Zero-COVID strategy drives Omicron cases down across China

Benjamin Mateus

Despite the claims in the corporate media in the US and elsewhere that there is an accelerating wave of COVID-19 in China, the actual figures demonstrate that Chinese public health workers are successfully containing an outbreak of Omicron BA.2. The number of infections is significantly lower than in the United States—where the Biden administration claims that coronavirus is no longer a pandemic—and fewer Chinese have died in two months than die in the US every single day.

The death toll in the US has fallen to a “low” of about 400 a day. By contrast, the cumulative death toll in China since Omicron BA.2 invaded the country from overseas in early March is 287—over a period of nearly 60 days! During the same period, 42,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID-19, more than 100 times as many as in China.

By midnight of April 27, 2022, the National Health Commission (NCH) of the People’s Republic of China had confirmed 4,923 deaths across mainland China. On March 1, 2022, that figure was at 4,636. All but two of these 287 deaths occurred in Shanghai, the main financial hub and a center of both manufacturing an world trade, when cases began to explode in mid-March.

The first of these deaths in the financial hub occurred on April 17, when three fatalities were reported. By then, cases had peaked with a seven-day average of daily cases at 26,412, and several rounds of mass testing had already been conducted. The lockdown was approaching its third week.

Two days later, on April 19, another seven deaths were reported, raising mainland China's total to 4,648. The next day brought another seven deaths, and the day after, eight, bringing the total to 4,663. On April 22, Shanghai saw its first double-digit count in deaths with 11 fatalities, and the number rose to 12 the day after, bringing the cumulative number to 4,686.

Last Saturday, April 24, Shanghai health authorities reported a sudden jump in fatalities to 39 deaths, and then on Saturday, another 51. The rise in counts has remained stable since, with 51 on Monday and 48 on Tuesday. Yesterday, 47 perished.

Since March 1, 2022, there have been 677,980 COVID cases across the mainland, with the lion’s share of infections in Shanghai, 558,147 as of Wednesday. Yet, little more than 96,000 of these cases were confirmed as symptomatic. In other words, if not for mass testing and contact tracing, almost 80 percent of community infections could have been missed.

Assuming a commonly accepted infection fatality ratio (IFR) for COVID of around 0.5 percent, another 300 deaths can be expected over the next few weeks at the present levels of symptomatic infections.

The importance of making such a detailed account of these statistics is that, repeatedly, various media outlets have cited experts claiming that the numbers reported by Chinese authorities are rigged to provide a rosier picture of their pandemic response and therefore shouldn’t be trusted. The apparent political intent is to malign the Zero-COVID policy and the efforts to prioritize the population's lives over “the economy,” i.e., corporate profit.

For instance, CNN quoted infectious disease expert Dr. Peter Collignon, an Australian National University Medical School professor, saying that Shanghai should have had as many as 700 deaths for every 100,000 cases because Hong Kong had 9,000 COVID deaths out of 1.19 million infections in January 2022. Minneapolis epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm and others have made similar statements.

As to the lower death count, first, the response in Shanghai has been far different than what transpired in Hong Kong. Early medical attention and treatment can stem complications from an infection. Every effort is being made to administer and attend to asymptomatic and symptomatic cases.

Second, given the data being presented by the NHC, the time course of infections to deaths is proceeding according to expected epidemiological predictions. The apparent lower death toll as compared to all reported cases has everything to do with the Chinese health authorities identifying all infections, which commonly has not occurred in other countries.

During the massive waves of infections in Europe, the US, and everywhere Omicron gained a firm foothold, the positivity rate spiraled upwards, implying a significant undercount of infections. Most cases being reported are among symptomatic patients seeking medical attention.

For instance, according to Worldometer, there have been 82.8 million COVID infections during the pandemic. However, according to a recent seroprevalence study by the Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC), the actual estimate of COVID infections by February 2022 is closer to 200 million. And this does not consider a considerable rate of reinfections.

Suppose we were to employ the 0.5 percent IFR rule for COVID, based on the 80 million estimated infections. In that case, the US would be expected to suffer 400,000 COVID deaths. But the current official death toll is approaching one million, consistent, based on the IFR, with an infection total of 200 million.

Presently, close to 400 people are still dying from COVID every day. But these grim tolls are spun in a positive light by the White House and its coronavirus experts.

Despite the turmoil Chinese health officials faced in the latter part of March and into April, their persistent efforts appear to be gaining on the virus. Indeed, many of the recent reports in the bourgeoise press have begrudgingly acknowledged that efforts to contain the pandemic are proving effective.

The current seven-day average of daily cases has declined to 17,000, a 35 percent decline over 11 days since its peak. On Wednesday, there were only 11,285 new locally transmitted infections across the mainland, the lowest figure Since April 3. If we exclude cases reported in Shanghai, mainland China found only 663 locally transmitted cases yesterday. In Jilin province, site of the initial outbreak in the northeast, COVID cases are down to 154.

Shanghai too has reported its lowest figures since the mid-April peaks of over 27,000 COVID cases. Yesterday there were just 10,622 COVID cases reported, of which 1,292 were symptomatic, prompting officials to begin the steps to exit lockdown by easing restrictions in districts where COVID-19 infections were eliminated.

Residents line up for the first round of mass COVID testing in the Jingan district of western Shanghai, China, Friday, April 1, 2022. (AP Photo/Chen Si, File)

However, the outbreak in Beijing is being followed carefully by the world press as authorities explained that for about a week, community transmission was occurring undetected. Most of the initial cases were discovered in Chaoyang District at a middle school, pushing authorities to respond expeditiously.

Yesterday, 48 symptomatic and two asymptomatic cases were reported in China’s capital, underscoring the concern that the outbreak is far more extensive than current figures indicate. Efforts are underway to conduct three rounds of mass testing citywide this week, with the first completed on Monday for the more than 19.8 million residents.

As in Shanghai, a jump in cases is expected. It is not a harbinger of an explosion of cases, but a product of the systematic effort to find all infections to assist in long-established public health controls and to eliminate the pathogen from the community. Currently, only Chaoyang District is in lockdown while movement restrictions are enacted in high-risk neighborhoods. A wider lockdown may be implemented should the citywide testing indicate community spread is much more extensive.

Rather than applauding the monumental and essential efforts undertaken to contain these outbreaks, the spokespersons for the financial oligarchs decry these efforts. Colm Rafferty, chairman of the Beijing-based American Chamber of Commerce in China, told the Wall Street Journal, “Today, the situation in Beijing appears to be stable, but we remain concerned about the possibility of a citywide lockdown.”

The Journal added, “A total of 46 cities and their 343 million inhabitants across the country were under partial or full lockdowns or faced some degree of movement restrictions as of Monday … These cities account for more than 24 percent of China’s population and over 35 percent of its gross domestic product.”

The Journal never bothers to ask, “To what extent did Omicron disrupt economic activity in the US?” More than 80 million people were infected from December through February, accounting for one-quarter of the US population. It also killed 170,000 people during that period, including a substantial number of previously fully vaccinated individuals.

More than 8.7 million Americans were out of the labor market because of COVID or caring for someone infected. More than 5.3 million parents and caregivers were taking care of children who were home from school, and airlines had to cancel flights due to labor shortages. As businesses, restaurants, and retail stores were cutting back hours, health care workers were once more being brought to the brink of exhaustion as emergency rooms and hospitals were brimming with infected patients. 

Chris Williamson, a chief business economist at IHS Markit, said of the pronounced pullback in services and manufacturing sectors, “Soaring virus cases have brought the US economy to a near standstill at the start of the year.”

The Journal wrote on January 24, “In the US, IHS Markit’s composite purchasing managers index—which measures activity in both the manufacturing and services sectors—fell to 50.8 in January from 57 in December, to hit an 18-month low … Much of the economic impact comes from COVID-related staff absences, Simon MacAdam, senior global economist at Capital Economics, said in a note to clients.”

To have allowed the coronavirus to run roughshod over the Chinese population would have been another historic assault on the international working class, one of many they have endured during the pandemic.

However, based on current trends, the Zero-COVID strategy should end the present threat by the virus in China in less time than it took for Omicron to sweep through the populations of the US and Europe like a tsunami. On a social scale, measures to eliminate the virus have consistently proven the correct response. However, the war against the coronavirus is a war against the socioeconomic conditions that allow the threat to persist. Defeating the virus will require a frontal assault against capitalism.

The Global Economy Shock of the Ukraine War

Patrick Cockburn

Photograph Source: Ray Weitzenberg – CC BY 2.0

The war in Ukraine is already leading to fewer weddings in Syria because it has increased the price of the gold jewellery which is a traditionally part of Syrian wedding contracts. Prospective husbands who promised a fixed quantity of gold to their bride-to-be find that they can no longer afford to pay for it.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, the price of gold rose sharply and dozens of weddings were postponed or cancelled in Syria according to Saeed Ali, a 46-year-old goldsmith and currency trader in Qamishli in north east Syria.

“A relative of mine had a provision in his marriage contract to buy 50 grams of gold for his fiancée,” he says.

“This would have cost him $2,500 before the Ukraine war, but after it broke out he could only buy 43 grams for that sum and this caused problems with his marriage.”

In small and large ways, the war in Ukraine is affecting the rest of the world, but nowhere is its effect more devastating than on countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and South Sudan, to name but four, which have been torn apart by decades of warfare. For them the Ukraine crisis is the final destructive blow for weak governments and societies that are barely holding together.

Some 80 per cent of Syrians are rated as impoverished with many on the edge of starvation, while 12.4 million are described by the World Food Programme as being “food insecure.”

Many are jobless or grossly underpaid after a collapse in the Syrian currency caused by harsher American sanctions in 2020 that established what amounts to an economic siege.

A Syrian government employee today earn the equivalent of $25 a month and their Kurdish counterparts $75. But in the last couple of months the price of basic foodstuffs such as sunflower oil, sugar and tomatoes have doubled or tripled while the price of bread has risen by 50 per cent.

“Incomes are the same here but prices are crazy,” says Salem Amin, 43, who sells cooking oil in all Syrian cities.

“All this is happening because of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: the fire may be there, but we are burning up here in Syria.”

The economies of these shattered countries in the Middle East and Africa were already close to capsizing because of endless military conflicts before the war in Ukraine began, but they are now close to sinking entirely.

Catastrophic though their situation is there is limited international interest in their plight because world attention is fixated on Ukraine and what is fast becoming a proxy war between Russia and the US.

Atrocities and mass killings in these forgotten war zones seldom get on the international news agenda, though they would be headline news if they occurred in the Donbas, Kharkiv or Odessa.

Many have been ignored for a long time, so it is scarcely surprising that their fate attracts little interest now. In South Sudan, the world’s newest nation, for instance, some 400,000 people were killed in a civil war between 2013 and 2018 that few outside the region ever knew was happening.

This has supposedly ended, but in fighting earlier this month 44,000 people had to flee for their lives from their burning villages after losing their houses, belongings and food stocks.

Bad though the situation has been for years, Ukraine has made it that bit worse primarily because it has raised food and fuel prices for those who can least afford to pay them.

Matthew Hollingworth, the South Sudan country director of the World Food Programme (WFP), says that of the 7.4 million people suffering from food shortages in South Sudan the WFP will only be able to feed 4.4 million because there is not enough money to pay for more rations.

Of the $1.7bn needed for humanitarian assistance only 10 per cent has been funded by donors.

“We are used to making do with 50 or 60 per cent of what we ask for,” he says, but he is shocked by a shortfall of this size when costs are soaring.

Reverberations from Ukraine are battering a country already hit by multiple disasters resulting from 30 years of savage fighting, the Covid-19 pandemic, and four years of flooding of the vast Sudd swamp on the White Nile which prevents villagers from fishing in the wet season and pastoralists grazing herds of cattle in the wet season.

“They no longer have a dry season,” says Hollingworth. “The pastoralists have to take their herds to new territory where they are not always welcome.”

It is a measure of the all-embracing effect of the war in Ukraine that it is now affecting the cattle herders in the swamplands of South Sudan as it is the marriage market in Syria.

In both cases people with very little are finding that they are even less able to meet their needs than before. Yet the crisis is not solely economic because it means increased great power competition which will destabilise some of the most fragile states in the world.

These countries were often the arenas where the proxy wars between the US and its allies and the Soviet Union were fought out between the late 1940s and 1989.

A second confrontation between Russia and the Nato powers could have a similarly destabilising effect.

The Backstory of NATO, Ukraine and Putin’s Fears

Richard Miller

Photograph Source: Sergei F – CC BY 2.0

A widespread misconception of NATO’s relation to Ukraine has been sustained by silence in news sources and falsehoods by pundits. According to this myth, the NATO-Ukraine connection, prior to Russia’s current horrific invasion, was a matter of Ukraine’s asking to join and NATO’s not saying “No.” In fact, over the last fourteen years, NATO’s conduct has gone far beyond openness to eventual admission, in engagements that have included extensive and expanding joint military operations in Ukraine. This involvement, which was accompanied by US efforts to shape Ukrainian politics, does not in the least affect Putin’s moral responsibility for the carnage he is inflicting. But awareness of this history should affect vitally important assessments of the proper response.

In 2008, William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia and now CIA director, cabled from Moscow, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin) …I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” As Burns’ cable suggests, Ukraine has distinctive geopolitical significance for Russia. It is the next-largest country in Europe, after Russia, dominates the northern border of the Black Sea, and has a 1,227-mile land border with Russia. Nonetheless, at the end of the 2008 Bucharest NATO Summit, when expansion to Russia’s borders was virtually complete, NATO, led by the US, declared agreement on its completion: “We agreed today that these two countries [Ukraine along with Georgia] will become members of NATO.” In 2011, a NATO report noted, “The Alliance assists Ukraine … in preparing defence policy reviews and other documents, in training personnel, … modernising armed forces and making them more interoperable and more capable of participating in international missions” — international cooperation that had already included a joint Black Sea naval exercise with the US.

On February 22, 2014, large, increasingly militant months-long protests centered in Independence Square in Kyiv led to the deposition and flight to Russia of a president who had depended on strong electoral support from autonomous Russophone regions in the east and had sought to balance cooperation with NATO with positive relations with Russia, opposing integration with the EU. A strongly pro-Western government came to power, with the composition hoped-for in vigorous US efforts to “midwife” it, as the US ambassador put it in a Russian-intercepted phone conversation. Russia occupied Crimea and sent military support to secessionist forces in the east.

One response was the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015, signed by representatives of Ukraine, Russia and the separatist regions. They aimed for autonomy compatible with Ukraine’s sovereignty in the eastern regions and Ukrainian neutrality, with international guarantees, including the “pullout of all foreign armed formations … [and] military equipment from the territory of Ukraine”  and the permanent monitoring of the Ukrainian-Russian border. NATO’s response was very different: an extensive increase in joint military activity in Ukraine,  including Operation Fearless Guardian in 2015, in which the 173^rd Airborne trained three Ukraine brigades over the course of six months. The Brussels NATO Summit in June 2021 declared, “We reiterate the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance ….  We welcome the cooperation between NATO and Ukraine with regard to security in the Black Sea region.  The Enhanced Opportunities Partner status granted last year provides further impetus to our already ambitious cooperation …  with the option of more joint exercises ….  Military cooperation and capacity building initiatives between Allies and Ukraine, including the Lithuanian-Polish-Ukrainian Brigade, further reinforce this effort. We highly value Ukraine’s significant contributions to Allied operations, the NATO Response Force, and NATO exercises.” In March 2021, Putin had begun the shift of military forces toward Ukraine. On February 24, 2022, he announced his horrific invasion, denouncing “the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border.”

This history provides evidence for a hypothesis about a crucial motivation for Putin’s aggression: the crucial impetus was a desire to push back at the extension of active NATO military engagement across Burns’ “red line.” This does not remotely justify his aggression and the carnage that he has inflicted, any more than my leaving my wallet on a seat in my unlocked car affects a wallet-snatcher’s moral responsibility for his thievery. But one’s account of the causes of Putin’s aggression should make a great deal of difference to one’s assessment of the proper response.

For one thing, if this was the impetus, Ukraine-Russia negotiations aiming at Ukrainian neutrality could have provided an off-ramp from carnage. On March 16, the chief Ukrainian negotiator and the chief Russian negotiator separately declared openness to such a settlement, openness affirmed by Zelensky on March 21. Progress was impeded by Biden’s naming Putin “a war criminal” on March 16,  his declaration the next day that Putin is “a pure thug,” and the March 20 assertion by the US ambassador to the UN, “the Russians have not leaned into any possibility for a negotiated and diplomatic solution.” Suppose, on the other hand, that entrenched Great Russian ethnonationalism is what drives Putin, leading him to aggressively unite Russians and Ukrainians in one sovereign nation, or that he is driven by an irrepressible urge to restore the grandeur of the Russian Empire. These hypotheses, which make it harder to explain the timing of Russia’s incursions, support impeding those negotiations as doomed endeavors when counterforce was needed, despite the continued carnage it guaranteed.

The choice among these hypotheses has further, momentous global importance in judging current arguments for a more confrontational, miliitarized American foreign policy. Eminent advocates such as Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense under G.W. Bush and Obama and CIA Director under G.H.W. Bush, have claimed that Russia’s invasion expresses an irrepressible urge, paralleling an aspiration that drives China, to “recover past glory” and “restore the Russian empire” and have called for an end of “Americans’ 30-year holiday from history,” “a dramatic change” including “a larger, more advanced military in every branch” and more assertive rivalry with Russia and China which greatly expands the use of “instruments of power … that played a significant role in winning the Cold War.” Robert Kagan argues for the same surge in order to confront Russia’s drive to “reclaim its traditional influence” out of a “centuries-long habit of imperialism,” an impetus paralleled by Chinese longings to return to traditional domination of East Asia. Stephen Kotkin bases his calls to arms on the need to resist Russia’s “perpetual geopolitics” based on the view of Russia as “a providential power” and similar imperatives in China.

Awareness of the role of NATO expansion in Ukraine should deepen fears of the suffering the revival of the Cold War could cause worldwide. Of course, the larger history of the carnage that the US has inflicted to sustain its geopolitical preeminence in power is a vital basis for organizing resistance to these appeals. But concealing the history of US-led involvement in Ukraine aids the exploitation of widespread justified revulsion at Putin’s brutality in Ukraine to weaken resistance. The myth should be busted, as well.

Johnson government acted unlawfully in policy that led to mass deaths in care homes, UK High Court rules

Robert Stevens

The High Court in London has ruled that the Conservative government acted unlawfully in the early weeks of the pandemic when it discharged thousands of untested hospital patients into care homes.

Lord Justice Bean and Mr Justice Garnham stated following a hearing in March that the policy failed to take into account the risk of asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19.

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)

This was one of four policies at issue in the case—part of a declared herd immunity strategy that transformed care homes into killing fields in which tens of thousands of elderly and vulnerable people died preventable deaths. “About 20,000 residents of care homes in England died of COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020,” the ruling notes.

Over 193,000 are now dead in Britain from COVID; fatalities overseen by Prime Minister Boris Johnson who infamously declared, “No more fucking lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”

The ruling tears to shreds government lies that it protected care homes by surrounding them, in the words of then Health Secretary Matt Hancock, in a “ring of steel.”

The defendants in the case were the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Hancock), National Health Service England, and Public Health England (PHE). It was brought by Dr. Cathy Gardner and Fay Harris whose fathers, Michael Gibson and Donald Harris, died in care homes after testing positive for COVID-19.

The judgement states, “Claimants seek declarations that certain policy documents issued by the Defendants during the relevant period, and the policy decisions recorded in those documents, constituted breaches of their fathers’ rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, or alternatively were unlawful and susceptible to judicial review on common law principles.”

The High Court ruled that two government policies were unlawful: The March 2020 Discharge Policy, the basis on which thousands of patients were sent from hospitals into care homes to free up hospital beds; and the April 2 Admissions Guidance, providing care homes with advice on the admissions of people from hospitals.

Point 5 of the summary states that “the drafters of those documents failed to take into account the risk to elderly and vulnerable residents from non-symptomatic transmission, which had been highlighted by (among others) Sir Patrick Vallance [government Chief Scientific Officer] in a radio interview as early as 13 March.”

The judges found it was “irrational for the DHSC [Department for Health and Social Care] not to have advised until mid-April 2020 that where an asymptomatic patient (other than one who had tested negative for COVID-19) was admitted to a care home, he or she should, so far as practicable, be kept apart from other residents for 14 days.”

Representing Dr. Gardner and Harris, Jason Coppel QC told the court, “The care home population was known to be uniquely vulnerable to being killed or seriously harmed by Covid-19.

“The Government’s failure to protect it, and positive steps taken by the Government which introduced Covid-19 infection into care homes, represent one of the most egregious and devastating policy failures in the modern era.

“That death toll should not and need not have happened.”

Speaking after the ruling, Dr. Gardner and Harris called for Johnson’s resignation. Dr. Gardner told Sky News, “When secretary of state Matt Hancock said that he’d thrown a protective ring around care homes right from the start—I heard him say that on television and my chin nearly hit the floor because all of us who were involved in any way with care homes at the start of the pandemic knew that was absolutely not true.

“It was a lie. It was a lie then and it is a lie now. They didn’t do anything to protect my father, there was no help given to care homes and the death toll in those first few weeks of the pandemic was catastrophic.

“I think they never imagined they were going to be found out. You only have to look at the parties [that government officials held in Downing Street] to realise they never think they’re going to be found out.”

Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice campaign group spokesperson Charlie Williams said, “We’ve always known that our loved ones were thrown to the wolves by the government, and the claims made by Matt Hancock that a ‘protective ring’ was made around care homes was a sickening lie. Now a court has found their decisions unlawful and it’s clear the decisions taken led to people dying who may otherwise still be with their loved ones today.”

Williams’ father Rex, aged 85, was one of 27 people who died in the same Coventry care home.

The ruling is a damning indictment of government policy, but as with every intervention by the judiciary it lets the government off the hook on the essential issues. The claimants had an “important and legitimate claim,” the judges ruled, “but we must emphasise at the outset what it is and what it is not. It is not an inquest concerning the deaths of Mr Gibson and Mr Harris alone. On the other hand, the case is not a public inquiry but a judicial review. There has been no oral evidence. Evidence of opinion about the actions and decisions of the Defendants is not admissible.”

The ruling documents in detail how from the very earliest stages of a pandemic, many weeks before thousands of NHS patients were flooded into care homes, a growing body of scientific opinion and modelling indicated that COVID could be transmitted by asymptomatic people.

But it goes on to say that whereas there was “no evidence” that Hancock “considered” the question of whether to quarantine care home arrivals from hospitals for 14 days, there was also no evidence that “he was asked to consider it”. No one can shoulder any blame since it was the “drafters of those documents [March 2020 Discharge Policy and the April Admissions Guidance] that failed to take into account the risk to elderly and vulnerable residents from non-symptomatic transmission.”

Sections of the ruling pull no punches in their opposition to the bereaved families. Point 281 states, “We regard the sustained attack on the Hospital Discharge Policy as quite unrealistic.”

It adds, “Similarly, the suggestion that the Government should have made provision in March for the testing of each patient before discharge to a care home is hopeless.” This is explained away because “there were only 5,000 tests available each day by 18 March and only 10,000 each day by 27 March.”

The judges dismissed other parts of the case, including a claim against NHS England and claims under Articles 2 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The government could not hide its relief. Johnson doubled down on his lies in Parliament after shedding a few crocodile tears, saying of the murderous care home policy, “I want to remind the House of what an incredibly difficult time that was and how difficult that decision was. We did not know very much about the disease… we did not know in particular was that COVID could be transmitted asymptomatically in the way that it was.”

Health Secretary Matt Hancock speaking at a government Covid-19 press conference inside No10 Downing Street (credit: picture by Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street—Flickr)

Hancock’s spokesperson said, “This court case comprehensively clears Ministers of any wrongdoing and finds Mr Hancock acted reasonably on all counts. The court also found that PHE failed to tell Ministers what they knew about asymptomatic transmission.”

Public Health England was a Department of Health and Social Care agency, disbanded in October 2021 after being made a scapegoat for the government’s disastrous pandemic policy.

The bereaved families welcomed a ruling which declared part of the government’s COVID policy unlawful, vindicating a two-year battle to establish that their loved ones died needlessly. But it would be a mistake to conclude that any true reckoning with a government which has committed social murder on a vast scale can emerge from the High Court.

Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus stated, “After Partygate, the billions in public money wasted and today’s ruling, the need for a public inquiry to begin immediately is clear.”

However, the planned public inquiry will be yet another whitewash, as with every previous inquiry organised by the ruling elite after a mass loss of life at its hands. What is required is not more inquiries and appeals to the criminals in Downing Street to “learn lessons”, but the removal of a hated government by a mass movement of the working class, independent of and opposed to both the Tories and Labour and directed against the capitalist system and its state.

At least a dozen US universities reinstate mask mandates as COVID cases rise

Trévon Austin

Colleges and universities across the United States, particularly in the Northeast, have reinstated mask mandates and returned to online learning in response to a recent surge of COVID-19 infections on campuses, marking the third straight academic year disrupted by the coronavirus.

Schools in New York, Washington D.C., Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Texas have announced they will again require face coverings in classrooms or certain indoor spaces, with Howard University moving to remote learning to combat the spread of the virus.

Most US universities dropped mask mandates leading up to spring break, following a winter surge fueled by the Omicron variant. But several parts of the country have seen another surge in cases and hospitalizations in recent weeks, as the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron drives another wave of infections and illness.

Four schools in New York state reinstated their indoor mask mandates in recent weeks. Syracuse University, located in a county with one of the largest surges of infections in the US, announced it would once again require masks in classrooms on Monday.

Earlier this month, Columbia University in New York City announced students would be required to wear non-cloth masks in classrooms for the remainder of the spring semester. The university directly cited the city’s uptick in cases and its own increasing test positivity rate in the decision.

Columbia graduate students during a recent strike(WSWS Media)

Barnard College, a women’s school affiliated with Columbia, also reimposed its indoor mask mandate due to a spike in cases since it lifted the rule at the end of March.

The University of Rochester announced on April 15 that it would reintroduce its indoor mask mandate policy for all of its campuses and properties in response to a spike in cases that was “straining the capacity” of quarantine and isolation spaces on its campuses.

“The trending high numbers of positive student COVID cases at the University in recent days make it in everyone’s best interest to take the step of re-masking indoors right now,” the university administration said in a statement.

Four universities in Washington D.C. have also reinstated mask mandates following high transmission rates in the region and significant case increases on their campuses. The city’s COVID-19 infection rate has more than doubled in April.

Howard University students are now required to wear masks for all indoor settings and outdoor group settings until the end of the spring semester. Furthermore, the university announced many undergraduate courses would switch to remote learning during the last days of classes and final exams would be conducted virtually.

George Washington University also revived its mask mandate for all campus facilities earlier this month, noting the mandate would extend through the rest of its spring semester, exam period and commencement. American University reinstated its indoor mask mandate for all campus buildings and Georgetown is requiring indoor masking on two of its campuses.

The city of Philadelphia recently revived its mask mandate, prompting the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University to require indoor masking again starting Monday. Although the city prematurely ended the mandate Thursday, the colleges have kept the mandates in place.

In Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University announced it would begin testing all undergraduate students twice a week, noting a steep rise in cases. The school also said masks would be required in classrooms and group settings like residence hall common areas.

In Houston, Rice University announced earlier this month that students should resume wearing masks in classrooms and canceled large campus parties, citing an uptick in cases on campus.

The uptick in COVID-19 infections across US schools and campuses is a direct product of deliberate policies of the American ruling class, which seeks to normalize sickness and death. In February, the Biden administration urged states to reclassify what qualify as COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths by using the artificial distinction between those hospitalized “with COVID-19” and those hospitalized “from COVID-19,” a far-right talking point since early on in the pandemic.

It was also in February that nearly every state began ending whatever mask mandates were still in place. Multiple states slashed the number of public COVID-19 testing sites, driving testing to its lowest level since last summer. Federal pandemic funding also dried up in March, meaning uninsured people now have to pay $100 for a PCR test.

The sabotage of any serious public health response to the pandemic, carried out by the American capitalist class and its political representatives, has needlessly killed over 1 million Americans and potentially exposed many more to the debilitating effects of Long COVID.

Police murder in Rambukkana exposes Sri Lanka’s Tamil National Alliance

V. Gnana

On April 19, Sri Lankan police forces opened fire on a crowd of protesters at Rambukkana demanding affordable fuel. Chaminda Lakshan, a 40-year-old father of two, was shot dead in broad daylight, in front of hundreds of people, and 27 were injured. This crime against the Sri Lankan workers exposes not only the Sinhalese-majority government of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse but also the Tamil National Alliance (TNA).

For most of the last month, as mass protests mounted against surging food and gas prices and for the ouster of the Rajapakse clan, the TNA was deafeningly silent. Then, on April 11, the president’s brother, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, demanded that protesters go home, or otherwise Sri Lanka would be “once again slipping into a time as dark as that in our history.” Given the regime’s massacre of tens of thousands of Sinhalese youth in the 1980s, and of Tamil civilians and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fighters in 2009, it was an unambiguous threat of murder.

M.A. Sumanthiran. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Two days later, TNA leader M. A. Sumanthiran finally broke his party’s silence on the protests to announce that it was in close, behind-the-scenes talks with the Rajapakse clan and the entire Sri Lankan political establishment. Despite the Rajapakse cabal’s mass murder of Tamil civilians at the end of the civil war in 2009, Sumanthiran made no warnings about the threat of violence. Instead, he explained that he was discussing with Rajapakse how to end the protests, stating:

Former President Sirisena spoke to me, and former President Madam Chandrika [Bandaranaike Kumaratunga] spoke to me in the morning. Other leaders are talking to me. I have been involved in many of the ongoing negotiations to try to bring stability to the political situation. My advice to the current prime minister, Mahinda Rajapakse, yesterday was that if the government itself takes steps to abolish the executive presidency, we can move forward. I personally told him my opinion.

Six days after Sumanthiran boasted of his secret talks with the Rajapakse cabal, Rajapakse’s police opened fire at Rambukkana. Saminda Lakshan’s wife, R.N. Priyanganee, fearlessly identified the uniformed government killers, telling the Ceylon Mirror: “My husband was shot. This is not going to be the last death, and many more will be shot. They are uniformed, star-studded murderers.”

There is no question about the deliberate character of the police massacre, and the fact that it was ordered from top levels in the state machine. Anuradha Rajapakse testified at the official inquiry into the shooting that a senior police officer in uniform with two stars and the royal emblem ordered: “Do not shoot high, shoot to kill.” But the officer who ordered the murder has not yet been publicly identified, arrested, or charged.

The massacre in Rambukkana raises the most serious questions about the TNA’s role. What did the TNA know? When Sumanthiran spoke personally to Rajapakse, did he discuss Rajapakse’s threat of deadly violence? Did Sumanthiran discuss plans for police killings with Rajapakse? Or did he calculate that, given mass hatred of the Rajapakse clan for its 2009 slaughter of Tamils, he could better cover up his dirty dealings with Rajapakse by not discussing them in detail, so he could claimafterwards that he did not know?

The TNA reacted to the police murder of Lakshan with a cynical Tweet, stating: “We condemn unreservedly the police shooting in Rambukkana yesterday that resulted in unfortunate deaths. An immediate independent inquiry must be held, and the Minister for Internal Security must resign forthwith.”

This begs the question: if the TNA is proposing to remove of the interior minister, why does it not call to throw out of the entire Rajapakse cabal that is leading the repression of the protests?

The TNA is working to politically shield the Rajapakse government from explosive mass anger over its murder of Lakshan, while engaging in back-channel talks with Rajapakse himself, and the entire ruling establishment in Colombo. While it cynically poses as a friend of the Tamil people, it defends the Rajapakse cabal and the executive presidency that is at the heart of the unitary capitalist state in Sri Lanka. Its claim to oppose the executive presidency is a political fraud.

Rajapakse has handed over the task of securing fuel transports to Army Commander Shavendra Silva. This officer has already been accused of human rights abuses and war crimes against the Tamil people in the final stages of the civil war in 2009. Silva’s role was so notorious that even Washington felt obliged to impose a travel ban on Silva, who has also played a leading role in suppressing protests against the regime’s malign indifference to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The TNA, speaking for a narrow layer of Tamil capitalists and upper middle class forces, are terrified of mass anti-government protests demanding affordable food and energy for the workers. Since the end of Sri Lanka’s 1983-2009 civil war and the defeat of the LTTE put them back under the control of the Sri Lankan authorities in Colombo, they have ever more closely relied on the executive presidency to defend their class privileges.

Today—desperate to save their personal fortunes and privileges even as masses of Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim workers face hunger and impoverishment—the TNA is calling to resolve the crisis with International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity measures. This means massive cuts to public sector jobs, wages, and pensions; privatisation of state-owned corporations; slashing social programs; and deep cuts to public education and health. Yet Sumanthiran has boasted that he personally told Rajapakse: “Talk to the IMF immediately.”

Russian miners work in “bondage-like conditions” says government official

Andrea Peters

A little more than five months after an explosion at the in Kemerovo, Russia, took the lives of 51 workers, Russian General Prosecutor Igor Krasnov declared Wednesday that an investigation has revealed that the Listvyazhnaya miners there “were forced to work in bondage-like conditions.” He listed the absence of personal safety gear and a lack of regard for work and time-off schedules as just two of 3,000 violations uncovered at the mine. He said that many thousands more have been identified at other operations across Russia.

Krasnov’s admissions, which feign concern, are a half-hearted attempt to address widespread anger over the ugly reality of life in Russia’s workplaces. The real attitude of the country’s ruling elite is revealed by the fact that a top official found responsible for allowing the gross violations at Listvyazhnaya to continue, Aleksandr Mironenko, was just appointed an adviser to the regional Kuzbass government. He will have special responsibility for consulting on socioeconomic issues.

People lay flowers and light candles in memory of the dead miners in the Listvyazhnaya mine in the Siberian city of Kemerovo, about 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) east of Moscow, Russia, Friday, Dec. 3, 2021. [AP Photo/Sergei Gavrilenko]

In December, Listvyazhnaya miners were made to swear an oath of responsibility in which they had to declare their commitment to safety standards. The mine operators were not. Despite promises that rescue workers, five of whom perished in last November’s disaster, would be given awards in recognition of their heroism, none have been forthcoming and news reports indicate that authorities have no plans to do so.  

In the days surrounding Krasnov’s statement, there have been multiple deaths in the country’s resource extraction, metallurgy, and construction industries.

On Monday, a water pipe explosion in a mine in Russia’s Kuzbass region left one dead and one injured and forced the evacuation of 200 others. Two days earlier, three workers were killed in an explosion at one of Russia’s largest copper mines in Orenburg, near the border with Kazakhstan. Another 58 people, working more than a kilometer underground, were pulled out in time. Safety violations appear to be the cause.

Earlier in April a fire at a phosphate mine in Murmansk threatened the lives of 110 miners. Simultaneously, two workers at the Taldinskaya-Zapadnaya mine in Kemerovo became trapped underground when a roof collapsed on them. A few weeks prior, the body of a worker at the Osinnikovskaya mine, which is in the same region, was pulled out from the rubble. He was suffocated and crushed by a combined gas leak and rock fall.

In January, a 33-year-old man in Miass, Russia died at a scrap metal factory after suffering injuries in the process of unloading material. The same month a worker in Moscow fell to his death when the cable on an elevator car that he was repairing gave way. Just this Wednesday, another laborer in Russia’s capital city died in a similar manner when he plunged 33 stories down an elevator shaft at a construction site. On Sunday, a 52-year-old employee at the machine building company Uralvagonzavod also fell to his death. A few days before this, a 26-year-old was crushed by a machine at a materials processing plant in Lipetsk, a city of just over 500,000 in western Russia. On Tuesday, an agricultural worker in his mid-40s was run over by a tractor at a farm in the Tambov region.

The list goes on and on. According to official government statistics, thousands of Russian workers die every year in work-related events. Some research outlets, which likely use different standards to measure the data, place the number in the tens of thousands.  

The deaths and disasters in Russian heavy industry come alongside of initial signs of growing working class resistance.

Sanitation workers in Novosibirsk, a major Russian city with a population of more than 1.5 million and a center of industry, are on strike. Two hundred and eleven garbage collectors walked off the job more than a week ago over the quality of the machinery they are made to use, contract violations, and inadequate wages.

In Sakhalin, which is in Russia’s far east, workers at a poultry factory are on strike over the company’s failure to pay them their wages and low compensation. Wage arrears are growing in Russia, a manifestation of the economic crisis provoked by anti-Russian sanctions.

Taxi drivers are protesting. In Tver in mid-April 100 refused to work, explaining to the press that they face an impossible situation. “Spare parts are expensive, cars are expensive, gasoline is expensive,” they told Tatar-inform. A 15 kilometer trip earns them about 200 rubles, about $2.70 at current exchange rates.

In Moscow, employees with the courier service Delivery Club are on strike because the company changed the way in which their compensation is calculated that the majority of workers have seen their incomes fall by 20 percent. Anger among the workers is high. In February, Delivery Club fired an employee for missing his 14-hour shift in order to attend his mother’s funeral. The leader of the Delivery Club workers’ protest has just been detained by the police for staging illegal meetings.

In January, doctors, paramedics and ambulance drivers in Ishimbay, a town of about 65,000 in the Russian Republic of Bashkortostan, staged a “work to rule” action to protest against poverty wages, gross understaffing, and violations of their work schedules. They say that the best paid among them bring home just 29,000 rubles a month ($390), with many making far less.

In a public statement addressed to local, regional, and federal officials, including President Vladimir Putin, the medical workers declared, “We conscientiously fulfill our responsibilities, but our professional pride does not allow us to see our fellow citizens be deprived of emergency medical care. We are against dispatching ambulance brigades that are not fully staffed, when instead of the legally required two medics there is only one. We are essentially forced to violate standards of rendering medical care.”

In retaliation, the leaders of the labor action were fired. A number of them received calls telling them that their employment had been terminated because they were sent a letter in the mail telling them they had to work on the weekend but did not show up for their shift. Needless to say, they never received any such letter, which, in addition, could not have been put in the mail in time for them to receive it. After protesting, many have since been reinstated.

The oppressive conditions that face the majority of Russia’s workers are intersecting with a growing economic crisis. Inflation, particularly for basic consumer items, is rising sharply, placing many essential items out of workers’ reach and threatening millions with destitution. The efforts of Washington and NATO to remove the Putin government by creating an economic catastrophe in the country are taking a toll, intersecting with the brutalization of the population at the hands of its own ruling class.

Russia vows “lightning” response to NATO as war threatens to spill beyond Ukraine

Andre Damon

Following the declaration by US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this week that the US is seeking to “weaken” Russia, and that the US is already in a “fight” with the country, Russian President Vladimir Putin made his most open threat to date to retaliate against NATO members for their  involvement in the war.

“If someone decides to intervene into the ongoing events from the outside and create unacceptable strategic threats for us, they should know that our response to those oncoming blows will be swift, lightning-fast,” Putin told Russian lawmakers on Wednesday.

“We have all the tools for this — ones that no one can brag about. And we won’t brag. We will use them if needed. And I want everyone to know this. We have already taken all the decisions on this.”

A Ukrainian soldier stands near an apartment ruined from Russian shelling in Borodyanka, Ukraine, Wednesday, Apr. 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Also on Wednesday, Russian officials said that a large batch of weapons supplied to Ukraine by NATO members were destroyed in a missile strike in Central Ukraine.

A day prior, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had warned that NATO-supplied weapons shipments inside Ukraine “will be a legitimate target for the Russian Armed Forces.”

“Warehouses, including in the west of Ukraine, have become such a target more than once. How else could it be? NATO is essentially going to war with Russia through a proxy and arming that proxy. War means war.”

On Wednesday, Russia cut off natural gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria in response to crippling economic sanctions levied by the US and European Union. The Kremlin is also threatening to end its supplies to other NATO members, including Germany, which is highly dependent on Russia for natural gas.

Also on Wednesday, fires at arms depots inside Russian territory were reported. That same day, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised in a Senate briefing the prospect that “Ukrainians should take actions that go beyond their borders”—clearly referring to attacks on Russian territory.

The Russian military said in a statement that strikes inside Russia would lead to retaliatory attacks on “decision-making centers in Kiev.” Attacks on Russia “will immediately lead to our proportional response,” the Ministry of Defense said. “As we have warned, the Russian armed forces are on standby around the clock to retaliate with long-range high-precision weapons against decision-making centers in Kiev.”

Blasts were also reported in Moldova. The Financial Times reported, “The mysterious blasts, which targeted the state security ministry, a radio tower and military unit, happened days after a senior Russian commander claimed Russian speakers in Moldova were being oppressed.”

Russian forces are meanwhile pushing deeper into Eastern Ukraine, capturing several villages. The Russian army has been concentrating their advances on the south and east of the country after having retreated from the suburbs of the capital of Kiev.

Commenting on the widening scale of the war, New York Times reporters David E. Sanger and Steven Erlanger published an article noting, “Fears Are Mounting That Ukraine War Will Spill Across Borders.” They conclude:

“For nine weeks, President Biden and the Western allies have emphasized the need to keep the war for Ukraine inside Ukraine.

Now, the fear in Washington and European capitals is that the conflict may soon escalate into a wider war—spreading to neighboring states, to cyberspace and to NATO countries suddenly facing a Russian cutoff of gas. Over the long term, such an expansion could evolve into a more direct conflict between Washington and Moscow…”

They continue,

“Seth G. Jones, who directs the European Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said on Wednesday that “the risk of a widening war is serious right now.”

“Russian casualties are continuing to mount, and the U.S. is committed to shipping more powerful weapons that are causing those casualties,” Mr. Jones said. Sooner or later, he added, Russia’s military intelligence service might begin to target those weapons shipments inside NATO’s borders.”

Sanger and Erlanger warned that while Russia “has never attacked … supply lines inside NATO territory. Now, there are signs that the restraint is fracturing.”

The US media, meanwhile, is full of increasingly open and unguarded calls for nuclear war. On Wednesday, Seth Cropsey, a deputy undersecretary of the Navy, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled, “The U.S. Should Show It Can Win a Nuclear War.”

He writes, “The reality is that unless the U.S. prepares to win a nuclear war, it risks losing one. Robert C. O’Brien, a former White House national security adviser, proposed a series of conventional responses, which are necessary but not sufficient.”

Cropsey concludes, “The ability to win is the key. By arming surface ships with tactical nuclear weapons as well as attacking a nuclear-missile sub and thus reducing Russian second-strike ability, the U.S. undermines Russia’s ability to fight a nuclear war.”

He then declares,

“Jeopardizing Russian second-strike capability would tangibly raise the military stakes. Mr. Putin could no longer unleash his nuclear arsenal with impunity. Instead, he would need to reckon with the possibility that NATO could decapitate the Kremlin—yes, suffering casualties in the process, but still decapitate it.”

The proxy war in Ukraine is emerging increasingly openly as a war between Russia and NATO, threatening to spill over into a war throughout the European continent. The United States has worked to systematically destroy any prospect of a peaceful settlement of the war, and is instead doing everything to fan the flames to instigate the conflict.

The aims being pursued increasingly openly by the United States in this war inevitably involve the expansion of the conflict. There is nothing left of the fiction that the United States and NATO are not at war with Russia. In pursuit of regime change, the dismemberment of Russia and the plundering of its vast resources, American imperialism is risking nuclear war.