Three children dying of COVID-19 every day in the US

Genevieve Leigh

According to the latest data from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) another 225,978 children were officially infected with COVID-19 and at least 20 died in the last week alone. Since July 1, a staggering 1.47 million children have been infected, 4,561 have been hospitalized and 145 have died.

Over 100 children have died from COVID-19, or roughly three children a day, in the last five weeks in the US. The time period coincides with the forced reopening of K-12 schools and college campuses throughout the country.

Children lost to the pandemic: Kimora "Kimmie" Lynum, top-left (family photo), Makenzie Gongora, top-right (GOFUNDME), Kali Cook, bottom-left (Karra Harwood/GoFundMe), and Ryland Lee Daic, bottom-right (family photo).

Perhaps even more alarming, the latest AAP data shows that multiple states have quietly changed their parameters for tracking child infections, hospitalizations and deaths in order to obscure the data. Alabama, for example, changed their definition of “child cases” from ages 0-24 down to 0-17. In Missouri and Hawaii the definition for “child cases” was adjusted from ages 0-19 to 0-17. Similar changes were made in other states.

Florida has stopped reporting child hospitalizations altogether. Arkansas has stopped reporting child deaths and hospitalizations. Nebraska has completely removed their COVID-19 dashboard from public view—that is, the state is no longer reporting child cases, hospitalizations, or deaths.

In other words, the available data for how the new Delta variant is affecting children is being manipulated to under-report the severity of the situation.

Even with the efforts to play down the impact on children, the available data is incredibly damning. Over two weeks, from September 2 to September 16 there was a 9 percent increase in the cumulated number of child COVID-19 cases. Local reports reveal devastating stories of the young lives unnecessarily taken by the pandemic.

Alexia Jade Garrison (Image Credit: McClure Funeral Home and Cremation Services)

On Thursday, September 16, 17-year-old Alexia Garrison, high school senior from Illinois passed away from COVID-19. Alexia’s father, Jason Garrison, told WCIA that his daughter had not been vaccinated, and she had no pre-existing conditions.

Her father reported that his daughter had mild symptoms throughout her quarantine period after catching the virus. After she was no longer showing any symptoms, she returned to school. Alexia collapsed in her home late Wednesday night and was pronounced dead early Thursday morning. The family is being told that COVID pneumonia was the cause of death.

Danny Rees (Image Credit: GoFundMe/Tammy Rees)

On September 14, 13-year-old Danny Rees from Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin died after testing positive for COVID-19. Danny’s mother, Tammy, told Channel3000 that her son had been congested for two days prior to his death. His mother thought he only had a cold before he suddenly stopped breathing while resting at home.

The Fort Atkinson School Board approved a mask mandate Thursday night following his death.

Addison Wishart (Image Credit: GoFundMe/Sina Trotman)

On September 12, 17-year-old Justin Leming, a high school student from Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, died from COVID-19. On September 4, Addison Wishart, only 4 years old, from Evans, Georgia, was recovering from abdominal surgery when she contracted COVID-19 and died.

The deaths of these children are beyond tragic. Their families and friends are dealing with unimaginable grief and pain from the loss of their loved ones at such a young age. It is hard to overstate the impact that such tragedies are having on society. How does a parent of elementary school youth explain the death of a friend, a teacher or a bus driver? How do they promise their children that they are safe after such tragedies?

Parents and workers are being put in impossible situations. The forced reopening of schools has purposefully coincided with the cutting off of federal unemployment benefits and the scrapping of the eviction moratorium, threatening millions of families with destitution and homelessness unless they send their children to unsafe schools and return to unsafe workplaces.

This campaign to reopen schools has been spearheaded by the Biden administration and the Democratic Party with the full backing of the Republicans. The ruling class is carrying out this campaign in direct opposition to science, which clearly shows that the reopening of schools is not safe under the current conditions and children are susceptible to contracting and spreading the virus. Closing schools and non-essential businesses for a relatively brief time is one of the key tools for stopping the spread of COVID-19 and saving lives.

While it is true that children die at far slower rates than adults, children are dying every day from the virus.

For those children who contract the virus but do not die, there is mounting evidence of long term symptoms and complications from COVID-19. Innumerable stories are emerging of severe cases among children. Just a brief review of some of the more harrowing cases include the following:

• Eduardo Cortes, 8, from San Diego, California, contracted COVID-19 from his parents, who were unvaccinated. Both parents had contracted the virus several weeks prior. Cortez was hospitalized a month later with Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome (MISC). According to reports from the family, Cortes’ fever reached a staggering 106.1 degrees.

MISC has affected about 4,000 children since April 2020. There have been 80 cases diagnosed in San Diego alone. Doctors do not know why some kids are susceptible to MISC, while others are not.

• Elijah “E.J.” Johnson,18, has been admitted to a pediatric ICU in Missouri just one month after he scored two touchdowns in his first high school football game of the season. His mom told local reporters that he is now fighting to breathe due to COVID-19 pneumonia complicated by blood clots.

Elijah was not vaccinated. His mom has been vocal on Facebook about Elijah’s situation, “because the youth are being exposed and transmitting the virus more and more. ... his school doesn’t have a mask mandate, it’s optional.”

• Christian Davila, 17, from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina was placed on life support due to COVID-19. Davila has been at MUSC’s Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital for three weeks. According to local reports he’s only been awake for the last week and a half of his stay. He is now regaining strength. “To walk into a hospital and see your son laying on a ventilator and nothing you can do about it, it floors you,” his dad told ABC-4 News.

“When we first heard about this COVID, you know, I thought it was nothing serious, nothing more than just the flu, you know, media hype whatever, but after watching what my son’s gone through over the last month, it’s totally changed my mind,” his father added.

Pediatric cases are on the rise in South Carolina. As of Thursday, there were 36 children hospitalized with COVID-19 statewide, 16 in the ICU, six on ventilators and two on life support.

• 1-year-old Ava Amira Rivera was placed on life support due to COVID-19 after being airlifted to a Texas hospital 150 miles away from her home because of a shortage of pediatric beds in the Houston area. “My heart sank to the floor,” her mom told reporters.

The Biden administration, union bureaucrats and politicians on both sides of the aisle have repeated the chorus ad nauseam that “we must learn to live with the virus.” But this is a lie. All of these deaths and infections were preventable. Had the proper measures been taken at the start of the pandemic, the virus could have been contained and eradicated. Now, due to the negligence and criminality of the ruling class, both Democrat and Republican, more dangerous strains of the virus are developing.

The fact of the matter is that all factions of the ruling class—from Republicans, who are demanding an end to every mitigation measure, to Democrats, who claim that reopening can be carried out safely through “mitigation”—are opposed to the measures that are necessary to eradicate the virus, including the shutdown of schools.

In the country's largest school district, New York City, Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio unilaterally announced on Monday that unvaccinated children who are known to have been exposed to COVID-19 in classrooms will no longer be required to quarantine. These moves come just one week after schools reopened in the largest district in the US with roughly 1.1 million students.

The Democrats are working closely with the trade unions, and in particular the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in every state, to keep the schools open no matter the cost. AFT President Randi Weingarten has declared that “the number one priority is to get kids to be back in school.”

These efforts have been accompanied by a massive campaign in the corporate media to downplay the dangers posed to children and to promote the idea that things are “back to normal.”

There is, however, nothing “normal” about child deaths and infections from COVID-19. Opposition to these deadly policies is brewing among workers, parents and students across the country and in fact, internationally.

What is necessary is a common fight to close all K-12 schools, universities and nonessential workplaces with full compensation for those affected, in combination with a mass vaccination campaign, universal testing, contact tracing, isolation of infected patients and other public health measures, as part of a broader strategy to eradicate COVID-19 on a world scale.

IG Metall union agrees to cut 2,600 jobs at Siemens Energy in Germany

Peter Schwarz

On Tuesday, the IG Metall trade union, its works council representatives and Siemens Energy management agreed to cut 2,600 jobs in Germany. Five locations are affected: In Berlin, 602 jobs will be eliminated, in Mülheim more than 600, in Erlangen 565, in Duisburg 326 and in Görlitz 124. A total of 7,800 jobs worldwide are to fall victim to the axe.

The job cuts are the result of negotiations by a conciliation board requested by the company’s management. According to paragraph 76 of the federal Works Constitution Act, the conciliation board is composed of an equal number of representatives of management and the works council, plus an “impartial” chairman.

Demonstration of Siemens workers on the avenue of Kurfürstendamm in Berlin (source WSWS)

With the agreement of the works council and the union to the job cuts, exactly what the WSWS had predicted has come to pass. We had long warned that the so-called workers’ representatives were preparing for a sell-out and that their protest demonstrations were only intended to deceive workers and blow off steam.

On July 14, we wrote that “IG Metall and the works council will hide behind the alleged neutrality of the chairman of the conciliation board in order to press ahead with the planned redundancies against the resistance of the workforce.” IG Metall is unreservedly prepared “to cut wages, social benefits and jobs.” With the help of external consultants, it had drawn up its own alternative concept and was now trying to “convince the company and its shareholders that its proposal would prove to be more profitable than the board’s own plan.”

When IG Metall called for a rally in front of the conciliation board meeting place on August 23, we stated in a German-language article: “The aim of the action was not to defend the jobs, but to continue cooperation with management. ... Otto and IG Metall are not pursuing the goal of defending the wages and jobs of the workforce, but of ‘helping to shape the transformation,’ i.e., restructuring Siemens and other corporations so that they will continue to yield high profits in the future.”

That is exactly what happened. The 2,600 jobs that IG Metall and its works council representatives have now agreed to eliminate are only slightly below the 3,000 figure that Siemens Energy originally announced. It can be assumed that the company had deliberately set this figure too high in order to be able to subsequently make a “concession” to the union.

Nevertheless, the leading IG Metall representative in Berlin, Jan Otto, described the result as a “strategic partial success.” He justified this by saying that 136 fewer jobs would be cut at the Berlin gas turbine plant than originally announced, that the reduction would be extended to 18 months—due to unfulfilled orders—and that the company had promised to invest hundreds of millions in the future of the site.

Manfred Bäreis, chairman of the Erlangen works council, also called the 565 job cuts in Erlangen “sustainable.” He said the job cuts were being made “on a voluntary basis.”

As usual, the job cuts are to be carried out via a “social plan” and without “compulsory redundancies.” This means that workers who do not “voluntarily” accept severance pay, early retirement or being moved into a transfer company will be put under personal pressure until they are worn down and resign.

Although the Siemens workforce demonstrated its willingness to fight at numerous demonstrations, IG Metall and the works council never intended to wage a battle to defend the jobs. They are pursuing a completely different strategy.

They are trying to prove to the corporations and the government that they have better plans for defending the interests of big business in the global struggle for market shares and profits. They want to convince them that their profits and stock prices will rise faster if they work closely with unions.

There is an inescapable logic to this. In order for Germany to remain competitive as a business destination, wages must be lowered, jobs must be cut and productivity increased. Instead of uniting the international working class, which is fighting against the same corporations and financial interests worldwide, IG Metall is dividing them and playing one location off against the other.

Jan Otto, the Berlin IG Metall leader, is an expert in this form of corporatist class collaboration. While the conciliation body negotiated the jobs massacre at Siemens Energy behind closed doors, he organised one so-called “transformation summit” after another.

On September 2, IG Metall held a “transformation conference” in Berlin, attended by IG Metall Federal Chairman Jörg Hofmann and Mayor Michael Müller (Social Democratic Party, SPD), the top candidates of Berlin’s political parties—Franziska Giffey (SPD), Kai Wegener (Christian Democratic Union, CDU), Klaus Lederer (Left Party) and Bettina Jarasch (Greens)—as well as hand-picked functionaries from the factories.

The conference ushered in “a new era for IG Metall,” Otto proclaimed. “We want to expand our mandate to include an activating and successful industrial and transformation policy.”

A transformation summit followed on Sept. 10 at Berlin City Hall, to which Mayor Michael Müller (SPD) and the city’s senator for economics, energy and business, Ramona Pop (Greens), had invited high-ranking union officials and top managers from Siemens Energy, Stadler, Bayer, Daimler, Biotronik, Alstom and other corporations. IG Metall was represented by Jan Otto and Regina Katerndahl.

On its website, IG Metall celebrated the summit as a “clear commitment from industry and trade unions” that it made sense “when decision-makers discuss the transformation of Berlin as an industrial location directly with social partners from the trade unions.” At the summit, he said, “many business models for the future” had emerged. One “exciting aspect was the idea of using Berlin as a real laboratory.”

The job cuts at Siemens Energy show what is meant by a “real laboratory.” On the day the agreement was announced, German Economics Minister Peter Altmaier (CDU) and lead CDU candidate Kai Wegener met with works council representatives at the gas turbine plant that had agreed to the cuts. They assured them, “Politics stands by the works council and their union.”

The Siemens Energy sell-off underscores once again that defending jobs, wages and social rights requires a break with the trade unions. Workers must build independent rank-and-file committees to organise the struggle and establish contact with workers in other plants and countries.

Siemens Energy is just the tip of the iceberg. In the German auto industry alone, half a million jobs are up for grabs. The ruling class is using the coronavirus pandemic to impose harsh social attacks. While countless workers are losing their income, livelihood or even their lives, it is using the pandemic for a new offensive of enrichment.

China’s Evergrande set to default on debt payment

Nick Beams

Tomorrow is looming as crunch day for the beleaguered debt-burdened Chinese property developer Evergrande when interest payments on two bonds fall due.

Evergrande is up for a payment of $83.5 million in interest on an 8.25 percent five-year bond and a $36 million payment on another debt on the same day.

China Evergrande Centre [Wikimedia Commons]

Financial markets have priced in the prospect of payment as unlikely with one of its bonds trading at less than 30 percent of its face value. Whatever the outcome of events tomorrow, the prospect of default will continue to hang over the company as, according to the Financial Times, it has $850 million due in interest payments falling due before the end of the year.

On Monday the Evergrande crisis triggered significant falls on global share markets with Wall Street experiencing its largest one-day fall since May. At one stage the Dow was down by 972 points before paring back some of the losses to finish down by 614 points, a 1.8 percent decline.

The S&P 500 index dropped by 1.7 percent with the tech-heavy NASDAQ down by 2.2 percent after falling by more than 3 percent at one stage during trading.

The sell-off was halted on Tuesday, with the S&P 500 and the Dow only marginally lower for the day. This was largely on the back of assurances from major finance houses that the Chinese government had the situation under control. As Bloomberg commented: “Wall Street analysts are putting their faith in the Chinese Communist Party.”

It cited a list of statements to the effect that China was not facing a “Lehman moment” – a reference to the collapse of the New York investment bank which led to the financial crisis of 2008.

A comment by Judy Zhang of Citigroup was typical of many. “We do not see the Evergrande crisis as China’s Lehman moment given policymakers will likely uphold the bottom line of preventing systemic risk to buy time for resolving the debt risk and push forward marginal easing for the overall credit environment.”

But despite these reassurances the Evergrande crisis does have implications for the Chinese financial system and the economy as a whole.

As the Wall Street Journal columnist James Mackintosh commented, “Evergrande is the Chinese economy in miniature.”

“Both have operated for decades on the principle that it was worth borrowing to build, in Evergrande’s case mostly housing, in China’s case not just apartments, but roads, rail, airports and other infrastructure.”

The Evergrande debacle was sparked by a decision last month to tighten credit regulations for highly leveraged companies, particularly in the real estate sector. It was motivated by the fear that the escalation of debt, which it had previously encouraged, was getting out of control and had to be scaled back lest it provoke a financial crisis.

The government had for some time been seeking to halt debt accumulation, largely to little effect. But the new regulations, characterised as “three red lines,” introduced more stringent measures. Financial authorities declared that borrowers had to meet three criteria: the ratio of liabilities to assets had to be less than 70 percent; net debt to equity ratios had to be below 100 percent and cash levels had to be at least equal to short-term debt.

Evergrande failed on all three. Its business model has depended on the continuous inflow of money and the expectation of a continued rise in the price of apartments.

It sold dwellings off the plan, either through a significant deposit or a full payment and then used the money obtained to finance further projects. The company is reported to have a total of $300 billion in debts with 778 projects under way in 223 cities. It supplemented its cash flow with short-term borrowings, often from firms in the so-called shadow banking system, and even raised money from its own employees to finance day-to-day operations.

For a time, it appeared to be riding an endless property boom and moved into other areas including bottled water, professional sport and electric vehicles. It is now trying desperately to sell of some these assets in order to alleviate its cash-flow crisis.

But with a credit crunch imposed by financial authorities and a falling housing market it is now running out of cash to complete the construction of many apartment block projects.

According to an estimate from Barclays, there are as many as 1.6 million people who have put money into the purchase of apartments they may now never receive.

The crisis is not confined to Evergrande, which has been described as the “tip of the iceberg.” The credit rating of the property development Fantasia Group was downgraded by the rating agency Fitch earlier this month and Guangzhou R&F has also had its credit rating downgraded. Earlier this year, China Fortune Land Development, a company that specialises in the development of industrial parks in the northern province of Hubei, defaulted. This cost Ping An, China’s biggest insurer $3.2 billion.

Morgan Stanley has estimated that property development firms defaulted on $6.2 billion of risky debt in the year to mid-August, more than the previous 12 years combined.

Evidence of the broader crisis in the property market was visible this week when television programs around the world showed videos of 15 uncompleted apartment blocks being demolished because the developers had run out of money to complete them.

Despite assurances that Evergrande will not provoke a financial crisis – at least in the very short term – numerous commentators and analysts have pointed to the flow on effects of the Evergrande crisis both for the Chinese economy and the world economy as a whole. It is estimated that property development and related industries account for more than 25 percent of the Chinese economy.

“This is a threat to global growth,” Ilya Feygin, a managing director at WallachBeth Capital told the Wall Street Journal. “What if things worsen? That means a hit to the financial system in China [and] overall economic activity around the world because of China’s importance.”

The dangers contained in the rise and rise of Evergrande have been known for some time, but the belief has been that the Chinese government would ensure that they were contained. Now that assessment is at least being questioned.

Goldman Sachs analysts have called on financial authorities to send a “clearer message” on how they intended to stop Evergrande from causing “significant spillovers” to the rest of the economy. Citigroup said officials may commit a “policy error of overtightening” and economists at Société Générale have said there is a 30 percent possibility of a “hard landing.”

Ding Shuang, an economist at Standard Chartered in Hong Kong said: “Even though most people don’t expect Evergrande to collapse all of a sudden, the silence and lack of major actions from policy makers is making everyone panic.”

In a note published on Sunday, Goldman Sachs economists pointed to the longer-term issues for Chinese property development because of its key role in the economy.

“With policy makers showing no signs of wavering on property market deleveraging, the latest headlines regarding Evergrande suggest that housing activity may deteriorate further in the absence of the government providing a clear path towards an eventual resolution,” they said.

Some of the companies hardest hit in the stock market sell off triggered by Evergrande have been those involved in the mining and refining of basic metals. And for good reason. Rapid calculations published in the FT noted that the Chinese real estate sector accounts for the consumption of around one fifth of the world supply of copper and steel.

At the start of the week, iron ore futures in Singapore fell by as much as 11.5 percent to below $100 per tonne. Back in May the ore price was around double this level. Last week iron ore prices fell by 20 percent in their worst week since the financial crisis of 2008.

This is not entirely due to the Evergrande crisis. But the growing problems in the Chinese property market is feeding into a general assessment that, far from experiencing a bounce back as governments scrap public health measures to deal with the pandemic, the world economy is entering a downswing.

Why Do Europeans Live Longer Than Americans?

Sam Pizzigati

Demographers looking back — years from now — on America’s annual mortality rates are going to find an asterisk on the years 2020 and 2021. The text behind that asterisk is going to give the reason why so many more Americans died in those particular years than the years right before.

The explanation, of course, will be the Covid-19 pandemic.

But those demographers of the future, to really understand American mortality in the early decades of the 21st century, are going to need another asterisk. They’re going to need an explanation why Americans of that era, before the pandemic hit, were living significantly shorter lives than their peers elsewhere in the developed world.

How much shorter? A just-published study from a global team of 27 social scientists from 13 different developed nations offers up some numbers that will take most Americans completely by surprise.

Back in 1990, the new data detail, White Americans showed the same 76-year average life-spans as the general populations of England, Germany, France, Netherlands, Norway, and Spain, with Black Americans trailing behind by seven years. By 2018, Black Americans had nearly halved the life-span gap with their White American counterparts. But those same White Americans had fallen well behind the Europeans. Their life-spans — right before the pandemic — trailed the European average by about the same three years that U.S. Blacks trailed U.S. Whites.

“White Americans have increasingly lost ground compared to Europeans,” the new international mortality study concludes, “with substantial gaps in mortality rates opening between Europeans and White Americans.”

“The comparisons with Europe,” the National Bureau of Economic Research study continues, “suggest that mortality rates of both Black and White Americans could fall much further across all ages and across richer and poorer areas.”

So what’s stopping those U.S. mortality rates from falling that “much further”? Certainly not money. The United States now spends twice as much, per capita, on health care as the average European nation.

How much money different nations spend on health care, in other words, simply does not automatically predict their health outcomes. How nations distribute their money, on the other hand, appears to tell us a great deal.

The United States has, over more than four decades now, chosen to let wealth concentrate intensely in the pockets of a few. The United States has become significantly more unequal, a much more economically stratified society. Europe has not followed suit. Until relatively recently, Europe has been able to maintain most of the landmark egalitarian gains of the mid-20th century.

The United States, by contrast, has let those gains lapse. So why should the resulting inequality translate into poorer health outcomes? Epidemiologists — the scientists who study the health of populations — have been discussing and debating that question for the past quarter-century, ever since the mid-1990s when the prestigious British Medical Journal informed readers that “studies have related income inequality to infant mortality, life expectancy, height, and morbidity, with a consistent finding that the less equitable the income distribution in a country, the less favorable the health outcome.” The studies, the journal added, “seem to show that inequality per se is bad for national health, whatever the absolute material standards of living within a country.”

In one recent review of the literature, the British Equality Trust points to “status anxiety” as the “most plausible explanation for income inequality’s apparent effect on health and social problems.”

“In more unequal societies, the data indicate, status anxiety increases not just among the poor, but across all income deciles,” note Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, authors of the widely influential 2009 book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. “We all worry more about whether others see us as capable and successful — or as a failure.”

Threats to self-esteem and social status, the pair add, “turn out to be particularly strong sources of stress.” And stress kills.

“For decades, U.S. politicians on the right have resisted calls for income redistribution and universal insurance under the theory that inequality was a fair price to pay for freedom,” writes the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson in a thoughtful reflection on the new international life-expectancy data. “But now we know that the price of inequality is paid in early death — for Americans of all races, ages, and income levels.”

Greater equality may well be the best medicine any doctor can ever prescribe.

Hospitals throughout US South remain inundated with COVID-19 patients as Delta variant surge continues

Alex Johnson

The Southern region of the United States is continuing to see an explosive growth of hospitalizations and deaths which is being fueled by the highly infectious Delta variant of COVID-19. The latest wave of virus is taking a dangerous toll on hospitals in multiple states, as the enormous influx of sick patients is causing strains on hospital staffing and placing untold pressure on health care workers.

While states such as Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia have seen slight declines in their hospitalizations since the initial onset of the Delta wave in August and early September, deaths in all four states have shot upward in recent weeks, demonstrating that fatalities are catching up with the monstrous rise in infections which has been driven by the bipartisan push to reopen schools and lift all pandemic restrictions combined with low vaccination rates.

In Georgia, daily deaths from COVID-19 have risen nearly ten-fold since August 1, according to data from the Georgia Department of Health. An average of 93.7 Georgians a day are currently dying of the virus, which represents a 977 percent increase since the beginning of August.

A nurse enters a monoclonal antibody site, Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021, at C.B. Smith Park in Pembroke Pines, Florida (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

The disaster facing the South has been one of the main contributors to the catastrophic resurgence of the pandemic in the US since early July. The country is now averaging over 2,000 COVID-19 deaths and about 150,000 new infections every day, the highest levels since the deadly winter surge.

Despite the Biden administration’s recent announcement of a vaccine or testing requirement for business with more than 100 employees, about 770,000 shots per day of the vaccine are being dispensed nationwide, well below the peak of 3.4 million a day in mid-April. The slow rate of vaccinations has also rendered a large chunk of the population vulnerable to the Delta variant, with 46 percent still unvaccinated—including all children under the age of 12.

In Tennessee, intensive care units remain dangerously full and have begun to create disruptions in hospital systems across the state. Hospitalizations have plateaued at well over 3,000 since the beginning of September. West Tennessee Healthcare, a critical access hospital in Bolivar, east of Memphis, currently has at least a dozen patients admitted into its facility, five times the two or three patients that the facility usually sees. Half of them are sick with COVID-19, according to Hospital CEO Ruby Kirby.

Conditions have worsened to the point where the hospital’s health operators are being forced to transfer ventilated patients to intensive care units (ICUs) in larger cities like Memphis or Nashville, which also have a very limited number of open beds. “We’re managing them, but it is putting a strain on the system, trying to hold these patients in these hospitals until we can get them moved,” Kirby told WKU Public Radio. While COVID-19 hospitalizations statewide have declined slightly over the last week, more than a thousand COVID patients remain in ICUs across Tennessee.

Like many states that have become epicenters for the latest Delta wave, staffing has reached dangerously low levels at hospitals which are flooded with COVID-19 patients. Many hospitals in Tennessee are now receiving help from the state’s National Guard, while the state has even offered money to help pay for travel nurses.

In eastern Tennessee, hospital operators say even offering high pay isn’t enough to fill all the openings left by nurses who’ve left the COVID-flooded ICUs due to working arduously long hours and suffering burnout. One chief medical officer, Dr. Harold Naremore of Blount Memorial Hospital in Maryville, told WKU the challenges the hospital is facing are “very frightening” because “there’s no more staff to bring in.”

At North Carolina’s Duke University Hospital in Durham, 99 percent of adult inpatient beds were occupied on average each day in the week ending on September 11—the ninth-straight week that the hospital has been at 98-100 percent capacity. According to the data, an average of 81 of those patients had confirmed or suspected COVID-19, meaning COVID patients filled about one out of every nine beds on average each day. In the intensive care unit, all ICU beds were occupied on average each day last week.

At the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Hospital, 86 percent of adult beds were occupied on average each day that same week, and 83 of those beds were filled with COVID-19 patients. About one in seven beds were filled with a COVID patient each day. At WakeMed in Raleigh, 88 percent of inpatient beds were occupied on average each day. Of those beds, more than a quarter were filled with COVID-19 patients—a daily average of nearly 150 suspected and confirmed COVID patients.

In Kentucky, at least 70 percent of hospitals are facing critical staffing shortages, with health and political officials issuing dire warnings of an imminent collapse of several facilities. Staffing shortages have been reported in 66 of the state’s 96 hospitals, the highest level yet throughout the pandemic. Governor Andy Beshear along with Kentucky’s public health commissioner Dr. Steven Stack admitted last week that the latest surge in COVID-19 is straining the entire health care system.

“Our hospitals are at the brink of collapse in many communities,” Stack noted. According to health experts, the highly contagious Delta variant has exacerbated the crisis. Dr. Ryan Stanton, an emergency room physician in Lexington, Kentucky said he’s seen the virus spread to whole families, especially if older members are unvaccinated. “Now in Kentucky, one-third of new cases are under age 18,” Stanton said in a recent Newsweek interview.

Contrary to the lying claims made by the Biden White House and entire political establishment that the reopening of K-12 schools can be done safely, one of the main facilitators for transmission are now children, with small children and youth participating in in-person learning and other face-to-face activities spreading the virus to the rest of their families. Stanton pointed to the reopening of schools and classroom learning, a reckless and homicidal policy that’s been pursued by every governor nationwide and the Biden administration, as directly responsible for the catastrophe. “Between daycare and schools and school activities, and friends getting together, there are just so many exposures.”

Perhaps the greatest indicator of distress from the Delta-fueled upsurge are intolerable conditions that health care workers in Kentucky and nationwide have been forced to endure. More than 400 members of the Kentucky National Guard, as well as strike teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s emergency medical services, have now been deployed to help struggling hospitals across the state.

In an interview with ABC News, Kerri Eklund, a nurse working in Elizabethtown at Baptist Health Hardin Hospital, relayed the tragic burdens facing nurses. “I would honestly say it’s at least three times worse than what it was the first time. We’re seeing a lot of people getting really sick. There are patients that will come in and they’ll be doing okay for a few days and then, in the blink of an eye, they go downhill.”

Many health care workers have described the current wave as unexpected after brief relief in the spring and early summer, with infections and deaths slowed to their lowest numbers during the pandemic. Central blame for the resurgence, however, lies with both corporate-controlled parties and institutions such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which in May dropped all national health mandates, above all social distancing and masking, in order to greenlight in-person learning in schools, as demanded by Biden, and ensure no restrictions remained on profit making.

With the pandemic escalating at break-neck speed, frontline health care workers are seeing the consequences of the deadly policies pursued by the ruling class in intolerable working conditions. Medical professionals from nurses and physician assistants to respiratory therapists have reported feeling stretched so thin that many are experiencing exhaustion and burnout.

In Kentucky, which has become an epicenter for the new surge, health practitioners have reported seeing highly experienced and exceptional colleagues walk away from their profession in droves because of the stress and anxiety they are having to deal with. Many front-line workers are fearful of yet another surge as the current fall season stretches into the winter months without any serious effort to suppress the pandemic and eliminate COVID-19. In the same interview with Newsweek, Eklund said, “I’m really worried that it’s just going to keep getting worse...because we all know that winter is the worst time for health issues all together.”

Mass infections threatened as students return to UK campuses

Henry Lee

Over the next weeks, one million students and tens of thousands of staff will return to university campuses under conditions in which the COVID-19 pandemic is raging out of control. Casting aside even the dishonest promises of a “safe return” from 2020, the ruling elite intends to expose students and higher education workers to the unrestricted spread of the virus.

Despite the insistence in the media that young people are safe from COVID-19, its long-term impacts are only beginning to be understood. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimated at the start of September that around 110,000 people under the age of 25 were suffering from Long COVID. Of these, 26,000 reported that they had symptoms at least 12 months after initial infection. The ONS found that most young Long COVID sufferers reported that their symptoms limit their activity. An estimated 46,000 young people described the impact as limiting their activity “a little”, and 13,000 “a lot”.

Public Health England’s “Weekly national Influenza and COVID-19 surveillance report” for the week to September 12 estimates that only 65 percent of young people aged 18 to 25 have received at least one vaccine dose, and only 48.9 percent are fully vaccinated, leaving large numbers extremely vulnerable to infection.

A sign reading "COVID ROOMS" at the Courtrooms halls of residence at Bristol university last term (WSWS Media)

The reopening of campuses with no restrictions on the spread of the virus is not only a reckless experiment with the health of students, but increases the risk of dangerous new strains emerging. When the government announced the lifting of all COVID safety restrictions in July, the Co-Director of the Centre for Genomic Research at the University of Liverpool, Steve Paterson, warned, “Letting a virus rip through a partially vaccinated population is exactly the experiment I’d do to evolve a virus able to evade immunity”.

Last week, there were reports of 19 UK cases of the more transmissible Delta variant with an E484K mutation associated with greater resistance to vaccines.

Even before most students have arrived on campus, outbreaks are already being reported at multiple universities. University College London announced that in the week beginning September 6, 10 students and four staff tested positive. Even earlier, in the week beginning August 30, 10 staff and four students at the University of Manchester tested positive.

While students have suffered in the under-resourced and largely unplanned move to online teaching, the demand from the government that face-to-face teaching must resume with no restrictions has nothing to do with defending education. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s only concern is to advance the murderous programme of herd immunity by mass infection, in service to the profits of the corporations.

The same claims to be defending a normal university experience and standard of education were made last year, with the government and universities promising “COVID-secure” campuses. In reality, students were herded into crowded dorms to keep tuition and accommodation fees flowing. Once the inevitable outbreaks took place, they were scapegoated and subjected to brutal policing, forcibly quarantined in their dorms in appalling conditions—in at least one case with a fire door sealed shut.

This year, universities have even more explicitly treated students as “cash cows”. Desperate not to lose the tens of thousands of pounds in tuition fees paid by each international student, more than 50 institutions arranged charter flights to bring 1,200 young people from China to the UK. They are planning to arrange more according to the Sunday Times.

The government’s claims to be concerned for student’s education are belied by its plans to slash arts and humanities funding in half and overseeing the closure of courses and whole departments. University managers have meanwhile carried out a wave of job losses, with figures obtained by education platform Edvoy showing over 3,000 redundancies were made between March and September 2020 alone.

Students and university staff are in this position thanks to the treachery of the education unions. The University and College Union (UCU) has worked to suppress all opposition among academics and support staff opposed to working on unsafe campuses.

At Cardiff, members of the union branch voted in an indicative ballot in January to take industrial action, including a strike, if they were forced to work on campus. This was never organised by the union, with the local UCU website now declaring it is waiting for an “act of good-will empowering workers with a choice about face-to-face work”. Indicating the worthlessness of its “indicative” ballots, it adds, “if necessary, we will run a [strike] ballot in the Autumn to protect members who do not feel safe returning to face-to-face working on campus.”

The UCU and other campus unions have played a similar role in demobilising their members in every university. During the first lockdown in 2020, the UCU, UNISON, Unite, EIS and GMB put out a joint press statement with the Universities & Colleges Employers Association, committing the universities only to “consult” the unions and “use government guidance … as the basis for their response to the Covid-19 pandemic.” The document agreed that the unions would enforce a reopening as long as this inadequate guidance was followed.

The National Union of Students (NUS) has said nothing about fighting for COVID safety on the campuses and takes no position on the return of students. The last press release issued by the NUS mentioning COVID-19 was in April. Endorsing fraudulent claims that lectures can be made “safe” with a few mitigations, the NUS says, “We believe that students should be back on campus when it is safe to do so and would like this to be grounded in scientific advice.”

The unions are holding back a tide of opposition. In a global survey by Times Higher Education issued this month, only 28 percent of respondents said they felt safe returning to in-person teaching or on-campus working this term, and 53 percent responded “no”. Underscoring the total lack of faith in the “safety measures” worked out between universities and the unions, 78 percent said that they were concerned the return of in-person teaching will lead to a spike in coronavirus cases in their area.

Showing how workers are seeing through the anti-scientific propaganda which insists young people are safe from infection, the survey reported that it was younger workers, in the 18-34 age group, who were the most dissatisfied with their employers’ preparations to stop the spread of COVID-19 on campuses. THE reports that many respondents were nervous because of a lack of transparency, after having spent the last year and a half being lied to about the risks and spread of the pandemic.

A majority of respondents to the survey were from the UK, but the international response indicates that workers everywhere face and oppose the same dangerous conditions.

US Border Patrol agents whip and corral Haitian migrants

Patrick Martin

Video footage and photographic images of US Border Patrol agents herding Haitian migrants as though they were cattle triggered widespread revulsion across the United States and internationally Monday.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection mounted officers attempt to contain migrants as they cross the Rio Grande from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, into Del Rio, Texas, Sunday, Sept. 19, 2021. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez)

The footage, taken by photographers for the Associated Press, Reuters and AFP, showed the crackdown ordered by the Biden administration against more than 10,000 Haitian migrants who have gathered under a freeway underpass on the outskirts of Del Rio, Texas, a border town 145 miles west of San Antonio.

Several reporters described the actions of Border Patrol agents mounted on horseback as using the reins of their horses to threaten migrants who had waded across the Rio Grande—which is exceptionally low at this point. The El Paso Times reported Monday that an agent ”swung his whip menacingly, charging his horse toward the men in the river.”

The refugees assembled in a makeshift camp under the freeway bridge on the US side of the river have been crossing back into Mexico to get food and other supplies, rather than risk crossing through lines set up on the US side of the camp by the Border Patrol and Texas state police, who would arrest them and ship them off for immediate deportation.

Border Patrol agents began riding on horseback along the river in order to cut off those, mostly men, who have gone back to Mexico for supplies, and prevent them from rejoining their families. In some cases, desperate migrants dropped the food and water they were carrying on their heads into the river, in order to make a dash for the US side.

The Border Patrol began mass deportations of the Haitians on Sunday, taking 3,300 migrants into custody and sending more than 400 back to Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. The remainder of this group were divided between El Paso and San Antonio, to await imminent deportation with flights set to continue from both cities to Haiti.

Acting Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz said all the Haitians remaining in Del Rio would be removed by the end of the week. “Over the next 6 to 7 days our goal is to process the 12,662 migrants that we have underneath that bridge as quickly as we possibly can,” he said. “What we want to make sure is that we deter the migrants from coming into the region so we can manage the folks that are under the bridge at this point.”

Flights to Haiti will be ramped up to a total of seven a day, four to Port-au-Prince and three to Cap-Haïtien, the largest city in the north of Haiti, giving the airlift a capacity of about a thousand people a day. Other refugees are to be deported to Mexico and Central America.

The images of border agents herding Haitian migrants were only the most overt expression of a US government policy that is savage in every aspect. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, whose agency controls the Border Patrol, arrived in Del Rio Monday to oversee the mass repression, accompanied by a small army of 600 additional agents.

In a press briefing in the border city, he reiterated the Biden administration’s position that the migrants would not be allowed to file for asylum, which is their right under international law. Instead, they would be rounded up and immediately deported under Title 42, a legal provision that allows the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to declare a public health exception—the coronavirus pandemic—to justify emergency action.

Title 42 was initially invoked by the Trump administration as part of its all-sided war of repression against migrants attempting to cross the US–Mexico border. Biden made a pretense of criticizing this savage policy during the presidential election campaign, but has embarked on a policy that is no less brutal and anti-democratic.

After a federal judge issued an order September 16 barring the use of Title 42, the administration immediately announced it would appeal. In the meantime, given a 14-day stay of the order by the judge himself, the Biden administration is moving rapidly to deport all the Haitian migrants during that two-week window.

Most of the thousands of Haitians at Del Rio are not recent immigrants from Haiti. They fled in 2010 after the massive earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people and left much of the country in ruins, migrating to Brazil, Chile and other parts of South America in search of economic and physical survival.

As a result, many, perhaps a majority of those being shipped back to Haiti, have little knowledge of the “home” country to which they are being forcibly returned. Most of the children were born or grew up in South America, and are more fluent in Spanish or Portuguese than in Haitian Creole or French.

The older migrants have not been back to the country of their birth since 2010. But they know Haiti remains the poorest country in the western hemisphere, ravaged by recent hurricanes and a second major earthquake, as well as rampant political violence culminating in the recent assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. The economic downturn and coronavirus pandemic have led them to seek to enter the United States, where many have family members or hope to find work and safety.

The Biden administration regards the brutality on the border as a public relations problem to be managed by its spin doctors. Thus, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that the images of the Border Patrol agent herding migrants through the river were “horrible to watch. I don’t think anyone seeing that footage would think it was acceptable or appropriate.”

The violence is, however, in pursuit of the policies decreed by the White House. The US government closed the border at Del Rio on Sunday, and the Border Patrol agents were acting to enforce that closure.

For all the phony handwringing in front of the national media, there will be no change in policy toward the migrants, or any diminution in the everyday violence by the Border Patrol thugs, who only a few months ago gave their full-throated support to Trump, who appeared regularly at Border Patrol functions to applaud their most ruthless actions, and was endorsed for reelection by their union.

The conditions within the Del Rio camp are appalling. Several pregnant women are trapped there, and at least one gave birth at the site, was taken to a hospital in Del Rio and then returned with her newborn infant to the camp. Reporters saw one woman collapse within sight of National Guard troops—deployed at Del Rio to reinforce the Border Patrol—and troops “slowly approached and carried her away.”

The temperature in Del Rio hit 105 degrees Fahrenheit Monday, falling only to 100 degrees by nightfall, with a low temperature of only 80 overnight, putting many of those trapped there in danger of heat stroke.

Meanwhile, the Mexican government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Sunday it would join the United States in the immediate deportation of Haitians. A government officials said there would be deportation flights from the Mexican side of the US border and from along the Mexican border with Guatemala, where another large group of Haitians remains.

Russian elections overshadowed by COVID-19 surge

Clara Weiss

Russia’s elections to the State Duma (parliament) this weekend were overshadowed by the rapid resurgence of COVID-19 and a deepening social crisis. Because of the pandemic, the election was held over the course of three days, from Friday through Sunday, and it was possible to cast ballots online.

Russian President Vladimir Putin during his annual live call-in show in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, June 30, 2021. (Sergei Savostyanov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

The ruling United Russia party, which is closely associated with President Vladimir Putin, won with close to 50 percent (down from 54 percent in 2016) of the vote. This will give the party a two-thirds majority in the parliament. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) was able to capitalize to some extent on growing social and political discontent and received about a fifth of the vote.

There were widespread reports of ballot rigging, and employees of state-owned enterprises, including many industrial workers, were forced to vote. Despite these measures, however, voter turnout stood at just 52 percent, a sign of growing popular hostility toward all the established political parties.

The KPRF has already declared that it will not recognize the result of the online vote. Online ballots were only counted on Monday, and they tipped the vote significantly in favor of United Russia.

In the run-up to the election, the Kremlin cracked down heavily on the liberal opposition gathered around the imprisoned Alexei Navalny. Navalny, who is backed by US and German imperialism, was arrested early this year and sentenced to over two years in prison.

Two weeks before the election, Russia summoned the US ambassador over alleged “election interference.” The Kremlin indicated it had “undeniable proof” of US-based tech companies violating Russian laws in the lead-up to the elections, without specifying the allegations or the evidence.

Navalny and his staff, based on the so-called “smart vote” strategy, called upon people to cast their ballots for any candidate that was the most likely to defeat a rival from United Russia.

In many places, this meant that the Navalny team recommended candidates of the Stalinist KPRF. The KPRF is notorious for its anti-immigrant and Great Russian chauvinism and, to this day, staunchly defends and praises the worst crimes of Joseph Stalin. Following the line of Navalny, the Pabloites of the Russian Socialist Movement also backed KPRF candidates.

Apart from United Russia and the KPRF, three other parties will also be represented in parliament. The far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), headed by the anti-Semite and chauvinist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Just Russia Party both received about 7.5 percent of the vote. The Novye Liudi (New People) party, which was only recently established by Alexei Nechaev, the CEO of a cosmetics company, got a little over 5 percent. The LDPR, as well as Just Russia and the KPRF, have functioned for over two decades as a “loyal opposition” to the Putin regime, working to channel social and political discontent in a right-wing direction.

Russia’s stock market reached a record high on Friday as the elections began, even as cases and deaths surged and the economy remains mired in crisis.

The election was marked by an almost complete black-out of the burning social issues affecting the working class, above all, the COVID-19 pandemic. Several parties, including United Russia, signed an agreement with the Kremlin, obliging their candidates to not make any statements on the pandemic.

Cases skyrocketed again over election weekend, reaching daily numbers of over 20,000 on both Saturday and Sunday. In Moscow, which has the highest levels of vaccination in the country, numbers also rose once more to above 2,000 per day. The resurgence of the pandemic comes as a fourth wave that brutally hit the country’s population in the summer has barely concluded. At least 790 people have died each day for weeks now, with a daily record of 820 deaths in late August. In July alone, so far the deadliest month in the pandemic for Russia, over 50,000 people officially died from COVID-19.

Amid widespread vaccine hesitancy, only 27 percent of the population of 140 million are fully vaccinated, and just 30 percent have received at least one dose. Almost all restrictions have been lifted on the federal level. The Kremlin has left it to regions to implement limited measures on a local and ad hoc basis.

The principal driver behind the new rise in infections is the reopening of schools and colleges on September 1. Since then, hundreds of classes and schools have been closed across the country because of outbreaks among students and staff.

Last week, 80 classes in 58 schools were closed in the region of Novosibirsk alone. According to the deputy health minister of the region, Yelena Aksenova, cases rose by 46.2 percent with close to 60 percent of them among children. Even before the schools had reopened, Russian officials acknowledged that half a million children had contracted the virus in the previous year and a half.

Russian officials have also indicated that the Mu variant of the virus, also known as B.1.621, has now been detected in the country, without providing figures as to how widespread it is. The WHO recently designated the Mu variant as a “variant of interest,” which could be more resistant to vaccines.

Russia has now recorded a total of over 7.214 million cases, and 195,835 deaths. The real number of deaths, however, is believed to be far higher, by up to a factor of five. This would bring the true death toll close to 1 million people. A major reason for the high death toll, apart from the total lack of adequate public health measures and low vaccination rates, is the catastrophic state of Russia’s health care system. Thirty years after the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism, the country’s hospitals are completely dilapidated, underequipped and understaffed.

Social inequality, which has been rising, and deteriorating living standards were issues of primary concern for Russians leading up to the election, according to polls. Real wages in Russia have declined for years, with the first quarter of 2021 reporting the largest quarterly decline in real wages (5 percent) since 2009. While the pandemic and economic crisis have resulted in income losses for the vast majority of Russians, the number of Russian billionaires swelled from 99 to 117 in 2020, and their collective net worth rose dramatically, from $385 billion to $584 billion, according to Forbes .

The parties that competed in the elections are virtually all run by this very class of multibillionaires and millionaires. Andrei Gorokhov, a leading candidate for United Russia, reportedly has an income of $256.8 million, Andrey Kovalev, a prominent member of Just Russia, has an income of $91.6 million, and Alexei Nechaev, the founder and leader of the New People party, has a reported income of $60.1 million. By contrast, the monthly average salary in Russia is just $802, with millions earning significantly less.

In an indication of the enormous social crisis in the country, on Monday, a mentally ill student at Perm University killed at least six people and injured another 28. The shooter was injured by the police and is reportedly now hospitalized in critical condition. Just earlier this year, in May, a 19 year old gunned down nine people in his old school in Kazan, among them seven children.