Global life expectancy drops two years since the start of the pandemic

Evan Blake & Benjamin Mateus

A major study published in March in the journal Population and Development Review estimates that global life expectancy declined by roughly 0.92 years in 2020 and another 0.72 years in 2021. These are the first declines in global life expectancy since the United Nations began tracking this figure in 1950 and the worst since World War II killed an estimated more than 70 million people.

The study, written by sociologist Dr. Patrick Heuveline of the University of California, Los Angeles, is highly significant in that it is the first to estimate global life expectancy declines from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report notes, “Annual declines in life expectancy … appear to have exceeded two years at some point before the end of 2021 in at least 50 countries. Since 1950, annual declines of that magnitude had only been observed on rare occasions, such as Cambodia in the 1970s, Rwanda in the 1990s, and possibly some sub-Saharan African nations at the peak of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) pandemic.”

Prior to 2020, there had been an uninterrupted 69-year rise in life expectancy since the United Nations began calculating this figure, from 1950 when life expectancy was 45.7 years until 2019 when it had reached 72.6 years, with an average of 0.39 years of life added annually.

Global life expectancy, 2010–2021 (both sexes, in years). SOURCE: 2010–2019, United Nations (2019); 2010–2021, author's calculations (see the Appendix for details)

The report notes, “The largest annual gains, more than 0.7 year from 1964 to 1968, reflect the success of global public health campaigns, in particular childhood vaccination programs.” Additional public health initiatives adopted in many countries at the time included the filtering and chlorinating of water supplies, the development of sanitation infrastructure, swamp drainage, milk pasteurization and mass vaccination campaigns, among many other scientific achievements.

Over the last two decades, this progressive expansion of life expectancy came under increasing attack, as the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 and the eruption of American imperialism initiated three decades of unrelenting social counterrevolution on a world scale. The report notes that in the years preceding the pandemic, “annual gains in global life expectancy … declined below their 1950–2019 average of 0.39 years, dipping below 0.3 years from 2015 to 2018 and below 0.2 years in 2019.”

The pandemic has rapidly accelerated this retrogression and has proven to be one of the deadliest pathogens to have ever ravaged human civilization. The comparison of the pandemic to world wars is no hyperbole. According to a study published in The Lancet, global excess deaths in the last two years stood at 18.2 million by the end of 2021, nearly equivalent to all the deaths during World War I.

Unlike previous pandemics, every aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic was both foreseeable and preventable, as documented by dozens of scholarly papers, books and even films released just since the start of the 21st century. At every step of the way, the financial oligarchy and its political representatives ensured that profits were prioritized over human lives and well-being.

To put it succinctly, the decline in life expectancy is a concrete health measure of the policies of social murder, whose monetary values can be appraised by the coinciding rise in stock market indices.

In the United States and many other countries, sections of the ruling elites have long advocated lowering life expectancy. They welcomed the pandemic as a positive good to cull the elderly and infirm, reduce pension obligations and cut social services.

Lexie, 6, left, Charlie, 8, right, and their mom wait in an exam room before Charlie has an MRI during a long day of testing at Children's National Hospital, in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2022. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

At a national level, eight countries experienced substantial declines in life expectancy of more than four years over the last two years. These include five countries in Latin America—Peru (5.6 years), Guatemala (4.8), Paraguay (4.7), Bolivia (4.1) and Mexico (4.0)—and three in Europe, including Russia (4.3), Bulgaria (4.1) and North Macedonia (4.1).

The study estimates that in 53 countries, including the United States, life expectancy declined by over two years during the worst 12-month period of the pandemic. Numerous other countries experienced even worse 12-month periods of declining life expectancy, including Tunisia (3.4 years), South Africa (3.1), Egypt (2.3), Bosnia and Herzegovina (4.0), North Macedonia (4.0), the Philippines (3.0), India (2.6), Kazakhstan (3.2), Lebanon (3.4) and more. However, multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific region where elimination strategies were employed, including China with a population of 1.4 billion people, life expectancy climbed.

To appreciate the full impact of the study’s findings, it is worth noting that in 2019 the United Nations anticipated that global life expectancy would rise by 0.18 years in 2020. The implication is that had the ruling elites taken the necessary measures to eliminate COVID-19 in January-March 2020, the world’s population would have expected a life span two years higher than now exists. Instead, global life expectancy has dropped to below 2013 levels, with one decade of gains in life expectancy vanishing for all of mankind.

Alongside the massive loss of life, there has also been a tremendous loss of livelihood. A recent study conducted by researchers from the University of Michigan estimated that roughly 43 percent of reported infections worldwide have led to Long COVID, with more than 100 million people likely experiencing various symptoms which can impact nearly every organ in the body.

In a significant subset of Long COVID patients, the condition can be quite debilitating and lead to the inability to work or care for themselves. Recent studies have associated even mild COVID-19 infections with an increase in all-cause mortality.

The report by Dr. Heuveline serves as a devastating indictment of the response of world capitalism to this global catastrophe. Expressing the silent brutality of the bourgeoisie, not a single corporate media outlet has reported on the groundbreaking study. The silence of the media and all world governments on the report underscores their culpability in the greatest social crime since World War II.

Outside of China and a handful of countries in the Asia-Pacific region which eliminated COVID-19 in early 2020, world capitalist governments refused to implement the measures necessary to stop the transmission of the virus. Instead, they pursued either the most brutal “herd immunity” strategy of mass infection or maintained a pretense of implementing limited mitigation measures, all of which were scrapped during the surge of the Omicron BA.1 subvariant.

These policies caused the evolution of ever more infectious and vaccine-resistant variants, with the Omicron BA.2 subvariant the most dangerous so far. China is now the only major country still fighting for a Zero-COVID strategy and is presently battling its worst outbreak since the start of the pandemic due to the BA.2 variant, with a record of over 20,000 infections reported on Tuesday.

The Western media now brays for China to abandon Zero-COVID, knowing full well that this could cause millions of deaths throughout the densely populated country. At the same time, they are cheerleading the US-NATO escalation of the drive to war with Russia which threatens to unleash a nuclear World War III.

Both the response to the pandemic and the escalating drive to war express the criminality and bankruptcy of the capitalist system, which is hurtling mankind toward disaster. The same criminal financial oligarchy that has gorged itself and amassed trillions of dollars since the start of the pandemic now strives for an imperialist carve-up of Russia, China and the entire Eurasian landmass to directly exploit the region’s vast resources and working class population.

Just before the start of the Omicron surge, the World Socialist Web Site initiated the Global Workers’ Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic, which is gathering testimony from workers, scientists and anti-COVID activists throughout the world to uncover and document the disastrous response to the pandemic. These efforts must be expanded in every country and the findings popularized within the working class.

Above all, it is vitally necessary to build a mass movement rooted in the international working class fighting intransigently against war and for a strategy to eliminate COVID-19 throughout the world.

Only the universal deployment of every public health measure on a world scale, including paid lockdowns, mass testing, contact tracing, the isolation of infected patients and quarantining of exposed people, the globally coordinated provision of vaccines and treatments, the provision and mandating of high quality N95 or better masks, and more, can stop the pandemic and renew the growth of global life expectancy.

Minority Africa Fellowship 2022

Application Deadline:

24th April 2022.

Tell Me About Minority Africa Fellowship:

The Minority Africa Fellowship, a project by Minority Africa — a digital publication using data-driven multimedia journalism to tell African minority stories — targets journalists and storytellers from minority groups across Africa providing them with the platform, skill, and mentorship to report stories from and about their communities.

Through an intensive six-month paid program, fellows will polish their existing reporting abilities both from a skill and thematic perspective but will also be trained on the intersecting areas and groups of focus for the fellowship. This means that fellows are taught and leave the fellowship knowing how to cover groups outside of the immediate communities they belong to.

These groups include women, sexual, gender, ethnic, and religious minorities, persons with disabilities, migrants, asylum seekers, as well as refugees. We nonetheless acknowledge that all minorities across the continent do not fall under these broad categories and also focus on groups that exist outside of these general definitions.  

Fellows will be trained by journalists from the Minority Africa newsroom as well as a network of journalists who work for or have worked across the continent with the Associated Press, Agence France Presse, Reuters, RFI, CNN, The Guardian, Time, and began legacy media companies tackling present media problems including one praised by former US President Barack Obama.

This training program includes modules on solutions journalism, data journalism, interrogating the scope of inclusive futures within the metaverse, as NFTs and AI adoption grow, and the geopolitics of climate change among others. 

What Type of Scholarship is this?

Fellowship

Who can apply for Minority Africa Fellowship?

Fellows have to be at least 18 years of age, they have to be from and living in an African country and belong to at least one of the minority groups highlighted in the focus areas above. They can be writers, photographers, filmmakers, journalists, or a combination of all and have relevant and provable work experience in their chosen areas. 

Which Countries are Eligible?

African countries

Where will Award be Taken?

Online

How Many Fellowships will be Given?

Not specified

What is the Benefit of Minority Africa Fellowship?

Fellows will be paid a monthly allowance, receive an internet stipend, and intra-country travel related to the coverage of stories will be covered by Minority Africa.

During the fellowship, fellows will be familiarized with editorial guidelines of Minority Africa and will work and report on stories for the publication. They are paired with external mentors, work with editors in the newsroom, and are required to produce at least two stories every month. 

By the end of the program, each fellow would have published 12 stories on Minority Africa. These stories will be a blend of reported multimedia features as well as opinions and analysis. The program is entirely virtual and the first cohort runs from May to October 2022. 

How Long will the Program Last?

6 months

How to Apply for Minority Africa Fellowship:

All applications have to be submitted online and through our secure application form on this website. Applications received over email will not be considered. Applications for the first cohort open on the 1st of April 2022 and close on the 24th of April 2022.

Apply Now

Visit Award Webpage for Details

UK government axes coronavirus infection control funding in social care

Stephan Alexander

From April 1, key funding for infection control in social care settings, including free lateral flow testing (LFT) for visitors and sick pay for the precariously employed workforce has been discontinued. Free testing will be wound up a few weeks later by the devolved governments in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

The move, which comes as the BA.2 variant is producing a record wave of infections and hundreds of deaths daily, will leave relatives and friends of the elderly and clinically vulnerable shouldering considerable costs. Those wishing to take a test before visiting a care home or for keeping loved ones safe in their own homes will now have to pay for an LFT. The legal requirement for people visiting care homes to take a test has been lifted, provoking widespread concerns that the sick, disabled, and elderly will be exposed to the virus.

In this April 20, 2020, photo, nurses guide a resident at Wren Hall nursing home in the central England village of Selston. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

Nadra Ahmed, chair of the National Care Association, said, “Visitors should never have been left out of the free testing regime, as they’re coming into high-risk environments for themselves and loved ones.

“This is a community of frail, vulnerable people with complex medical conditions and we know the virus is still out there and is highly infectious within communities, and no testing is now the new normal.”

Charity and care sector leaders have condemned the end of free testing as a “tax on caring”. Observing safe testing protocols for vulnerable relatives is an additional financial burden for working-class families, under conditions of a steep rise in the cost of living estimated to plunge 1.3 million people into absolute poverty in the UK. It could cost visitors to care homes upwards of £70 per month to individually fund the previous LFT testing protocols, providing yet another pandemic profit stream for big business.

Many firms are now jumping on the gravy train, with some charging exorbitant prices for the LFT kits they sell. Office supplies company Ryman, for example, is selling packs of 20 kits for £300, or £15 for a single test which some experts say cost only “pennies” to manufacture. More reliable PCR tests, which can confirm a COVID infection, are also no longer free. Here, private companies are charging anything between £45 and £100 for a single test. Those on a minimum hourly wage of £9.50 would have to work between 5 and 10 hours to pay for one test.

The abandonment of all public health measures will further isolate the clinically vulnerable, who have already effectively been excluded from safe access to society as ever more virulent coronavirus strains have been allowed to spread uncontrolled through workplaces, schools and the wider community.

A spokesperson for the Alzheimer’s Society said, “Over the past two years, we’ve consistently heard many tragic stories from families struggling to visit their loved ones in care homes. With infection rates rising once again, the government must provide free lateral flow tests for all visitors to care homes so that families are not put in an agonising position where they are forced to ration visits, leaving people with dementia once again isolated and alone.”

Even before the impact of these measures, infection rates in those aged 70 and older are already at the highest since records began, according to the Office for National Statistics. In the week ending March 18, 2022, there were 325 Covid-related deaths in those aged 86 years or older—25 more than the previous week. The same period saw 187 Covid deaths in those aged 75 to 84, with the next highest death toll (78 deaths) recorded in individuals aged 65 to 74.

The recent Vivaldi study of 15,000 care home residents, backed by the UK government’s Health Security Agency, found that immunity against hospitalisation and death declines rapidly in older generations compared to the young in the three to seven months following a second dose of the vaccine.

Although a second booster shot (or fourth dose) for the elderly (aged 75+) and vulnerable is now available, the roll out is slow and less than half the severely clinically vulnerable have had one. It remains to be seen how well the booster will perform against the BA.2 variant and further mutations that mass infection will produce.

For the moment social care staff, National Health Service (NHS) workers and other “high risk” workforces such as prison officers, will retain access to free testing together with care home visitors who perform personal care for relatives. Testing for residents, however, will only be carried out during a suspected outbreak instead of routine weekly testing.

Testing for domiciliary carers is to be reduced to twice per week rather than daily, in line with the guidance for care homes. Those providing home care can visit upward of a dozen households in a single week. The reduction in testing will increase the risk of infection for the nearly one million people dependent on such visits in the UK.

If more evidence were needed of the Conservative government’s homicidal disregard for the lives and health of society’s most vulnerable, it is laid bare by the latest testing guidance for severely immunocompromised adults. Although they will have access to some free tests, they are instructed to test only if they become symptomatic, when it may well be too late to save them from serious health complications or death. Their family members and friends will have to pay if they want regular testing, even if they live in the same household as a vulnerable relative.

Even before these measures, the effectiveness of testing in social care settings had already been drastically undermined with the sector on its knees from the combined impact of the pandemic and decades of austerity cuts and privatisation. Staff shortages stand at well over 10 percent of the workforce (120,000 in England alone), with attrition rates as high as 30 percent due to poverty wages and intolerable working conditions across the sector.

In the face of a renewed surge of the virus, such is the staffing crisis in care that many providers are encouraging infected staff to continue working if they are asymptomatic or develop only mild symptoms. Somerset Council public health consultant Alison Bell said, “In some cases, we have no choice but to have people who are testing positive delivering care to people in Somerset. That risk is actually less than that person not receiving care.”

Besides comprehensive free testing, a raft of other essential public health protections and support programmes have been abandoned as of April 1. These include:

• Funding for sick pay for those self-isolating under the Adult Social Care Infection Control Fund has ended. The fund was introduced in May 2020, after the first deadly wave in care homes was linked partly to the absence of sick pay across the heavily privatised sector, which meant that workers could not afford to stay at home when infected.
• Limits on workforce movements between care homes have been lifted. These were set up due to high levels of transmission related to the widespread dependence of the sector on heavily exploited agency workers who work shifts piecemeal across many different care homes and hospitals over a large geographical area.
• The UK-wide compensation scheme which had provided families of NHS and social care staff who died of Covid with a miserly £60,000 bereavement payment has been closed, even though workers in the sector continue to die from workplace exposure. Ten NHS staff have died of COVID since the start of December 2021, according to official figures. Some 922 care workers died from COVID between the start of the pandemic and May 2021 in England, according to the workforce development body Skills for Care.

Tunisian president assumes dictatorial powers amid deepening social unrest

Jean Shaoul

Tunisian President Kaïs Saïed dissolved parliament last week, after more than half its members voted to repeal the draconian powers he had given himself after mounting a coup last July.

The powers included the suspension of parliament, the designation of ministers and chairing of the meetings of the council of ministers, the use of presidential decrees to pass legislation and dissolution in February of the Supreme Judicial Council that deals with judicial independence and assumption of control over the selection and promotion of judges.

Demonstrators in Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday, July 25, 2021. (AP Photo/Hedi Azouz)

Saïed’s latest move was made against a vote that while not legally binding is the most open sign yet of the bitter infighting within Tunisia’s political elite. It sets the stage for an intensification of the country’s political and economic crisis.

Last year he sacked the Islamist Ennahda Party government, suspended parliament, stripped legislators of parliamentary immunity and deployed the military to guard state buildings. This followed months of protests over police brutality, economic hardship and the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 28,000 people of the country’s 12 million population. He went on television to warn that the military would not hesitate to use force against those who opposed his coup, a clear threat to the working class.

Saïed banned dozens of judges, politicians and businessmen from traveling and put others under house arrest. He shut down the National Anti-Corruption Authority and sidelined the Independent High Authority for Elections. He appointed Najila Bouden, a professor of geophysics, to head a government and abolished the 2014 constitution. Saïed said he would hold a referendum in July this year on a new constitution to be drafted by a panel of experts—after a public online consultation process—that is widely expected to strengthen the powers of the presidency. The referendum, set for July 25, would be followed by parliamentary elections on December 17.

In the event, less than 10 percent of voters took part in the consultation, indicating the widespread hostility to the president and his policies. The two largest parties, Ennahda and the Free Constitutional Party, both also deeply unpopular, have rejected Saïed’s plans for a July referendum and called for elections to be held within the legally mandated 90 day period after the dissolution of parliament.

Kais Saïed, President of Tunisia, on 26 February 2020. (Photo by Houcemmzoughi badoo)

Following the ouster in 2011 of long-time autocrat Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who fled to Riyadh, Saïed, a former law professor and establishment figure with conservative views, entered politics, becoming president in 2019.

Saïed’s long-planned actions were the prelude to setting up a presidential dictatorship, aimed at maintaining the venal Tunisian elite’s grip on economic and political power in the face of mounting unrest among workers and young people. The major imperialist powers issued pro forma statements urging him to respect the constitution. The Tunisian General Labour Movement (UGTT), the largest union, called on him to “guarantee the constitutional legitimacy of all actions taken in these difficult times.”

In the eight months following his coup, the economic situation has worsened. The OECD’s report, Tunisia 2022, published on Monday, stated, “Tunisians are facing the worst crisis in a generation, as COVID-19 hit an economy that was already slowing down.” The pandemic had led to a severe economic contraction, particularly in the tourism and service sectors. Unemployment has risen from already high levels—particularly among Tunisia’s young population of whom more than one third are aged 15-29. Poverty is on the increase. Shortages of sugar and rice are widespread.

Public finances have collapsed, with some public sector wages paid late in recent months. This prompted the government to turn to the International Monetary Fund for a loan that would require privatising its state-run companies, slashing its public sector wage bill, imposing new taxes and increasing existing ones and taking the axe to bread subsidies under conditions of widespread food shortages. But any such loan, which would need the buy-in of the main political parties and the UGTT, is unlikely to be agreed before the summer, which may well be too late to prevent a collapse of the currency, late or non-payment of state salaries and the country’s ability to import basic state-subsidised foodstuffs.

Leader of Tunisia's Islamist Ennahda party House Speaker Rached Ghannouchi, center, arrives for questioning at the judicial police headquarters in Tunis, Tunisia, Friday, April 1, 2022. (AP Photo/Hassene Dridi)

The loan is further imperilled by Tunisia’s response to the US/NATO provoked war in Ukraine, as Saïed tries to maintain relations with Russia which Tunisia relies on for tourism and trade, without antagonising the United States and Europe, whose financial and diplomatic support are crucial to keep the economy afloat. While Tunisia voted in favour of the UN General Assembly resolution denouncing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it has refrained from publicly denouncing Russia. In welcoming the new Russian ambassador to Tunisia a few days later, Foreign Minister Othman Jerandi stressed a desire to strengthen the relationship between the two countries.

This year has seen numerous demonstrations protesting social and economic conditions, with the total number of demonstrations in the eight months since Saïed’s July coup topping those that preceded it.

Last month, 13 Tunisian and international rights groups reported on a leaked draft law that would give government authorities huge powers and discretion to interfere with the formation, funding, operation and freedom of expression of NGOs and civil society organisations, reinstating many of the restrictive regulations of the repressive Ben Ali regime. Human rights groups have warned of growing repression of journalists and activists by a president who promised to uphold rights and freedoms won in the 2011 uprising.

Turning reality on its heels, Saïed has accused the legislators of “an attempted coup” by holding an “illegal” meeting and defended his decision to dissolve parliament as a defence of the state. The justice minister has reportedly ordered an investigation of those who took part in the online session “for conspiring against state security.” Rached Ghannouchi, the parliamentary speaker of the assembly and head of the Ennahda Party, the largest with one quarter of its 217 seats, said that the Terror Crimes Investigation Unit had summoned him and at least 20 legislators from Ennahda and other parties for questioning.

Saïed could again bank on the UGTT’s support. Secretary-General Noureddine Taboubi has long called for the politicians to set aside their differences and hold a “national dialogue” before the elections, saying, “We have to get over the difference of considering what happened last 25 July as a coup or not.”

He had called for Saïed to dissolve parliament and applauded him when he did so, stating that it was a response to an effort aiming to “destabilise the country and lead it to a wave of legitimacy conflicts.” On April 1, he held talks with Saïed and agreed on the need for a “partnership” to overcome the economic crisis.

The major powers have largely remained silent, with the European Union (EU) keeping the financial taps flowing to prevent the country’s collapse. On the same day Saïed dissolved parliament, the European Commission announced it would lend Tunisia €450 million in budget support this year, following a meeting between Saïed and EU enlargement commissioner Olivér Várhelyi in Tunis.

The events of the last 11 years since the protests that toppled the Ben Ali regime have demonstrated that without the working class intervening independently of all the political parties and trade unions the ruling elite will, under the cover of a “technocrat” as in Tunisia, Lebanon and Iraq, or a military figure as in Egypt, resort to increasingly repressive means to maintain the rule of the kleptocracy.

Chinese authorities complete COVID testing for Shanghai’s population of 25 million in less than one day

Benjamin Mateus

China’s Global Times reported that Shanghai had accomplished “mission impossible” Monday—the PCR testing of all 25 million-plus people in one day. Placing this figure into context, it is 10 times higher than all the tests conducted in the United States on January 10, 2022, when Omicron was surging across the country.

City officials said that the massive first-of-its-kind public health initiative was completed ahead of schedule at around 7 p.m. Monday. The previous day a city-wide antigen testing was conducted as a prelude to the PCR testing of the population.

A medical worker collects sample swab sample from residents in a lockdown area in the Jingan district of western Shanghai, China, Monday, April 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Chen Si)

On Monday, 13,354 new COVID cases were reported, a significant jump from 9,000 on Sunday. However, these are attributed to the more robust testing that identifies all the sources of infection in China’s financial capital. Of these, only 268 were symptomatic. Overall, China’s mainland reported 16,590 cases, a single-day high during the current Omicron surge. In Jilin province, the trend of daily cases is on the decline as lockdowns continue.

The two-phased lockdown that began more than a week ago in Shanghai morphed into a city-wide lockdown last Friday when lockdown measures were extended for the east side of the city across the Huangpu River due to the rising number of confirmed COVID cases.

Throughout March, following the explosion of cases in Hong Kong, Chinese health officials documented a growing number of community transmissions throughout most provinces in China. Yet, Shanghai had resisted employing more stringent measures to minimize the impact of the pandemic on the economy until health officials raised concerns about the growing unrecognized spread of infection.

The implementation of the lockdown in Shanghai signaled to the Chinese people and the international financial markets that the Politburo’s commitment remained to “a now-globally unique strategy—fine-tuned across outbreaks from Xi’an to Shenzhen—of attempting to completely eliminate local cases no matter the economic and social costs,” as characterized by the Financial Times (FT).

Given recent experiences with the massive surge and deaths in Hong Kong and, in general, with the deadly impact of the virus allowed to take flight across the globe, elimination remains popular with the Chinese population. Yet, it is being met with vicious denunciation in the bourgeois press.

Daily COVID cases China March 1 to April 5, 2022. Source WSWS.

On this issue, the World Socialist Web Site recently noted that the Financial Times, “Speaking for the city of London, Wall Street and the global financial oligarchy that once controlled Shanghai and aims to establish neocolonial domination over all of China, [the FT Editorial Board] denounces lockdowns and all other public health measures that impinge on the production of profits but have saved millions of lives in China.”

In short, they deem Zero-COVID an untenable prospect and demand that China begin a plan of action to end the elimination strategy and learn “to live with the virus.” Beijing, however, is not presently willing to concede defeat and acquiesce to these stipulations that would see millions of its inhabitants suffer the same deadly consequences.

It would be essential, in that regard, to take a brief account of the pandemic in the US over the last two years.

Over 1 million Americans have officially perished from their infections. However, as Scientific American recently noted, “This toll is likely an undercount because more than 200,000 other excess deaths go beyond typical mortality rates, caused in part by lingering effects of the disease and the strain of the pandemic.” COVID has become the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer in the US.

Nyesha Black, director of demographic research at the University of Alabama, speaking with Scientific American, said, “We will see the rippling effects of the pandemic on our society and the way it impacts individuals for generations.” Three-quarters of all the dead in the US have been among people 65 years and older, representing a critical part of the intergenerational family structure among the working class. Indeed, one out of every 74 people in this age bracket has been wiped off the face of the earth by a preventable disease.

Nearly one-quarter of all COVID deaths occurred among working-age Americans. As J Scott Davidson, CEO of the insurance company OneAmerica said in December 2021, “We are seeing right now the highest death rates we have ever seen in the history of this business. Death rates are up 40 percent over what they were pre-pandemic,” calling it “a one-in-200-year catastrophe.”

These deaths will have a lasting tragic impact on the lives of the youngest. It has been estimated that over 243,000 children have lost a “caregiver” to COVID, which includes 194,000 who have lost one or both parents.

Jennifer Dowd, a demographer at the University of Oxford, told Scientific American that “a lot of us demographers have just been tallying the losses, and it kind of snuck up on us, the scale of it all. We never thought it would keep going like this.” And even still, the long-term consequences on health and mortality have yet to be ascertained. Meanwhile, US politicians are wrangling over a few billion dollars in COVID funding while almost a trillion is to be made available for war-making.

For China, a co-existence strategy would have equally devastating consequences. Those 80 years of age and over, the most vulnerable, are the least vaccinated. And a considerable number of those 60 to 80 have only received two doses. With an immune evading virus and waning immunity, the virus would run like a massive tsunami wave through densely populated megacities across the mainland. The present attempts to bring Omicron under control attest to the difficulties faced by Chinese authorities.

Currently, China remains the only country that has continued to wage a campaign against the virus by mustering all available national resources to extinguish every outbreak through mass testing, tracing primary and secondary contacts, and isolating and treating the infected—all fundamental cornerstones of pandemic response.

The Chinese authorities mobilized all their national resources to test every person in Shanghai. As Reuters explained, “The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on Sunday dispatched more than 2,000 medical personnel from across the army, navy and joint logistics support forces to Shanghai … about 38,000 healthcare workers from provinces such as Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and the capital Beijing have been dispatched to Shanghai, according to state media, which showed them arriving, suitcase-laden and masked up, by high-speed rail and aircraft.”

Many had compared the current initiative to events in Wuhan in February of 2020, when the country faced its last real threat from the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The current testing strategy in Shanghai will inform the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and health authorities of the public health measures’ effectiveness and direct immediate actions to attempt to eliminate the virus from the city. However, as the FT noted, only three of 31 provinces have reported zero cases. Outside of Shanghai, Jilin, and possibly Hebei provinces, case numbers remain under 100 per day though almost half are seeing a rising trajectory.

The challenge and fundamental weakness of China’s Zero-COVID policy is its national character. The current relentless nature of the outbreaks may very well drive the ruling class of China to be more concerned about its economic standing and insist on the futility of elimination. In collaboration with their international brothers and sisters, the Chinese working class must resist abandoning elimination and demand a globally coordinated action. The fundamental reality remains that there is no national solution to the pandemic, which remains in its acute phase, despite more than two years it has been allowed to run rampant across the globe.

Peruvian government deploys army, locks down Lima, then rescinds order as cost-of-living protests swell

Eric London

Late Monday night, Peruvian President Pedro Castillo deployed the army, initiated a state of emergency and declared an all-day curfew Tuesday in the capital of Lima and the neighboring port city of Callao as protests over the rapidly-increasing cost of living spread across the country. Later Tuesday, as it became clear that the curfew would only trigger deeper protests, Castillo lifted the curfew.

What began eight days ago as a management-supported strike by truckers over the rising cost of fuel has now developed into a broader movement involving small farmers in the country’s impoverished central highlands region, as well as youth and workers in Lima. Inflation in Peru hit a 26-year high Friday, with the cost of consumer goods rising 1.5 percent over the prior month due to the war in Ukraine.

A transportation strike in Huaycan on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, Monday, April 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Martin Mejia)

Although Peru is located 8,000 miles from Ukraine, rising prices caused by the war, US/EU sanctions against Russia and breakdown in supply chains have triggered social protest by workers all over the world. Similarly explosive protests are taking place in Sri Lanka, and large demonstrations and strikes have taken place in Sudan, Albania, Iraq, Tunisia, Britain, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, Spain, the United States, Canada and elsewhere.

In a midnight address to the nation Monday night, Castillo—a former teachers’ strike leader who won election in 2021 by posturing as left-wing—announced a total ban on public movement in Lima and Callao and ordered millions of people to stay in their homes, barring all but those in essential sectors from leaving even to go to work or make necessary purchases. The shutdown order also bans public assemblies and does not exempt COVID vaccination sites.

In his hastily-announced speech, Castillo said, “In order to re-establish peace and internal order, the cabinet of ministers has agreed to declare the immobilization of the citizenry from 2:00 a.m. until 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, April 5.”

He ordered protesters to “respect public and private property” and said the size of the demonstrations reflects anger over “demands that were not paid attention to for a long time, that were aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic and now by the conflicts in the international situation.”

The order means a third of the country’s population will miss a day of work. Juan Gutierrez, a 45-year-old garment worker, told Al Jazeera: “Do you know what it means to lose a day? We have to work to eat.” On Tuesday afternoon, the Castillo government announced it was considering expanding the lockdown beyond Tuesday and implementing it on a national scale. Then, hours later, Castillo abruptly canceled the curfew, only adding to the spiraling political crisis as it became clearer that the curfew was only causing deep anger.

Over the weekend, a deal reached between the government and trucking and agricultural industry leaders failed to stop the protests, which had previously been limited to truckers and taxi drivers. The deal not only included the temporary elimination of most gas taxes, but also cuts to food prices and a 10 percent increase to the national minimum wage, which will now be the equivalent of $332 per month.

The announcement of a deal took place after thousands protested Friday in the city of Huancayo, Junín, roughly 150 miles from Lima. Protesters demanding the lowering of prices were met with brutal state repression. The size and militancy of the demonstrations in Huancayo were notable because the city is a stronghold of the ruling Peru Libre party and many demonstrators explained that they themselves had voted for Castillo, whose approval rating has sunk to the mid-20s.

In the southern city of Ica, impoverished agricultural workers descended on much-hated highway tollbooths and burned them down. Schools in many regions were closed Friday due to protests. A total of five people have been killed thus far.

Blockades of most major highways continued on Monday while spontaneous and socially explosive protests over food shortages took place for the first time in Lima, the third largest city in South America, with a population of 11 million and one of the world’s foremost megacities. Significant demonstrations took place in numerous working class districts of the city as viral videos show people breaking into grocery stores in search of food.

In an indication that the movement is gaining support among industrial centers of the working class, the main trade union organization, the General Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP) is attempting to preempt a wildcat strike movement by announcing a general strike for Thursday, with demonstrations throughout the country and a march to the presidential palace in Lima.

In a press release announcing the strike call, CGTP General Secretary Gerónimo López warned of growing social unrest, declaring that “the people are demanding that the government follow through on its campaign promises by raising the minimum wage to a level that conforms with basic family spending needs.”

Fears that protests will spread further were expressed by right-wing congressperson Jorge Montoya, who told the media Monday that the state of emergency and curfew were necessary because masses of impoverished Peruvians were preparing to “come down from the hills and sack the city, not only here [in Lima] but also in different places throughout the country. The capital is an emblematic site and it must be protected.”

Sections of the Peruvian ruling class who are hostile to the Castillo government from the right have attempted to use the crisis to press for his removal from office. Two parliamentary efforts to bring down Castillo have failed in recent months. Castillo beat his right-wing rival Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former dictator Kenji Fujimori, by a razor-thin margin in last year’s election amid a hysterical anticommunist campaign in the corporate press. Since coming to power, Castillo has worked with the banks and foreign finance capital to implement austerity and has repudiated promises of social reform.

But the right-wing press has made clear that it’s frustration with Castillo is based on his inability to stop the protests. In an editorial Tuesday, the business daily El Comercio blamed Castillo for denouncing the protesters as paid provocateurs, a tactic that only galvanized popular support for the protests and “exacerbated the violence in places like Huancayo.”

The editorial criticized Castillo’s justice minister, Félix Chero, for mocking the impact of Tuesday’s all-day curfew on the city’s working class for fear it will trigger even larger protests. When asked how Lima’s impoverished residents will find food if they are required to stay in their homes, Chero said, “I don’t think anyone will go without eating, because this is one day.” El Comercio warned, “This comment, in another time and place, would have added fuel to the French Revolution.”

There is growing concern in the media outlets of the major imperialist countries over the growth of protests in places like Peru and Sri Lanka.

“Surging Prices Threaten Governments Everywhere,” warned Bloomberg Tuesday in an article referencing the imposition of a curfew in Lima. “While citizens in some countries may be fine with paying more if it helps pressure Russia to stop the war, plenty of others will simply blame whoever is in charge. That’s a risk for all world leaders, no matter what they think of Putin.”

In an article titled “Fuel protests prompt Lima curfew as Ukraine crisis touches South America,” the Guardian wrote of Castillo on Tuesday, “The schoolteacher from a peasant farmer family narrowly won the election last year with the backing of the rural poor. Now many of his former supporters, among them farmers and transport workers, are driving the protests into their second week, while the government strives to bring prices down.”

The New York Times also published an opinion piece Tuesday that stated: “Before the war, roughly 811 million people around the world did not have enough to eat. That number could increase tremendously this hunger season, the time between spring planting and fall harvest when food often runs out. The war’s many implications are distressing. Food crises often lead to social unrest, conflict, failed governments and mass migrations. For example, some researchers point to rising food prices as a driver of the Arab Spring upheavals in 2011.”

All indications are that the economic and social crisis in Peru will escalate in the weeks ahead. Peru imports 1.2 million tons of fertilizer a year, over half of which comes from Russia. On March 19, the country declared a state of emergency over food insecurity caused by the rising cost of fertilizer.

Strikes and protests over the rising cost of living are growing throughout Latin America. A strike movement is developing in Brazil among teachers and other sections of the working class, while the Argentinian government announced Tuesday a 6,000 peso cash payment (USD $52) to pensioners to address rapidly increasing food prices.

Profiting off of the pandemic, CEO pay increased to record levels in 2021 while workers’ wages fell

Kevin Reed

In the second year of the pandemic, the chief executives of the top US corporations are on track to set new compensation records while the wages of their workers were reduced. This is the conclusion drawn by several analyses of pay data submitted by a group of S&P 500 corporations to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as part of their annual filing requirements.

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that median pay for CEOs rose to $14.2 million last year, up from a record $13.4 million in 2020. The report said that half of the companies reported median wages for their workers increased in 2021 by 3.1 percent. However, this is less than half of last year’s inflation rate of 6.7 percent, and it means that these workers took an effective paycut.

The Journal report noted, “Most CEOs received a pay increase of 11 percent or more, and pay rose by at least 25 percent for nearly one-third of them.” It also reported that for one-third of the companies, median employee pay declined last year.

These figures are based on a review by the Journal of “pay data for more than half the index from MyLogIQ LLC.” MyLogIQ is a provider of SEC compliance services and has access to the government agency public filings database.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

The CEOs of nearly half the companies reporting were paid 186 times that of median workers in 2021. The Journal report says, “That is up from 166 times in the year before the pandemic and 156 times in 2018, the first year that nearly all S&P 500 companies reported median employee pay.”

The compensation data is provided to the SEC by the corporations as part of the disclosures mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 which was passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis sparked by the collapse of the mortgage-backed securities markets on Wall Street. The CEO compensation figures include the value of stock awards along with salary, cash bonuses, perks and retirement benefits.

The Journal’s report goes on to air the complaints of business executives that the pay ratio data is a “blunt instrument that offers little meaningful insight.” The corporate representatives also criticize the reporting requirements because the SEC rules “give companies significant leeway on how they rank workers globally to identify the median employee,” and the pay for median workers is determined “using the same rules that govern reported CEO pay.”

Also on Sunday, the Financial Times (FT) reported that the pay data is “raising the prospect of fresh clashes with investors and employees as the gap between their earnings and those of their staff widens to a historic multiple in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

The FT’s analysis—based on information from the data company Equilar—said that CEO pay ratio shot up to 245 times that of a median employee in 2021 compared to 192 times in 2020, the largest one-year increase since the start of the disclosures in 2018. The report attributed the record gap to the stock market rally that “delivered far larger windfalls to bosses than to their employees.”

The FT also pointed out that the jump in CEO compensation was the result of bonuses that were paused or cut in 2020 during the pandemic. This makes clear that the reductions in executive compensation during the initial economic shocks of the coronavirus were little more than public relations window dressing as workers were suffering widespread unemployment and expanding poverty, as well as sickness and death from COVID-19.

It did not take long for the process of capitalist wealth accumulation for the super-rich to resume on a higher level than anything achieved prior to the pandemic. Meanwhile, some US corporations never bothered to slow down the growth of increasingly grotesque wealth inequality throughout the pandemic. At the grocery store chain Kroger, for example, the CEO pay ratio was 909 times that of a median worker’s wages in 2020, and the company has yet to file with the SEC for 2021.

A third study published on March 29 by Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance based on the Equilar data reported on the early trends in executive compensation showed that CEO pay had “bounced back strongly from pandemic ‘woes’.” The report showed that CEOs in the top 75th percentile increased by 22 percent last year from $16.8 million to $20.5 million, and the pay ratio increased by 42 percent from 307.5 to 437 times a median worker’s wages.

Significantly, the Harvard report also showed that for all categories—25th percentile, median and 75th percentile—the median employee compensation was reduced from 2020 to 2021. The steepest decline was among the lowest income group, the 25th percentile, where compensation was cut by 25 percent from $44,946 to $33,493. When inflation is added to this reduction, the wages of the lowest paid employees of the top 500 companies in the US were cut by more than 30 percent.

The data reported by approximately one-half of the S&P 500 companies shows that the US financial elite have not only taken advantage of the pandemic to dramatically increase their wealth through the unprecedented rise of the stock market fueled by a massive infusion of cash into Wall Street by the Federal Reserve Bank. The corporations have also used the social devastation caused by the criminal response of the US government to the public health crisis to intensify the exploitation of the working class by slashing wages.

The Wall Street Journal report highlighted the compensation of Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel Corporation, who earned a package worth $179 million, which is 1,700 times the pay of its median employee who was identified as “a program manager in Malaysia” who earned a total of $104,400. The Journal said Intel justified Gelsinger’s windfall because it “reflected his experience, the challenge of transforming Intel and $50 million in compensation he gave up by leaving business software company VMware Inc.”

Another featured compensation program was that of the private equity firm KKR & Company, which paid its co-CEOs Joseph Bae and Scott Nuttall approximately $559 million and $523 million respectively. A KKR spokesperson told the Journal, “The vast majority of the compensation is performance-based stock that will have to more than double in value for the stock awards to fully vest.”