Australian prime minister declares the country must “ride the wave” of Omicron surge

Martin Scott

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison declared at a press conference yesterday: “We have no choice but to ride the wave. What’s the alternative? What we must do is press on.”

This statement, echoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose criminal “herd immunity” policies have killed more than 900 people in the last week alone, was an official acknowledgement from the highest level that the Australian ruling class has adopted the same murderous program and will preside over levels of mass infection and death previously only seen abroad.

Already, the consequences of this position are beginning to emerge, with 76 COVID-19 deaths in Australia in the last seven days. Across the country, 13 deaths were reported today, including a double-vaccinated man in his 20s, with no underlying health conditions.

A nurse holds a phone while a patient affected with COVID-19 speaks with his family from the intensive care unit (AP/Daniel Cole)

Meanwhile, infection numbers continue to surge, with more than 72,000 new cases reported in Australia today. The national positive test rate of 31.35 percent indicates that this is a vast underestimation of the real figure.

University of Melbourne epidemiologist Tony Blakely yesterday told the Australian that reported infection numbers were “a gross underestimate.” Blakely said, in New South Wales (NSW), “the actual number of infections is likely something like 160,000 to 180,000 a day,” five times the official figures.

Morrison’s proclamation came after a meeting of the “National Cabinet,” a de facto coalition comprising state and territory leaders, a majority of which are from the Labor party, and the federal Liberal-National government.

Underscoring the completely bipartisan nature of Australia’s “let it rip” policy, one of its most vocal proponents is John Gerrard, chief health officer for the Queensland Labor government. Gerrard declared on Monday: “I think we just have to assume that all of us are going to be exposed in the next few weeks,” as the government he represents winds back all mitigations.

The National Cabinet ordered further cuts to COVID-19 testing, in moves designed to conceal the magnitude of the pandemic and force workers back on the job even if they are possibly infectious.

Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly announced that “as part of the living with COVID,” recent changes, introduced by state governments to force health workers exposed to the virus out of isolation and back to work, would be extended to the aged care sector.

Kelly said this was necessary because, “we need people at work to look after our aged care residents, even if they are at a low risk of transmitting COVID.”

As is true in the hospital system, where more than 3,800 health workers are currently in COVID isolation in NSW alone, the reckless policies of Australian governments have exposed so many aged care workers to the virus that the system is about to collapse. The ruling elite’s only answer is to send the probably infected workers back in to care for those most vulnerable to the disease.

The current wave of COVID has already begun to take hold in aged care facilities. At one nursing home in Clemton Park, in southwest Sydney, 38 residents and 25 staff have tested positive and one resident has died. Despite receiving their first and second vaccine doses more than seven months ago, the residents have not yet received booster shots.

Across the state, more than 650 aged care residents currently have COVID-19.

The crisis in the nation’s hospital system continues to escalate, with 3,283 people currently hospitalised for COVID-19, 208 in ICU, and 65 requiring ventilation. Almost half of the 131 ICU patients in NSW are double-vaccinated.

In NSW, more than 13,000 COVID-19 patients are being “cared for outside the hospital setting,” indicating that official hospitalisation figures are a vast understatement of the real number of people requiring treatment for COVID-19.

This number does not include more than 186,000 cases “self-managed” at home, in line with advice from NSW Health that those with COVID-19 should not seek medical attention unless they have difficulty breathing. Similarly, in Victoria, hospitals have urged people not to attend “unless absolutely necessary,” and emergency departments across the country have been forced to turn away patients presenting with supposedly “mild” symptoms.

Ambulance services are also in crisis. On Tuesday NSW Ambulance declared “status three,” meaning the service was unable to meet demand. High priority cases, meant to be attended within 10 minutes were left waiting more than an hour.

In practice, grievously-ill people have been abandoned and left to their fate.

One such case was a 14-year-old girl in southwest Sydney, who had previously tested positive for COVID-19. Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, her mother described watching as her daughter’s lips turned blue during a severe asthma attack as she waited more than an hour for paramedics to arrive.

As testing around the country has slowed to a crawl in recent weeks amid a massive Omicron surge, broad sections of the population, including epidemiologists, doctors and the general public, have urgently called for rapid antigen tests (RATs) to be made free and easily accessible.

Despite this, Morrison said yesterday: “Universal free access was not considered the right policy response by all of the states and territories in attendance today, and the Commonwealth.”

Instead, the National Cabinet declared concession card holders will be eligible for the woefully inadequate offering of ten free test kits over a three month period.

Regular COVID-19 tests will no longer be provided for truck drivers. This is aimed at shoring up supply chains under conditions where one major logistics company, Australian Container Freight Services, has reported up to half of its east coast workforce is infected or in isolation.

Australians who test positive on a RAT will no longer be required to take a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test to confirm the result. With no system in place to record RAT results, this is a naked ploy to hide infections and falsely lower reported figures.

The shift to rapid testing not only has the bipartisan support of the Labor and Liberal-National federal, state and territory leaders, but of the unions, which in a united front with business lobbyists, have been demanding wider use of RATs for months.

Test requirements for interstate and international travelers have also been slashed. The reduced testing measures will apply in all states except Western Australia, which did not send a representative to the meeting.

In a clear indication that the relaxation of isolation rules will be extended across the entire working class, the National Cabinet also vowed that a meeting would be held to “consider workplace health and safety requirements with a view to removing any potential obligation to impose testing requirements in workplaces on employees.”

In other words, employers will be absolved of any responsibility to ensure workers who have tested positive for COVID-19 do not return to work while they are still infectious. Combined with the tight restrictions on PCR testing, lack of availability of RATs—at any price—and recent redefinition of “close contacts” to include only household transmission, this virtually guarantees infection will be rampant in every workplace.

Already, Woolworths fresh produce shelves have been bare for days across Sydney, with reports on social media that up to half of staff at the supermarket chain’s Minchinbury warehouse are off work due to COVID.

Rival Coles is also experiencing shortages. Chief Operations Officer MatthewSwindells admitted yesterday “people may see gaps on shelves,” because “the isolation numbers from Omicron are growing rapidly.”

The National Cabinet was also adamant that schools must reopen at the end of the summer holidays. Morrison said: “We are all very shared in our view that schools go back and stay back, on day one of term one.” The insistence that schools reopen for in-person learning flies in the face of public health, and is aimed only at ensuring the parents can be forced back to workplaces.

Doctors have warned that they have not been allocated enough vaccine doses to meet demand for school-aged children, and are not allowed to order more. Dr Anna Davidson, from the NSW Central Coast told the Australian, “the reality is our kids are not going to be vaccinated for term one.”

The decisions made at yesterday’s National Cabinet meeting are just the latest confirmation that the Australian political establishment is thoroughly committed to protecting the profits of big business, whatever the cost to human lives.

Morrison’s rhetorical question, “what’s the alternative?” was intended as a mocking rejection of growing public opposition to the murderous “herd immunity” policies openly proclaimed by all Australian governments in recent weeks.

But there is an alternative. The necessary measures to eliminate COVID-19 are well known and could be used to stamp out the virus in just a few months. This has been demonstrated in practice in China and New Zealand, as well as in a number of Australian states which previously eliminated the virus, as a result of public health measures introduced following demands from workers and young people.

Necessary measures include genuine lockdowns, including the closure of non-essential workplaces—with full compensation for furloughed workers—the highest standards of testing, tracing, isolation and quarantine to prevent community transmission and a massive expansion of the chronically underfunded public healthcare system.

Oxford/Reuters Institute Journalism Fellowships 2022

Application Deadline: 14th February 2022 (23:59 UK time).

Eligible Countries: African/Developing Countries

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Does Japan Aspire to be a Super Power?

Alec Dubro

In early November, the German Navy frigate Bayern docked in Japan after two days of exercises with the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyer Samidare.  No, it’s not the reestablishment of the Axis Powers, but it’s still significant.

“The Indo-Pacific is today one of the strategically most important regions of the world,” Gen. Eberhard Zorn, chief of Germany’s armed forces said at a Tokyo press conference. “Here, important decisions over freedom, peace and well-being in the world are being made. Deploying our frigate to the Indo-Pacific makes clear that Germany stands up for our common values.” In other words, the Germans are doing their part to contain China, just as the British, French and Dutch have done. And, of course, the Americans.

The Japanese Self-Defense Forces have been described as the world’s fifth most powerful military. In November 2021, Japan’s military budget of $47 billion was supplemented by an additional appropriation of $6.7 billion. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and the ruling LDP had pressed for the supplement because of the ongoing threats not only from China but Russia and North Korea.

This comes as no surprise to the Americans. In their April high-level meeting in Washington, both Suga and President Biden declared their intention to increase Japan’s national defense capabilities to “further strengthen the US- Japan alliance and regional security.”

Regional security implies a strategic force, something that flies in the face of Japan’s 1947 Peace Constitution. That basic document is quite explicit in its dedication to world and regional peace. Its Article 9 reads:

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

Yet that stunning declaration by the nation that ravaged East and Southeast Asia, as part of a document forced upon Japan by the American Occupation, has been eroding since the day ink was committed to paper. Presently, Japan has a larger military budget than either France or the UK, and it continues to grow. Japan now openly admits its intention to militarily engage in the defense—whatever that means—of its littoral waters and its remote islands, most of which China claims. These Japanese-controlled islets in the East China Sea are called the Senkakus in Japanese and the Diaoyu in Chinese. But Tokyo is also quite open about its goal to become a major player in the East and South China seas, as well as the rest of the Western Pacific.  This apparently has the blessing of the Pentagon.

Following his April 2021 meeting in Washington with President Joe Biden, new Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said “that he received a “strong” message from the U.S. president of the “U.S. commitment to defending” the Senkakus. The statement lacked specifics, probably because the United States doesn’t quite know what such a defense would look like.

Currently, Japan has 150,000 active ground forces, including 50,000 in the Maritime SDF (as well as 150 ships and 350 aircraft) and 50,000 air force personnel. That’s more military personnel that either Britain or France. In addition, November’s extra appropriation goes to purchasing American surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems and other high-tech apparatus as well as more prosaic maritime patrol aircraft, naval mines, torpedoes, and other hardware. All of which goes toward countering North Korea’s missile-threatening misbehavior and China’s encroachment on Japan’s mostly uninhabited western Pacific islands.

However, budget numbers don’t necessarily reveal a military’s effectiveness. The trouble is, the JDF has relied mainly on Japanese equipment, and that equipment is both outdated and expensive. For instance, the tanks displayed at a much-ballyhooed Hokkaido set of public maneuvers recently were 30 years old. This not only puts the JDF at a battlefield disadvantage, but it cuts into Japan’s arms sales worldwide. According to defense expert Heigo Sato, speaking to the AP: “The problem is, Japan’s defense products are not first grade. Nobody is interested in buying second- or third-grade products at higher prices.”

Moreover, Japan is also hampered by its sub-optimal relationship with its nominal anti-China ally, South Korea. The Koreans are perennially seething over Japan’s failure to adequately make amends for its wartime treatment of its then-colony, with the Japanese saying in one form or another, “Get over it.”

On the other side, China has a much larger army and probably the world’s largest navy. But a huge defense budget alone is not a reliable measure of power, according to Richard Samuels, director of MIT’s Japan Program and of its Center for International Studies. Said Samuels, “Japan is unlikely to be ever be able to deter China on its own (short of nuclear breakout), and is therefore being diligent in hugging the US and cultivating relations with other countries in the region—and, you will have noticed, in Europe as well.”

And then there’s the pesky matter of Japan’s Peace Constitution which, while often creatively interpreted, still remains in effect. In short, although the Japanese right wing is all for reclaiming an aggressive military, it’s not at all clear that the general population will want to follow. Sabine Frühstück, chair in Japanese Cultural Studies at University of California in Santa Barbara, raised that point: “No matter who you speak to, I’d ask whether they believe that Japan’s young men and women would be willing to go to war should there be a conflict once it becomes a reality.” Especially over a few desolate rocks on the maritime border of Japan and China.

It’s not just a question of will. There’s also the matter of a declining population. In 2020, according to the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College:  “The lack of manpower imposes a structural constraint on Japan’s ability to expand its military, even if resources were available for a major buildup. Personnel levels for the SDF have stayed stagnant since the end of the Cold War. More worrisome, the SDF has struggled to fill its ranks.”

I’m not taking bets on whether the Japanese are willing to risk their still-prosperous and well-ordered civilization over the remnants of their once vast Pacific empire—even with the United States and the one-boat German Navy at their side.

Apparently, Tokyo is willing to hedge its bets. On December 28, The Japan Times wrote: “Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said Monday that he agreed with his Chinese counterpart Wei Fenghe on opening up a hotline between their officials amid tensions over disputed islets in the East China Sea.”

But neither China nor Japan appeared willing to concede any territorial claims.

Is Kazakhstan Russia’s next Ukraine?

James M. Dorsey

kazakhstan russia

With Russian troops massing on Ukraine’s borders, it’s not only Ukrainians who worry about what President Vladimir Putin may have in store for them. It’s Kazakhs too.

For now, Kazakhs don’t have to be immediately concerned about Russian troop movements. What unsettles them is years of Russian rhetoric, spearheaded by Mr. Putin’s repeated comments, stressing the ideological rather than the security aspect of the build-up against Ukraine and verbal assaults on Kazakhstan.

In his annual news conference, Mr. Putin used an unrelated question posed by Kazakhstan TV last month to remind his audience that “Kazakhstan is a Russian-speaking country in the full sense of the word.”

Mr. Putin’s reference to Russian-speaking was in response to some Kazakh activists pushing for Russian inherited from Soviet days to take second place to Kazakh as the country’s primary language.

Russian nationalists have responded vehemently to any suggestion to change the status of Russian in the Central Asian republic.

“Unfortunately, in Asia, only the language of power is well understood. (Russia) does not have to demonstrate its power, but it has to show its ability to apply it. The weak are not respected. As Alexander III said, Russia’s allies are its army and navy; unfortunately, we have no other natural allies,” said Alexander Boroday, a former separatist leader in Ukraine’s Donetsk-turned-member of the Russian parliament.

Mr. Boroday’s remarks were part of an evolving war of words. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov charged that xenophobia had sparked several attacks on Russian speakers in Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan shares a 6,846-kilometre-long border with Russia, the world’s second-longest frontier. The country hosts a Russian minority that accounts for 20 percent of the population. Ethnic Russians carry their empathy for the motherland on their sleeves.

Dariga Nazabayeva, a member of the Kazakh parliament and daughter of former president Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has a close relationship with Mr. Putin, shot back that “cases of xenophobia sometimes occur in Russia too.”

Mr. Putin demonstrated his friendship with Mr. Nazarbayev when he sent doctors to treat the former Kazakh leader after being infected by Covid-19.

Mr. Boroday’s was the latest comment in recent years by far-right, ultra-nationalist ideologues calling alternatively for the return of Russian rule to Central Asia and the carving up of Kazakhstan. The comments constitute the background music to Mr. Putin’s statements.

“One can label calling ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan a Diaspora as a political mistake for these are our lands which have been temporarily torn away from Russia,” said Pavel Shperov, a former ultra-nationalist member of the Russian parliament while he was still a deputy. “Borders are not eternal. We will return to the borders of the Russian state,” he added.

An informal poll in Ridder, a predominantly ethnic Russian coal-mining town on eastern Kazakhstan’s border with Russia, suggested several years ago that up to three-quarters of the city’s mostly ethnic Russian population favoured becoming part of Russia.

Mr. Putin first sent a chill down Kazakh spines seven years ago when a student in a news conference asked him nine months after the annexation of Crimea whether Kazakhstan risked a fate similar to that of Ukraine.

Echoing a widespread perception among ethnic Russians that Russia had civilized central Asia’s nomadic steppes, Mr. Putin noted that then-president Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s Soviet-era Communist party boss, had “performed a unique feat: he has created a state on a territory where there has never been a state. The Kazakhs never had a state of their own, and he created it.”

Mr. Putin went on to say that Kazakh membership of the five-nation, post-Soviet Eurasian Economic Union “helps them stay within the so-called ‘greater Russian world,’ which is part of world civilisation.”

By invoking the notion of a Russian World, an updated version of a concept embraced by ancient sources who saw the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine worlds as spaces not defined by borders but by cultural and economic influence, Mr. Putin articulated his view of Russia as a civilizational rather than a national state.

Mr. Putin first embraced the concept telling a Russian Diaspora conference in 2001 that “the notion of the Russian World extends far from Russia’s geographical borders and ever far from the borders of Russian ethnicity.”

Kazakh leaders have walked a fine line when responding to Mr. Putin and his far-right nationalist choir. In an article, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev called for an investigation into who was responsible for the famine in the early 1930s sparked by forced Soviet collectivization and settlement of nomads. Up to a third of the Kazakh population died in the famine.

Mr. Tokayev’s response was in line with his predecessor, Mr. Nazarbayev, when he reacted to Mr. Putin’s dismissal of Kazakh history.

Mr. Nazarbayev was quick to announce plans to celebrate the 550th anniversary of the Kazakh Khanate that dates back to 1465. “Our state did not arise from scratch…The statehood of the Kazakhs dates to those times,” Mr. Nazarbayev said. “It may not have been a state in the modern understanding of this term, in the current borders. … (But) it is important that the foundation was laid then, and we are the people continuing the great deeds of our ancestors.”

The former president drove the point home two months later, declaring at celebrations of Kazakh Independence Day that “independence was hard-won by many generations of our ancestors, who defended our sacred land with blood and sweat. Independence is the steadfast resolution of each citizen to defend Kazakhstan, their own home, and the motherland to the last drop of blood, as our heroic ancestors have bequeathed us.”

Some analysts suggest that 81-year-old Mr. Nazarbayev may be the last barricade blocking a Russian-Kazakh confrontation.

Noting that Russians as a percentage of the Kazakh population were diminishing, independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta pointed out that “Russia understands this but is not in the mood to easily concede to its former colony the right to live as citizens in the country they want.”

Novaya Gazeta’s editor, Dmitry Muratov, was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize with Filipina journalist Maria Ressa.

The newspaper quoted Kazakh scholar Dosym Satpayev describing the Russian-Kazakh relationship as that of a “husband and wife before a divorce. They are still trying to live together, but black cats are already circling. In the future, someone will probably want to start the divorce process, possibly peacefully or maybe confrontationally.”

Johnson declares, “We can find a way to live with this virus” as UK reports one-day record 218,000 COVID infections

Robert Stevens

Britain passed the horrific milestone of 200,000 COVID cases in a single day Thursday, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced in a Downing Street press conference that he would do nothing to combat the pandemic.

No further restrictions will be imposed to prevent the spread of the virus, he said. On the contrary, “We have a chance to ride out this Omicron wave without shutting down our country once again. We can keep our schools and our businesses open and we can find a way to live with this virus.”

The almost 220,000 cases (218,724) were up more than 60,000 on the previous day. Due to the unhindered circulation of the Omicron variant, over 1.2 million have been infected in Britain in just the last seven days—an increase of 60 percent week-on-week.

Britain is second globally only to the United States (3,264,875) in the number of officially recorded infections over the last week. However, the US population is five times as large. The UK’s 17,751 cases per million over the last seven days is almost double that of the US, with 9,777 per million.

People queuing this week outside a COVID test centre in east London (Credit: WSWS Media)

Fully 20 percent of Britain’s population have been infected with a disease which has killed over 173,000 people. The 909 people who have died in the last seven days was up by 51.8 percent on the previous week.

Even Johnson’s number-one yes man, Chief Medical Office Sir Chris Whitty, felt obliged to point out, “The idea that this is a mild disease as opposed to less likely to be hospitalised I think is easily demonstrated to be incorrect.”

While 200,000 plus cases is the new daily benchmark, this is likely only the tip of the iceberg as the UK’s track-and-trace system is in chaos. Statistician Sir David Spiegelhalter, a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), told BBC Radio on New Year’s Eve, “We should take (daily case data) with a pinch of salt because we don’t actually count reinfections… and testing is limited—people are finding it more difficult to find tests. Normally the number of cases are around half the number of infections, so we could be talking about half a million new infections per day.”

According to new data, it is estimated that 15 percent of all new Omicron infections are reinfections, which are not recorded in the official statistics.

The surge is bringing the under-resourced and understaffed National Health Service (NHS) to its knees. Nearly one in 10 NHS staff were off sick over the New Year, with 50,000 at home either sick with COVID or self-isolating. This is as 14,126 people were in hospital with COVID on December 31, up 5,600 on the previous week. Thousands more are likely to have been admitted since then.

On Tuesday, another two NHS Trusts, Morecambe Bay and Blackpool teaching hospitals, which provide services for hundreds of thousands of people, joined at least six others who have declared “critical incidents” in the last few days. A Morecambe Bay Trust internal memo spoke of “relentless and sustained pressure” caused by “unprecedented staff absences” that would see operations and appointments cancelled and staff redeployed, reported the Guardian.

With public sector managers told to prepare for a scenario in which up to 25 percent of the 5.6 million-strong public sector workforce are at home isolating, Johnson offered only to “prioritise” just 100,000 “key workers” who will take daily lateral flow tests to catch infections earlier, but not until January 10.

The government will officially review its Plan B measures today, but the Downing Street press conference was organised to reassure the corporations that nothing would change. As Johnson said in the press briefing, “Lockdowns are not cost-free.”

Everyone in ruling circles, including the Labour Party and trade unions who endorse these murderous policies, is singing from the same sheet.

A Financial Times editorial Tuesday spelled out, “The world must learn to live with Covid this year”.

It declared, “Whatever slim chance we might have had at the beginning of 2020 to eliminate Covid-19 has long gone. Efforts to control the pandemic have been justified so far in the context of a global health emergency but they cannot continue indefinitely.”

The Daily Telegraph , which functions as the Conservative government’s house organ, congratulated Johnson in its New Year’s Day editorial for his refusal to implement any restrictions to stop the spread of the disease:

“One thing is clear: the country cannot be trapped for ever in a damaging cycle of repeated lockdowns, in which it is considered legitimate for governments to shut down society and the economy whenever they or their scientific advisers consider it to be necessary. As many have been arguing since early 2020, at some point we will have to find an accommodation with the virus and learn to live with its effects.”

The Guardian employed the services in an op-ed of Dr. Raghib Ali, a clinical epidemiologist who wrote, “Sadly Covid is not going away permanently, but we can be optimistic that 2022 will be the year the pandemic ends and it becomes an endemic disease here and in most countries thanks to the very high levels of population immunity we now have—through a combination of vaccination and natural infection.” He concluded, “there is a realistic prospect that 2022 will be the year we can begin to live with the virus—and without the fear of both Covid and lockdowns that has haunted us for the past two years.”

In its article, the FT advised that booster jabs be abandoned as “we cannot expect to keep jabbing people every four to six months for very long in the face of new variants. We will have to rely on the immunity provided by annual inoculations… and by repeated exposure to what will sooner or later become an endemic infection.”

Within a day, Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), told the Telegraph that he did not presently support a further, fourth, booster shot for the entire population. “It depends if your goal is to stop all infections… But that is wrong. The goal is to prevent severe disease and protect health systems around the world.”

“We can’t vaccinate the planet every four to six months. It’s not sustainable or affordable,” he blurted out.

No measures that in any way hinders the profit accumulation of big business can be tolerated by the ruling elite. Any mitigation, no matter how minor and ineffectual, must be done away with in the pursuit of a policy of endemic COVID.

This week, as millions of schoolchildren and hundreds of thousands of staff return to classrooms, the most right-wing sections of the Tory Party are railing against the “tyranny” of wearing masks in corridors and classrooms and calling for the slashing of the period of self-isolation.

The government has already reduced the isolation period from 10 to seven days for those with COVID, if they test negative on a lateral flow on day six and seven. Robert Halfon, the Tory chairman of the education select committee, said this week, “The most important priority the Government should have is to keep children in school… If that means reducing the quarantine period from seven days to five days so more teachers can be in school, it’s absolutely something they should consider. And the Government should seriously consider applying this to children so they can get back to learning again.”

Tory MP Miriam Cates called for the “ridiculous” mass testing of 12–15-year-old children as they return to class to be abandoned, as it “totally lacks common sense”.

Omicron is hospitalising more children than at any previous stage in the pandemic. On Tuesday, SafeEdforAll (Safe Education for All) group member @TigressEllie posted data showing that an additional 114 children were admitted to hospital overnight. The majority (75) of these aged were aged 0-5 and therefore totally unvaccinated. This takes total child COVID hospital admissions to 14,115.

German government looks to shorten quarantine time despite Omicron and rising infections

Tamino Dreisam

Although the number of coronavirus tests over the holidays was significantly lower, and health departments only reported a fraction of cases to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the 7-day incidence level rose again in the last six days. On Tuesday, it officially stood at 239.9 per 100,000 inhabitants. The RKI reported 30,561 new infections and 356 additional deaths.

In fact, the figures are many times higher. Before the beginning of the new year, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (Social Democratic Party, SPD) explained that the real data is “probably two to three times higher [than] the incidence rates we are recording currently.” With a value between 460 and 700, the incidence level is thus already far above the previous peak value of the “fourth wave.”

In addition, there is the massive spread of the even more infectious Omicron variant. Since 15 November, the RKI has officially recorded over 30,000 infections of this variant. On Monday alone, 3,524 more people were infected with Omicron, an increase of 13 percent over the previous day. Nationwide, the variant already accounts for almost one-fifth of infections. However, due to the low genetic sequencing rate in Germany, the number of unreported cases is much higher.

A look at the pandemic in neighbouring European countries and internationally shows the explosive nature of the Omicron wave. In Denmark, one of the first countries to be hit by Omicron, the 7-day incidence level is currently 2,505. In France, where Omicron has become the predominant variant in recent days, the incidence level is 1,665.

Crowded underground in Berlin on November 12 (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

In the UK, the numbers are also exploding, reaching new highs every day. On Friday alone, there were 190,000 cases in one day. Hospital admissions are at their highest levels since January. In the US, there is currently an almost vertical rise in the number of cases: Within 24 hours, there were 440,000 new infections—more than twice as many as at the peak of the pandemic so far.

In Germany, the situation in hospitals is already dire. The adjusted hospitalisation rate is about seven, which corresponds to 5,000 to 6,000 hospitalisations per week.

The number of patients receiving intensive care continues to exceed 4,000. This threatens to increase significantly with the Omicron variant and to rupture hospital capacities. The RKI estimates the risk to the health of all those not triple-vaccinated as “high” to “very high.” This currently applies to over 60 percent of the population.

The ruling class knows what a disaster the spread of Omicron will bring. A “very high burden of disease from Omicron is to be expected,” according to the latest paper from the Conference of State Prime Ministers. The “sharply rising numbers of infections and their consequences” could thereby “reach a level that would restrict the functioning of critical infrastructure (KRITIS, including hospitals, police, fire brigades, emergency services, telecommunications, electricity and water supply and the corresponding logistics).”

In its first statement, the federal government’s expert council on COVID-19 warned that the high incidence of infection meant “a relevant part of the population will be simultaneously ill and/or in quarantine.”

Instead of taking the necessary measures to protect the health and lives of hundreds of thousands, the ruling class is responding with regulations that do everything to keep workers at work, enabling the maximising of profits.

For example, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (Social Democrats) is planning to shorten the quarantine period. At the next federal-state meeting on Friday there will “definitely be new decisions, because we have to think about how to change the quarantine regulation,” Lauterbach explained in an interview with broadcaster RTL/ntv on Sunday evening.

Last week, the US government reduced the quarantine period from 10 to only five days. On Sunday, France followed suit and reduced quarantine for fully vaccinated infected persons to seven days and, for those with a negative rapid test, down to even five. For fully vaccinated contacts, quarantine will be waived completely.

The measures will further fuel the already massive spread of Omicron. Since the beginning of the pandemic, it has been known that infected people can transmit the virus even if they display no symptoms.

Serious scientists castigate the measures. Berlin microbiologist and global health expert Timo Ulrichs told rbb-Inforadio he was “looking with concern” at the government parties’ plans to shorten the quarantine period. “If we end quarantine too early, people may still be contagious and pass on the virus in the final phase—and maybe we shouldn’t do that,” he said.

Federal and state governments are pursuing a deliberate policy of mass infection. After the Christmas holidays, schools are starting back with in-person teaching with full class sizes. This week, pupils in Berlin, Brandenburg, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland, Saxony and Thuringia must return to school. The remaining federal states of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Bremen, Hesse, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony-Anhalt and Schleswig-Holstein will follow next week.

“We must do everything we can to keep schools open,” wrote Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger (Liberal Democratic Party, FDP) on Twitter. Face-to-face teaching was “a question of equal opportunities,” and she cynically wished all pupils, parents and teachers a “good and safe start.” Indeed, returning to overcrowded classrooms without air filters is a recipe for mass infection. This is not about “equal opportunities” but about keeping children in schools so that their parents can be forced to work.

A look at the stock markets shows in whose interest such policies are being implemented. At over 16,000 points, Germany’s DAX stock index is approaching a new all-time high in the new year. While the majority of the population faces income losses and layoffs and has had to risk life and health at work, the top 10 percent continue to enrich themselves from the pandemic and mass deaths.

Apple market valuation touches $3 trillion

Nick Beams

A measure of the extent to which Wall Street has benefited from the ultra-cheap money poured into the financial system by the US Fed and other major central banks since the start of the pandemic is provided by Apple.

On Monday, the first day of trading for 2022, Apple shares rose to $182.88 at one point in the afternoon giving it a market capitalization of $3 trillion—the first time any company has reached that level.

The share price then fell back slightly before the close and then dropped again yesterday. But it is considered to be only a matter of time before it finishes a trading day at the $3 trillion level. According to Bloomberg, of the 45 analysts who cover Apple, some 35 rate it a buy.

CEO Tim Cook at the Apple retail store in downtown Los Angeles Thursday, June 24, 2021. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

The rise and rise in the Apple share price has been truly extraordinary. Since the lows recorded in March 2020, when Wall Street fell off a cliff because of fears over the pandemic and the wildcat walkouts and strikes by workers demanding safety measures, its share price has tripled, adding about $2 trillion in market capitalization.

The total divorce of its value from the underlying real economy can be seen in the fact that its market capitalization is now bigger than the gross domestic product of most countries, including the UK, Canada and Australia. At $3 trillion, it is more than one eighth the size of US GDP of around $22.94 trillion.

The result, a product of speculation, is even something of a shock for writers in the financial press, who so often function as market boosters. As the Wall Street Journal noted, Apple is now “worth $1 trillion more than it was nine months ago, yet the tech giant’s prospects haven’t changed that much in that time.”

The Financial Times also published data pointing to Apple’s meteoric rise. In August 2018 it became a $1 trillion company and just two years later became the first company to be valued at $2 trillion. At the end of October, it lost the title of the world’s most valuable company to Microsoft but then quickly regained it by adding half a trillion dollars to its market value since November 15—less than two months ago.

In the past five years, Apple’s stock price has increased by 500 percent, well ahead of the benchmark S&P 500 index which has increased by around 105 percent in that time. While the company makes products and introduces technological innovations that consumers and corporations find useful, this has little to with the rise in its stock price.

Apple is at the centre of a speculative boom that started in response to bailout of the markets by the US Fed in the wake of the 2008 crisis under its quantitative easing program and which deepened in response to the market crash of March 2020 when the Fed doubled its holdings of financial assets to more than $8 trillion, virtually overnight.

One of the main ways in which stock prices have been boosted is through share buybacks. According to research by economist William O. Lazonick, between 2010 and 2019 spending by all publicly traded companies on stock buybacks totalled $6.3 trillion. When the payment of dividends is taken into account 100 percent of all corporate profits have gone into payments to shareholders.

Up until 1982 share buybacks were illegal as they were considered to be market manipulation. Today they are regarded as core financial activity.

Apple has been one of the most aggressive share purchasers, spending $444 billion on share buybacks from October 2012 to June 2021, equivalent to 87 percent of its net income over that period. An additional $114 billion has been paid out as dividends over the same period, equivalent to 22 percent of net income. The maintenance of interest rates at historically low levels by the Fed has meant that in Apple’s case it has used borrowed money to finance share buybacks to boost its stock price.

The Apple surge, however, is only the most egregious expression of the speculative mania that has developed since the start of the pandemic. As the FT noted in an article on “prospering in the pandemic” two years after the emergence of COVID-19, a “jarring disconnect has emerged between the human toll and the record valuations of many large companies.”

There is, of course, a stark contrast between the death and illness confronting millions and the increasing fortunes of the market giants. But rather than a disconnect there is a direct link between the two phenomena. The enormous sums of money pumped into the markets by the Fed and other central banks in response to the pandemic has provided the basis for the orgy of speculation, of which the main beneficiaries have been Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google and Tesla.

Apple increased its market value by 123 percent in 2021, Microsoft by 110 percent, to record a market value of $2.5 trillion and Alphabet increased its market value by 108 percent to reach a market value of $1.9 trillion by the end of last year. Amazon recorded an 85 percent increase in market value, sending its capitalization to $1.7 trillion.

The biggest rise of all was by Tesla. It recorded a 1311 percent increase in market value to send its total capitalization to $1.1 trillion. As a recent Wall Street Journal Article noted, Tesla gained almost $200 billion in market value within four days in late December—more than the equivalent of the total market capitalization of Ford and General Motors combined.

This orgy of speculation, literally feeding off death, is the driving force behind the decisions of the Biden administration, replicated by governments around the world, to abandon any remaining public health measures, to ensure that the flow of profits to the corporations is maintained and the pandemic profiteers can continue their plunder.

Infections and hospitalizations skyrocket as Canadian governments facilitate rampant Omicron spread

Roger Jordan

Canada’s federal government reported 322,362 active COVID-19 cases across the country as of January 4, up by around 100,000 in just four days. Underscoring the rapidity with which the Omicron variant is spreading, the current number of infected people amounts to close to 15 percent of the 2.3 million positive cases detected since the pandemic began two years ago.

This catastrophic situation, which is already producing a dramatic rise in hospitalizations and deaths, is the product of the criminal policies pursued by the ruling elite. The federal and provincial governments have openly embraced the fascistic policy of “herd immunity”—i.e., the claim that the pandemic can be ended by allowing enough people to get infected and build up collective immunity. Governments have cut quarantine periods to ensure big business has a ready supply of workers and restricted COVID-19 testing to conceal the scale of mass infection from the public.

In Ontario, Health Minister Christine Elliott reported Tuesday that 1,290 people are currently receiving hospital care for COVID-19, up by a staggering 163 percent compared to the 491 receiving treatment a week ago. Of these, 266 patients are currently in intensive care, up from 187 a week earlier.

Clinical staff care for a patient with coronavirus in the intensive care unit at the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, England, May 5, 2020 (Credit: Neil Hall Pool via AP)

The Ontario Science Advisory Table estimates that only one in five infections is being detected by the authorities. Based on Elliott’s announcement of 11,352 new infections yesterday, that would mean that the true figure of daily infections is close to 60,000 in Ontario alone. At a press conference Monday, Premier Doug Ford declared that Ontario’s hospitals could be left short by “thousands” of beds in a matter of weeks. Under pressure from widespread public outrage over his government’s mishandling of the pandemic and the mounting Omicron catastrophe, Ford was compelled to announce a two-week delay to the reopening of schools for in-person learning. Delays of at least a week to school reopenings have also been announced in British Columbia, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, and Quebec.

Omicron is taking a particularly devastating toll on children. On Christmas Day, 12 children aged 10 or under were admitted to hospital in Quebec, a single-day record since the beginning of the pandemic. As of early January, 149 children aged nine or under had been admitted to hospital since the beginning of Quebec’s fourth wave of infections. This includes a two-month-old baby who died of COVID-19 at Montreal’s Sainte-Justine hospital on December 16.

Even though the Omicron wave is only in its early stages, hospitals are already reporting being overwhelmed by the rapid increase in patients. William Osler Health System, which oversees Brampton Civic and Etobicoke General hospitals in the Greater Toronto Area, declared a code orange yesterday for the first time during the pandemic. Code orange is declared when demand for patient care outstrips a hospital’s capacity.

In Quebec, more than 440 staff members at a hospital in Laval have been infected with COVID-19, with another 400 isolating due to possible exposure. The hospital will cut medical appointments and operating room activities by half as of today.

This unfolding health care catastrophe is not primarily the product of the extremely infectious Omicron variant, but the ruling elite’s criminal response to its emergence. A little over three months ago, the Trudeau Liberal government returned to office after September’s federal election proclaiming that the pandemic was entering its “end game.” Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced the gutting of what little remained of financial support for workers, claiming that the provision of a mere C$300 per week to workers in a lockdown was the “final pivot” of the government’s pandemic response. Freeland insisted that the benefit would only be paid to workers facing 14 days of consecutive lockdown ordered by an employer or provincial government, before subsequently relenting and allowing workers who lost their jobs due to the imposition of capacity limits to access the benefit.

In October, Ford declared his “reopening” roadmap for Ontario, which included the elimination of all public health measures, including mask wearing, by March 2022.

Following the designation by the World Health Organization of Omicron as a variant of concern in late November, Trudeau waited almost three weeks before making a public statement to the population on his government’s response. No serious measures were taken to contain the more infectious variant, which can evade the immunity provided by vaccines. The let-it-rip strategy was endorsed by all parliamentary parties, including the Conservatives, New Democrats, and Bloc Quebecois.

After voting for an extension to the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS), a slush fund for corporations that has seen the government pay them almost C$100 billion since the pandemic began, and to cut financial support to workers to just C$300 per week, the House of Commons voted unanimously to take a six-week Christmas break.

A report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released Tuesday revealed that the CEWS helped Canada’s top 100 CEOs reach one of their best years for annual compensation in 2020, with average earnings of C$10.9 million. Thirty-five of the companies, or more than one third, examined in the study received payments under the wage subsidy scheme.

The Liberal government’s indifference to Omicron’s spread has encouraged the far-right advocates of “herd immunity” to double down on their murderous strategy. Both Ontario and Quebec have cut the isolation period from ten to five days, following a decision by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC’s move has no basis whatsoever in public health, but was rather a direct response to the pleas of airline executives to help guarantee their bumper profits during the holiday season amid mass staff absences.

Meanwhile, Ontario has restricted PCR testing to those individuals deemed “high risk,” meaning that the true extent of virus transmission is unknown.

The callous indifference to human life that pervades governments and their public health officials across Canada was summed up in comments by British Columbia’s provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry. A reviled figure due to her refusal to acknowledge that COVID-19 is transmitted through fine aerosols which linger in the air, Henry enthused that BC’s highest numbers of daily infections since the pandemic began was a positive development, a “new game” paving the way to an endemic state. “The way the virus is changing with Omicron, that is leading us to that place sooner,” she claimed. “The type of illness it’s causing, with most of us being protected through vaccination, means that we are going to get to that place.”

This rehash of the constant propaganda from the corporate-controlled media about Omicron being a “friendly mutant” producing “mild” symptoms is nothing short of sociopathic. It contemptuously dismisses the experience of the virus’s deadly evolution to date, which has been worsened due to the pursuit of the policy of mass infection. The emergence of the more infectious Omicron was made possible because ruling elites internationally gave the Delta variant free rein to spread. Henry’s prescriptions will produce a similar catastrophe by encouraging the emergence of potentially more-infectious and more-virulent strains.

The “herd immunity” advocates could not care less for the more than 30,300 Canadians who have already lost their lives, and thousands more who will follow in the months to come if governments have their way. They are likewise indifferent to the plight of hundreds of thousands crippled by Long COVID. According to Alberta Health Services, some 68,200 people in the province have contracted or will develop Long COVID. Given that Alberta’s 4 million inhabitants account for just over 10 percent of the Canadian population, it is likely that hundreds of thousands of people across the country suffer from Long COVID.

“My COVID just didn’t go away,” Lisa Lauzon, a long-distance runner who contracted COVID-19 in April 2021, told CTV News. “I had to relearn how to breathe. One of the biggest learning curves is accepting being able to work within your energy envelope.”