, the Wall Street Journal reported that China had more 5G subscribers than the U.S., not just in total but per capita.

Given the ubiquity of smartphones, the news that America seemed to be losing the tech race to China was widely noted. Mostly ignored, however, was the extent to which the U.S. had become vulnerable to Chinese pressure in international trade.

America’s Vulnerabilities

In testimony before Congress in October 2019, Carolyn Bartholomew, chairwoman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, revealed that at least two-thirds of the world’s top 50 maritime container ports were directly owned and managed by the Chinese or supported by that country’s investments (up from roughly 20% a decade ago). These included terminals at major American container ports in Los Angeles and Seattle. When it came to such ports, it led the world with seven of the 10 largest ones.

A year earlier, officials at the state-owned China Ocean Shipping Company, one of the globe’s largest container shipping lines, acknowledged that the company had connected its routes along what was officially called the Maritime Silk Road, linking regional markets in West Africa, Northern Europe, the Caribbean, and the U.S. to form a more comprehensive and balanced globalized trading network. “By owning and/or operating a network of logistical nodes across Asia, Europe, and Africa, China can control a significant portion of its inbound supply chain for essential commodities and outbound trade routes for its exports,” Bartholomew explained. “In the event of conflict, China could use its control over these and other ports to hinder trade access to other countries.”

In the manufacturing sector, China finds itself in a privileged position by virtue of its special mineral deposits, called rare earth elements. A group of 17 rare earth metals, including lanthanum, cerium, yttrium, europium, and gadolinium, often called “industrial gold,” are critical components of such high-technology and clean-energy products as wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars, because of their magnetism, luminescence, and strength. They are also used in a wide variety of weapons from jet fighters to nuclear submarines.

Unsurprisingly, in recent years, there has been a rapid rise in the demand for these minerals in advanced economies. They are dispersed in low concentrations and are costly to extract from ore, an industry in which China has invested a great deal since the 1970s.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, in 2020, China accounted for 58% of rare earth minerals production, down from around 90% four years earlier, as the United States and Australia boosted their own mining of them. Still, as of 2018, the United States imported 80.5% of its rare earth metals from China. In May of that year, the Trump administration added these to a list of minerals deemed critical to American economic and national security. And in July 2019, it declared them “essential to the national defense,” which freed up resources for the Department of Defense to take action to secure a domestic rare earth production capability.

Even if the mining of these ores increased in the U.S., refining them requires specialist technology and trained personnel as well as high upfront investment. Due to the lack of these in the U.S. so far, China continues to enjoy a near monopoly in processing the ore, with the raw material containing the prized metal mined outside China shipped to the Chinese sites. The refining process also generates large amounts of radioactive waste and pollutes the environment. As a result, developed countries usually opt for getting the refining done in emerging economies.

All in all, when you view the globe in the throes of a once-in-a-century pandemic, you find an authoritarian state, wedded to centralized planning, initiating programs with long-term benefits for its citizens and seeing them through. You also see a politically riven democratic republic operating primarily on an ad hoc basis.

The stark truth is that an American president cannot even bet on his policies, however laudable or otherwise, surviving his four-year term. Trump’s succession after the Obama era illustrated this dramatically, as has that of Trump’s successor, Biden. When judged purely on the basis of final results, centralized planning clearly beats short-term programming, even if it is viewed with a mixture of derision and condemnation by the Western governments that Biden is attempting to coopt to challenge China. The reality of our moment: that country is now rising on a distinctly wounded planet.

The Ecological Toll of Disposable COVID Masks and Gloves

Reynard Loki

One of the most distinguishable features of the COVID-19 era is the public, everyday use of personal protective equipment (PPE), mainly in the form of disposable face masks and latex gloves. And while these thin layers protect us and others from transmitting and contracting SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes the lower respiratory tract disease, scientists are now beginning to understand just how harmful these objects can be for ecosystems and wildlife.

The demand for PPE has put some countries on a war footing, to give governments sweeping wartime authorities to control the economy and compel private businesses to join national fights against the pandemic. “Our national plan launches a full-scale war-time effort to address the supply shortages by ramping up production and protective equipment, syringes, needles, you name it,” said President Joe Biden in January. Even the inventor of the lifesaving N95 mask favored by front-line medical workers, Dr. Peter Tsai, said that countries should stockpile PPE as if they were on a war footing. “Weapons are not profitable,” he said in August. “But they need to have the weapons and then they don’t use them for 10 or 20 years. You need to see this kind of PPE as military weapons.” A majority of U.S. states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, have instituted “mask mandates” requiring people to wear face coverings in public to limit the spread of COVID-19.

But while these “weapons” that fight coronavirus have proved to be lifesaving for humans, an increasing number of non-human animals are finding them to be a brand-new, and often deadly, threat that has suddenly littered their natural habitat. One main problem is that face masks and latex gloves are disposable, and people often do not dispose of them properly. How many times have you seen a used mask or glove lying on the street or stuck in a bush or floating in a waterway? Welcome to the world’s new pollution problem. (As if the scourge of plastic waste weren’t enough of an issue for the global ecosystem.)

According to the World Health Organization, the fabric masks that should be used to fight the pandemic are made of three layers of fabric: an inner layer of absorbent material like cotton, a middle layer of non-woven non-absorbent material, like polypropylene, which is a kind of plastic, and an outer layer of non-absorbent material, like polyester. That means that these masks, if improperly discarded, have the power to threaten ecosystems for many decades, even centuries, to come. Polypropylene takes 20 to 30 years to decompose in a landfill. Polyester can take up to 200 years. Researchers from the University College London Plastic Waste Innovation Hub recently released a report that estimated that about 70,000 tons of plastic waste would be produced if all Britons wore a single-use mask each day for a year.

In August 2020, during a cleanup project at a canal in the Dutch city of Leiden, scientists discovered a fish trapped in a latex glove, a finding that prompted them to investigate whether this problem was more widespread. Their fears were soon realized: In just a few months, researchers found hundreds of face masks littering the city’s historic canals. Their findings were released in a March report published in the journal Animal Biology about the impact that PPE litter is having on wildlife. The grim conclusion: All those face masks and latex gloves are killing birds, fish and other wildlife across the globe. The researchers, from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the Institute of Biology at Leiden University, and the Institute for Water and Wetland Research, all based in the Netherlands, said that animals are becoming entangled in the gear, while others, mistaking it for food, are dying from fatally ingesting it. Some animals are building homes with it.

“As always with these single-use items, you’re not really looking after them and they end up in the environment really soon. They start becoming a real problem,” Auke-Florian Hiemstra, a biologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden and a co-author of the report, told CNN. “I think it’s ironic that the materials that protect us are so harmful to the animals around us,” he added.

The scientists included specific examples in their study, such as a dead perch (Perca fluviatilis) entrapped in a latex glove “with only its tail sticking out” in the Netherlands; a common coot (Fulica atra) building a nest with a face mask, also in the Netherlands; an American robin (Turdus migratorius) entangled in a face mask in British Columbia; a juvenile peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) whose talons got stuck in a face mask in Yorkshire; cygnets from a mute swan (Cygnus olor) with face masks wrapped around their beaks in Lake Bracciano, near Rome, Italy; and a red fox (Vulpes vulpes), entangled in a face mask, and a European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus), entangled in a glove, both in the United Kingdom. Even stray dogs have been found with PPE in their stomachs. The list goes on and sadly, will go on and on: Hiemstra warned that the entire animal kingdom may ultimately be impacted by humans’ COVID-19 litter.

“It makes sense that birds are being reported—they’re conspicuous, and you have a lot of people looking at them,” said Greg Pauly, a herpetologist and co-director of the Urban Nature Research Center at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who suspects that PPE litter is being ingested by many wild animals—a serious problem, the impact of which we’re not going to fully understand any time soon. “Ingestion isn’t something you can easily see, and almost no one is looking at it,” he said, recommending that wildlife biologists conduct more necropsies of wildlife across all species to collect data for future studies.

More than 30 years ago, the Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental group based in Washington, D.C., launched the International Coastal Cleanup (ICC), a global trash-picking event meant to eliminate ocean trash, mainly in the form of plastic waste. Every year, volunteers from states and territories throughout the United States and more than 100 countries around the world come together to participate in a local cleanup event. The COVID-19 pandemic has broadened the event’s remit: In July of 2020, Ocean Conservancy added a new category of trash to Clean Swell, the mobile app that volunteers use to log their cleanup work: “PPE.”

In March, the group released a report on the rising threat of PPE pollution and found that, based on a survey of ICC volunteers and coordinators conducted in early 2021, 94 percent of respondents observed PPE pollution at a cleanup in 2020, during which more than 100,000 pieces of PPE—mainly masks and gloves—were picked up on beaches across 70 countries. More than half of the survey respondents said they saw PPE littering their home communities every day.

What can we do? “We really encourage people to use reusable face masks,” said Liselotte Rambonnet, a biologist at the Institute of Biology at Leiden University and co-author of the Animal Biology report, told CNN. “All the interactions we found were with single-use face masks because they are inexpensive and can be lost more easily,” she added. Unfortunately, disposable PPE cannot be recycled, so they must go into the regular trash. When doing so, make sure that all contaminated PPE is disposed of in a covered waste bin lined with a garbage bag and that they are always out of reach from children and pets. In no case should you simply toss your used PPE on the street or in a waterway.

In addition, it is critical to cut the two ear straps on each side of your mask before disposing of it to reduce the possibility of wildlife getting entangled in it. And let’s take this opportunity to look at the big picture: How all our medical and plastic waste is impacting the natural world and what we can do to reduce this global pollution crisis.

“As we protect our communities and each other in the face of this invisible threat, we can also do more to protect our communities and our ocean from the impacts of the pandemic,” writes Janis Searles Jones, the CEO of Ocean Conservancy. “Once the need for PPE subsides as the pandemic recedes, we have a real opportunity to reduce our overall plastics footprint and to ensure that the plastics that we use are recyclable, made of recycled content, and stay out of the ocean and our environment.”

But even if we change our behavior now when it comes to PPE disposal, it may be too late. According to a report by OceansAsia, a marine conservation group based in Hong Kong, an estimated 1.56 billion face masks entered the ocean in 2020 alone. “Even if we take steps tomorrow, then for hundreds of years there will be face masks floating around in the ocean, still impacting our wildlife,” said Hiemstra. “I’m afraid it will not stop very soon, and actually the problem will only get worse over time, sadly.”

Greek government reopens economy amid COVID intensive care “nightmare”

Katerina Selin

Like all of Europe, Greece is experiencing a fierce third wave of the pandemic. With more than 4,000 new infections daily, a new high was reached at the beginning of April. Nearly 10,000 people have already died from COVID-19—about a third of them, around 3,300 people, in the last two months.

A record 847 patients currently need invasive ventilation. Intensive care units (ICU) have already been working at their limits for months and are now overcrowded. In the Attica region of Athens alone, 48 seriously ill coronavirus patients must currently be ventilated outside an intensive care unit because there are not enough intensive care beds. Dozens of patients with other illnesses who need ventilators are also not given an intensive care bed.

Nikos Kapravelos, the head of the intensive care unit at Papanikolaou Hospital in Thessaloniki, described the situation last week as a “nightmare,” saying there was no more capacity. He stressed to the Open News television station that younger and younger patients are being treated in the hospital. Three young people under 17 years old, 66 people between 18-39 years old and 1,406 between 40-64 years old have already died in Greece.

Students back in class in Glyfada, a suburb of the Greek capital Athens (AP Photo/Yorgos Karahalis)

The government, under the right-wing Nea Dimokratia (ND, New Democracy) party, is responding to this critical situation with the same ruthlessness and contempt for human life as the ruling classes worldwide. Amid the third wave, the government is opening up the economy in the interests of business and the tourism industry.

On April 5 retailers were allowed to reopen, and on April 12, face-to-face classes began in lyceums—with no significant safeguards other than two rapid tests per week. However, as intensive care doctor Kapravelos commented, the self-tests used have low reliability, so many cases are missed.

After one week, almost 200 schools have already had to close completely or partially due to coronavirus outbreaks. After the Orthodox Easter holidays, which begin on May 2, primary and secondary schools are also expected to open. The virus will also find new transmission sites in churches, which are expected to be allowed to open at Easter with minor hygiene measures. A year ago, however, when daily infections were less than 100, they remained closed.

At the same time, preparations are under way for the tourist season, which starts on May 14. Already, rules for entry into the country are being relaxed step by step. Tourism Minister Charis Theocharis claimed in parliament on Monday that the whole of Greece was “absolutely hygienically safe” and announced that priority would be given to vaccinating tourism workers. Yet only 7.2 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated.

The pseudo-left opposition party Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) is also in favour of opening up tourism and is demanding that the government reopen outdoor catering.

Under conditions of the current pandemic and the spread of numerous dangerous variants of the virus, the opening up of tourism means one thing, above all: The profits of big business, which depend heavily on tourism, are to be secured at all costs—even if thousands have to die. Last year, the opening of tourism in the summer was a major factor in the massive spread of the virus in the autumn. Before that, Greece had comparatively low case numbers due to a quick and severe lockdown, but they then skyrocketed after the holiday season.

As a result, excess mortality in Greece increased by about 7 percent last year. According to media NGO iMEdD, about 8,300 more people died than was statistically expected, an estimated 61 percent from COVID-19, the rest related to the pandemic.

To divert attention from the fatal consequences of its open-door policy, the government is trying to shift responsibility for the spread of the virus onto the population. The so-called “coronavirus parties” last weekend came just in time, with numerous young people violating the coronavirus measures and partying in public places in Athens despite the high health risks.

Immediately, the ruling class used the parties for a media campaign on state television, portraying the partying youth as the main culprits for the rising infection rates. This dishonest propaganda is designed to pull the wool over the eyes of the working class and hide who is responsible for the many coronavirus deaths and growing numbers of Long COVID sufferers.

The biggest “coronavirus parties” are taking place every day in factories, warehouses, offices and on public transport, where workers and employees are crammed close together indoors and at the mercy of the contagion without being able to maintain adequate distance and protection. All companies are blithely operating despite the pandemic so that neither supply chains nor the soaring share prices are interrupted.

Information about the spread of the pandemic in the factories is scarce. Companies are exhausting every possible means of intimidating their employees to cover up outbreaks. Here are just a few examples of infection incidents in the workplace that have come to light:

On March 18, a factory belonging to the packaging company “Afoi Lalousi” in the industrial area of Avlona in the Attica region, where about 85 workers are employed, had to close for five days because of a major coronavirus outbreak. The order from the Ministry of Citizens Protection spoke of a “high epidemiological burden” and warned of a “risk to public health” but did not give specific details about the workers affected.

Last week, a worker at the Sklavenitis supermarket chain lost her battle with the virus, bringing to three the number of Sklavenitis workers who have died from COVID-19. Supermarket employees, who have been on the front line of the pandemic since it began, have complained of inadequate protective measures and many workplace accidents due to the heavy workload. In early March, 16 cases also occurred at a branch in Thessaloniki.

According to a local trade union of commercial and service companies in Patras, cases have been discovered in numerous shops and warehouses there this year, spreading because employers refused early testing and quarantine measures. For example, in a warehouse of the supermarket chain Lidl, which employs around 60 workers, a case of coronavirus was concealed for three days. It was only after pressure from the workforce that all staff were finally tested, and 15 positive cases were discovered.

Last year, too, clusters of infections kept breaking out in companies: 30 cases in a meat processing plant in Kavala, 50 cases in an olive processing plant in Halkidiki in August, and 114 cases in a canning factory in northern Greece in October.

The daily spread of the virus in the workplace is an open secret. The iMEdD Lab found that most of the new infections occurred in the workplace, after evaluating data for November and December 2020. Out of 758 cases reviewed, 434 occurred in occupational contexts, such as workplaces and private companies, and 166 in closed facilities, such as nursing homes, psychiatric hospitals, camps, and rehabilitation centres, it said.

At a press conference held by the Ministry of Health on April 3, epidemiologist Vana Papaevangelou, who is part of the government’s team of advisors, had to admit, “It is known that the main spread of the virus is in the workplace and at home.” In the same breath, the use of rapid tests was then touted, but this is a smokescreen given the current infection situation. Only a lockdown involving the closure of schools, day care centres and nonessential production, with all affected workers and parents receiving full wage compensation, can contain the pandemic.

The ruling class is not only preventing the necessary lockdown but also refusing to provide any support to the health care system. Based on information from the Greek Intensive Care Association in January and February, out of 51 COVID ICUs surveyed, 40 fall short of government requirements in staffing levels, according to iMEdD.

Despite the disastrous understaffing of hospitals, the government has cut the health care budget by another 572 million euros this year. At the same time, it is obstructing reports on the conditions in the health care sector. In its current assessment on Greece, Reporters Without Borders criticises the fact that journalists must obtain government permission before they are allowed to report on hospitals. The Ministry of Health has also banned its staff from speaking to the press.

Among doctors and nurses, willingness to help and exhaustion are increasingly mixed with anger and indignation. On April 7, workers protested outside several hospitals and the Ministry of Health in Athens. Among the speakers was Doctor Kostas Katarachias, head of a workers council at the Athens hospital “Agios Savvas,” who had been dismissed after 13 years of working there, in the middle of the pandemic, for denouncing conditions in the health sector.

The Public Hospital Employees’ Union (POEDIN) is trying to control the explosive atmosphere in hospitals and therefore called for a five-hour work stoppage in Attica and a demonstration outside the Ministry of Health on Thursday, April 22.

POEDIN is working closely with the government and the establishment parties. The general secretary of the union federation, Christos Papanastasis, is also a leading member of the ND-affiliated DAKE union, and the president of POEDIN, Michalis Giannakos, belongs to a union faction close to the social democratic KINAL (formerly PASOK).

Canada’s vaccine rollout debacle key contributor to COVID-19 third wave

Omar Ali

The continued dysfunction of Canada’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout threatens to contribute to ever greater deaths as a third wave of the pandemic—driven by new, more contagious and lethal variants—surges across the country.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has adamantly opposed shutting down schools and non-essential workplaces. (Photo credit: Ontario government)

The absence of large-scale inoculation against the virus, coupled with the ruling elite’s rejection of the public health measures necessary to stop its spread, are causing the third wave to spread far more quickly than the previous two. As a result, Canada’s health care system, especially in Ontario, is on the verge of collapse.

Hospital intensive care units (ICU) in Ontario are already under great strain, with patients who require ventilators being moved to cities outside hotspots to reduce the pressure. Figures presented to the Ontario government predict up to 18,000 infections per day and 1,800 ICU patients by the end of next month in a worst-case scenario.

So low are supplies of tocilizumab, an anti-inflammatory drug that reduces death rates among seriously ill COVID-19 patients, the province’s COVID-19 Science Advisory Table has recommended the province prepare to use a lottery to determine who will get it, in other words who will be given a chance to live and who will be left to die.

Canada’s Chief Medical Officer Theresa Tam has admitted that the spread of the disease is outpacing the vaccine rollout. In fact, the vaccine campaign is barely running at half of its capacity, according to a report by Ipolitics. Only 1.8 million people were vaccinated in the seven days to April 20, just 58 percent of the 3.1 million weekly vaccines that could have been administered.

As of Tuesday, less than 25 percent of Canadians had received a first dose, and just 2.13 percent were fully vaccinated as of April 16, the most recent date for which official statistics are available.

Having had to abandon their original vaccine dosage timeline, Canada’s federal and provincial governments have moved to a strategy of extending the time between the requisite first and second doses to four months in hopes of providing each Canadian a single dose sooner, and thereby reducing the rate of severe cases and hospitalizations.

According to the guidelines issued by the National Advisory Committee on Immunization, the lengthy delay in the administration of the second dose should be applied to everyone except those with specific conditions, such as cancer diagnoses that would place them at greater risk.

Earlier this month, Public Services and Procurement Minister Anita Anand promised a surge in vaccine supplies that would help boost vaccination rates. This announcement suffered a blow when Moderna cut its supply to Canada by half for April and stated that some of the doses it intended to deliver in the second quarter of 2021 will only be available in the third quarter.

Although Pfizer was able to cover some of this shortfall by increasing supplies over the coming weeks from an initially announced level of one million doses each week until the end of May, the much heralded surge of vaccines is clearly not happening. The US Food and Drug Administration decision to pause the approval of the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine has added yet another hitch to Canada’s vaccination program.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has claimed that all Canadians who want to be vaccinated will have been able to receive a first dose by the end of the summer. According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, 60 percent of those 60 and over have to date received at least one dose.

The shambolic vaccine rollout is producing bitter recriminations between various levels of government. Seeking to deflect attention away from their own role in the murderous premature reopening of the economy and schools, Premiers Ford, Moe and Kenney, respectively of Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta, have all criticized Ottawa for not supplying the provinces with sufficient vaccines and adhering to its supply schedule. The Liberal government has responded by pointing to the provinces’ failure to get the doses that they do have into people’s arms.

The fundamental problem blighting the vaccine program is the anarchic global capitalist system and the vaccine nationalism it engenders. All of Canada’s vaccine supplies are imported from abroad, from the United States, Europe and India. The contracts signed with manufacturers have allowed the latter to delay shipments as deliveries were scheduled for certain fiscal quarters and not specific dates. The manufacturers have struggled to keep pace with orders because they refused to invest early enough in expanding production facilities, and the EU and India have imposed or threatened export restrictions.

Public Services and Procurement Minister Anand has claimed that the government will diversify its sources, and Ottawa has now hastily launched a scheme to establish a domestic manufacturing capacity with the construction of a facility to produce mRNA vaccines in Quebec now under way. However, it will be many months before the facility begins mass producing COVID-19 vaccines.

Ottawa has turned to the World Health Organization’s vaccine sharing program COVAX, taking in its first shipments of batches of the AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured in South Korea. This prompted widespread criticism of Canada’s government for resorting to a program designed to alleviate the vaccine disparity between rich and poor countries. Canada is the only G7 nation to receive COVAX supplies to date. At the same time, Canada has joined the United States and the European imperialist powers in refusing to allow the waiving of the pharmaceutical giants’ patents so as to allow for the mass manufacture of generic vaccines for Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The Trudeau government’s resort to COVAX is a tacit admission that, following years of vicious austerity and deliberate neglect by all political parties, Canada’s dilapidated health care system is little better than those in less developed countries. The public health infrastructure required to coordinate a mass vaccine rollout, not to mention the publicly funded laboratories to develop, test, and produce vaccines, is nonexistent. Even commentators in the bourgeois press have been forced to note the devastating consequences of the decision to privatize invaluable publicly funded health resources, like the Connaught Laboratories, which was once a world leader in vaccine research and development.

Despite the calls for national digital surveillance programs in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS outbreak, little is in place to allow for communication between different levels of government and with the local pharmacies that are administering many of the vaccines. This is only the most direct consequence for the vaccine rollout of the Canadian ruling elite’s conscious refusal to learn the lessons of the 2003 SARS epidemic, which prompted a series of comprehensive policy recommendations to prepare for a coronavirus-like pandemic that was both foreseeable and foreseen.

Instead, the entire political establishment, from the New Democrats to the Tories, prioritized balanced budgets, public spending austerity and tax breaks for the banks and super-rich.

The disastrous outcomes of decades of underfunding of health care and social services find particularly grotesque expression in the neglect of low-income, working class communities in the vaccine rollout, even though these communities are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19.

A study by the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences found that high-income neighbourhoods have been getting the vaccine at far higher rates than low-income neighbourhoods in the Toronto and Peel regions despite the greater proportion of cases and deaths in low-income areas. Pharmacies administering the vaccines are more likely to be located in the wealthier communities.

Older immigrant populations with language barriers and who lack computer skills are also at a disadvantage in registering for the vaccine. A CBC investigation found that while 43 percent of retail pharmacies in the 10 neighbourhoods with the lowest COVID-19 infection rates in Ontario are administering vaccines, just 19 percent of pharmacies in the 10 areas with the highest infection rates are doing so. Two overwhelmingly poor neighbourhoods in northwestern Toronto, Maple Leaf and Humbermede, do not have a single pharmacy administering vaccines.

This remains the case despite the evidence that these neighbourhoods are populated by essential workers and multigenerational families that are being decimated by the coronavirus. As a doctor at one Toronto hospital described his ICU patients recently, “These are not people who are disobeying the rules. These are people who are trying to make a living and haven’t been afforded the protection necessary to minimize their exposure risk.”

That COVID-19 has become a “poor man’s disease” is the result of a deliberate ruling class policy of allowing the virus to spread unchallenged in the interest of maintaining profits for big business. From their standpoint, the murderous reopening policy was a success as it allowed profits to continue to flow as the corpses piled up. Statistics Canada recently reported the economy added 300,000 jobs in March and was on pace to recoup all the losses incurred due to the initial outbreak. The recent inadequate “shutdowns” are attempts to belatedly forestall the collapse of the health care system and, crucially, an outburst of resistance to the policies of the ruling class among working people.

For their part, the transnational pharmaceutical corporations have used the vaccine shortage to criticize regulations that restrict drug prices in Canada which they claim have undercut their profits and created incentives to move production overseas.

The United States, motivated by its desire to reopen its border with Canada, may soon export vaccine supplies to its northern neighbour. Notwithstanding huge problems in its own vaccination campaign, US vaccination rates are far higher than Canada’s—with a third of all adults fully vaccinated—and the US is projected to soon have a surplus in vaccines. For the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, the COVID-19 infection rate in Canada has surpassed that of the US, which was long the world epicentre of the pandemic.

Questions surrounding the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which have been exacerbated by geopolitical rivalries and ruthless competition to control the market for coronavirus vaccines, have compounded Canada’s vaccine debacle. The government’s new guidelines instruct Canadians under 55 not to take the vaccine due to its potential relationship with cases of blood clotting, despite the extreme rarity of such instances. However, facing a dramatic rise in infections and reports of AstraZeneca doses going unused, Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Manitoba have lowered the cut-off point for the vaccine to 40. Concerns over the AstraZeneca vaccine are now contributing to its low uptake by those outside of the at-risk age group.

Meanwhile, those below 55 or 40 years old in some provinces who received the vaccine prior to the guideline change must now be switched over to an alternative vaccine for their second dose, further straining supplies and raising the question of the efficacy of mixed dosages, for which there has yet to be sufficient research. The European Medicine Agency has said that the side effects associated with the vaccine are exceedingly rare and its benefits outweigh its risks.

The disastrous vaccine rollout testifies to the impossibility of mounting a rational response to the pandemic on the basis of the capitalist profit system, which prioritizes the profits of the pharmaceutical giants and the geopolitical and economic interests of the rival national ruling elites over the protection of human lives.

Rather than using the tremendous scientific achievements represented by the vaccines to curb the spread of the pandemic and save lives, Canada’s ruling elite, like its counterparts the world over, is using the vaccines as an argument to dismantle all remaining public health measures.

Vladimir Putin warns against further anti-Russian provocations

Andrea Peters

With Russia and US-allied Ukraine on the brink of war, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned in his annual address to the nation on Wednesday that “the organizers of any provocations that threaten the fundamental interests of our security will regret what they have done in a way that they have not regretted for a long time.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin gives his annual state of the nation address in Manezh, Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, April 21, 2021. Putin's state-of-the-nation speech comes amid a new surge in tensions with the West over a Russian troop buildup near the border with Ukraine and a hunger strike by jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny protesting a lack of adequate medical treatment in prison. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Stating that thus far Moscow has tempered its response to “unfriendly actions” by foreign nations and continues to seek healthy relations with these powers, Putin added, “We really do not want to burn bridges. But if someone interprets our good intentions as indifference or weakness and they themselves intend to burn or even blow up these bridges, they must know that Russia’s response will be asymmetric, rapid, and tough.”

For years the United States, backed by its NATO allies, has led a ferociously anti-Russian campaign involving the installation of governments loyal to Washington in the former Soviet sphere, the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, the imposition of sanctions intended to cripple the country’s economy, and endless accusations that Vladimir Putin is responsible for everything from meddling in American elections to attempted cyber-attacks on US infrastructure to murder.

Currently, the government in Ukraine, armed to the hilt by Washington, has escalated attacks on Russian-allied forces in the country’s breakaway eastern republics and declared its intention to retake Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that was annexed by Russia in 2014 after a coup brought to power a far-right, anti-Russian government. The population of Crimea overwhelmingly voted in favor of joining the Russian Federation.

As Putin was speaking to the nation on Wednesday, press reports emerged that Kiev is moving tank divisions and military brigades towards the Crimean border. The dangers involved in such actions are made clear by Putin’s speech. “I hope that no one gets into their head the idea of crossing, as they say, a red line in their relationship with Russia. Where this red line is, we will determine ourselves in every concrete instance,” stated the Russian president.

Putin denounced efforts to overthrow the Russian-allied government of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and kill the head of state and his family. Minsk just announced the arrest in Moscow of conspirators accused of plotting against President Lukashenko’s and his children’s lives. Putin described these methods as beyond the pale and compared them to the US-orchestrated ousting of Viktor Yanukovich in Ukraine and attempt to kill Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. The American ties of Maduro’s attempted assassins have been definitively proven.

Nonetheless, the head of the Kremlin made no mention of the breaking developments in Ukraine in his speech. And later in the day, government spokesman Dmitry Peskov indicated Putin would review Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s statement that afternoon that he is willing to hold talks with Russia. Despite staging a show of force by amassing troops on its Ukrainian border, the Kremlin is aware that the situation could totally spin out of control and its military prove incapable of handling a situation that will draw in the imperialist powers, above all the US and Germany, becoming a bloodbath and vipers’ den of competing interests.

In yesterday’s remarks, Putin also made no mention of Alexei Navalny—the far-right, anti-immigration chauvinist turned “democrat,” “anti-corruption” crusader, and “freedom fighter” who has been turned into a cause célèbre by Washington, Berlin and the bourgeois media in the West. Nationwide protests called by Navalny’s supporters to coincide with the Russian president’s address drew only small crowds yesterday. The government arrested numerous demonstration organizers for holding unauthorized meetings.

Even as he confronts a serious geopolitical crisis to Russia’s west, the Russian president devoted more than eighty percent of his speech to domestic issues, in particular the coronavirus and the economy.

He promised one-time payments of 10,000 rubles ($130) for each school-age child in every Russian family, monthly stipends of 5,650 rubles ($73) for single-parent households and 6,350 ($83) for poor, pregnant women, and 100 percent wage coverage for parents who leave work to take care of a sick child under the age of seven.

Highways are to be extended, partial reimbursements for the costs of going to health resorts and sanitoriums continued, financial aid and debt relief granted to the regions. The crisis in the labor market, which has resulted in mass layoffs, will supposedly be resolved by the end of the year. By 2030, Russia’s average life span will rise to 78. Doctors, nurses, and scientists battling COVID-19 received their thanks and citizens were urged to get vaccinated. Putin has made similar limited social promises countless times before, and almost none of them were ever fulfilled.

Moreover, when considering the state of Russian society, all of this amounts to very little. While the initiation of mass vaccination has brought down coronavirus daily cases from their peak of over 10,000 earlier this year, Russia’s agency for consumer rights and human well-being just declared the COVID-19 situation in the country “unstable,” with new infections continuing to hover around 8,000 to 9,000 a day. The official death toll of over 105,000 is widely believed to be a gross underestimate. Furthermore, despite major efforts, vaccine hesitancy—an expression of the lack of confidence in the Putin government—remains a problem and the country has administered just over 16.5 million vaccine doses, enough to cover only 5.7 percent of the population with a two-dose regimen.

Families have still not recovered from a 4.8 percent official drop in real incomes in 2020. The average monthly wage of 51,100 rubles ($667) is not adequate to meet basic expenses or cover the costs of rising prices for basic goods, so household debt has risen. Experts predict personal bankruptcies will rise to 178,500 by the end of 2021, as compared to 119,000 in 2020. And, while COVID-19-related stimulus payments prevented some families with children from slipping into poverty in 2020, the poverty rate among childless households doubled since the onset of the pandemic.

Last week, Gazeta.Ru published a report detailing the income of government officials. Prime Minister Mishustin officially made $260,800 (20 million rubles) and his wife an additional $834,560 (64 million rubles). The Minister of Industry and Trade, Denis Manturov, saw a 27 percent rise in his income to almost $2 million (154 million rubles). This is still almost nothing compared to the riches controlled by the oligarchs. The ten richest Russians owned a combined wealth of $151.6 billion in 2020.