4 Nov 2020

Surge in coronavirus pandemic produces deadly situation in hospitals throughout Europe

Markus Salzmann


The massive increase in COVID-19 infections is pushing hospitals throughout Europe to their limits. In Germany, the number of intensive care patients grows daily. Doctors’ representatives and other experts are increasingly warning of the consequences of a shortage of nursing staff and intensive care beds.

The Robert Koch Institute reported 1,700 coronavirus patients in Germany’s intensive care units on Friday morning. By Saturday, the figure had risen to 1,830 and by Monday to 2,243. The number of cases subject to intensive care treatment has almost tripled in the past two weeks.

Intensive care bed (Photo: Calleamanecer / Wikimedia)

Despite these figures, the federal and state governments have not imposed a necessary lockdown, but only highly inconsistent restrictions on contact. Schools and daycare centres remain open so that work can continue in the factories and other workplaces.

The German Hospital Federation expects the number of intensive care patients to reach a new peak soon. The head of the organization, Gerald Gass, assumes the previous peak of April will be exceeded in two to three weeks and can no longer be prevented. “Anyone who is admitted to hospital in three weeks is already infected today,” Gass told the Bild newspaper.

Due to the extreme shortage of intensive care specialists, Gass announced that nursing staff from non-intensive medical areas would be deployed in intensive care units, which was “not optimal.” This is highly dangerous for patients. The fact that it is nevertheless being considered shows how desperate the situation is. Due to the complex equipment and procedures in intensive care, the use of untrained personnel poses considerable risks. At the same time, training and instruction can hardly be provided adequately due to the stressful situation in the clinics.

“There is not much leeway left in some federal states. Berlin has only 14 percent free intensive care beds, Bremen 17 percent,” warned Uwe Janssens, president of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine (DIVI). This was also since most clinics are still carrying out their “routine programme.” For many clinics, the urgently needed conversion of capacities to coronavirus cases means financial ruin. While in the spring there was a flat-rate payment to hospitals for keeping a certain number of beds free for coronavirus cases, this no longer exists.

At the same time, the care of other acutely ill patients is also at risk. According to a report by broadcaster NDR, a second intensive care unit has now been opened at the University Hospital in Essen. Ninety patients with COVID-19 are being treated there, 27 of whom are receiving intensive medical care.

The director of the Eye Clinic, Nikolaos Bechrakis, reports that he and his team operate on 400 people every year, many with serious tumours, where every day counts to prevent the threat of blindness. “In the first wave, we already had to lose 25 to 30 percent of our capacity. I am afraid that when the second wave comes it will be more severe,” said Bechrakis.

Saarland’s State Premier Tobias Hans (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) admitted the severity of the crisis this week. “The situation is frightening and alarming: soon many of the 1,900 hospitals in Germany may collapse,” he said. Wards and emergency rooms may have to be closed due to missing or sick staff. “Triage and Italian conditions threaten if we don’t take countermeasures now.”

It is becoming more and more obvious that claims that the lessons from the situation in spring had been learned and that care in German hospitals was stable, which Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) repeats like a mantra, are nothing more than deliberate misinformation intended to lull the population into a false sense of security.

The federal and state governments have done nothing to prevent the impending collapse in health care. Although experts have been calling for it for a long time, there is not even a proper record of how many nursing staff with intensive care training are available in Germany. Also, as the number of infections increases, a growing number of doctors and nurses are becoming ill. There is no uniform testing strategy to effectively protect employees in hospitals, nursing homes and similar institutions.

Instead, the precarious situation is at the expense of doctors and nursing staff, who are already working at the limits of their ability to cope with stress. Lower Saxony has again increased the maximum working hours for employees in clinics and nursing homes to up to 60 hours per week and up to 12 hours a day. The other federal states will follow suit. The measure had already been decided at the beginning of the pandemic. Now it will remain in place until May next year.

“For months, the country has been asleep rather than preparing medical facilities for the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic,” Nadya Klarmann, president of the Chamber of Nursing Care, noted. “Now it is up to the employees in the systemically important professions to again save the situation at the risk to their own health.”

The situation is alarming throughout Europe. The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned against overloading the health care system. “Many countries in the northern hemisphere are currently seeing a worrying increase in cases and hospital admissions,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said recently in Geneva.

In Austria, the situation is worsening day by day. The government has stated that with 6,000 new infections per day, there is a risk of overloading intensive care beds in hospitals. In extreme cases, doctors would then also have to decide who would be treated and who would not, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (Austrian Peoples Party, ÖVP) noted.

On November 4, a record 6,901 new infections were reported in the Alpine republic. The measures in force since Tuesday, such as a curfew from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., are unlikely to prevent an increase in cases and deaths. Despite the seriousness of the situation, businesses, daycare centres and the majority of schools—all drivers of the pandemic—remain open.

In Belgium, the health care system is already collapsing. A growing number of clinics can no longer deliver intensive care. According to the trade unions, dozens of doctors and nurses are on duty despite being infected with coronavirus. They receive no protection or support from the government or the trade unions.

“We have to choose between a bad or a very bad solution,” said Philippe Devos from the Federation of Medical Unions. The very bad solution was not to treat patients at all, broadcaster Deutsche Welle quoted the union official.

In terms of population, Belgium is the European country with the most new infections. By November 2, 1,074 out of 100,000 inhabitants had been infected with the virus within the previous seven days.

Switzerland also has an extremely high seven-day incidence, with 588 infections per 100,000 inhabitants. On Monday alone, almost 22,000 new infections were registered in the country with almost 9 million inhabitants. According to media reports, the government in Bern estimates that all intensive care units will be occupied by the middle of the month. In some cantons, such as Geneva and Valais, the treatment limit has already been reached. In Valais, 2,530 out of 100,000 inhabitants have been infected in the last 14 days, in Geneva 2,373 out of 100,000.

The government of the richest European country, whose pharmaceutical industry has an annual turnover of €80 billion, quickly lifted the initial protective measures in the spring, took hardly any precautionary measures and is now sacrificing the lives of countless people. More than 2,400 people have now died of COVID-19 in Switzerland, with 80 each day last Friday and Monday alone.

The situation in Eastern Europe has been extremely tense for weeks. COVID patients from the Czech Republic have already had to be brought to Germany for treatment. The Ministry of Health in Prague has ordered the postponement of all elective surgery.

In the Czech Republic, there were 782 infections per 100,000 inhabitants in the last seven days. According to the doctors’ medical association, more than 13,000 employees in the health care sector have become infected with coronavirus. If they did not continue to work when they showed no symptoms, providing treatment would no longer be possible. In the meantime, the government has imposed a night-time curfew. But that will hardly be enough to avert the complete collapse of hospitals.

In Poland, hospitals are completely overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing number of COVID-19 patients. The hospital in the border town of Slubice, which has been reconfigured for coronavirus patients, recently reported four deaths from the disease within 24 hours, according to broadcaster rbb. On HTS local television, managing director Lukasz Kaczmarek spoke about the catastrophic situation. “There is a lack of cleaning agents, body-care products such as cream and shower gel. That is bad. Also, our hospital has an infrastructure from the 1960s. We have to cope with this situation.” There was also a lack of disinfectants, food and garbage bags.

The situation in France and Britain is similar.

Breonna Taylor’s mother demands an independent investigation into police killing after exposure of grand jury whitewash

Steve Filips


Tamika Palmer, the mother of Breonna Taylor, the African American emergency medical technician who was killed by police during a surprise raid on her home, is demanding an independent prosecutor and a new grand jury to investigate her daughter’s death at the hands of three members of the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) on March 13 just after 12:30 a.m.

A third juror came forward on Friday, corroborating with the first two jurors who went public last month with criticism of the presentation of the grand jury’s decision not to bring any charges in Taylor’s death made in September by Kentucky’s attorney general Daniel Cameron, who is African American and a rising star in the Republican Party.

People gather in Jefferson Square awaiting word on charges against police officers, Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2020, in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)

The office of Kevin Glogower, the attorney representing the three jurors, explained in a statement, “After much reflection, Anonymous Grand Juror #3 has joined Anonymous Grand Jurors #1 and #2 in promoting truth and transparency regarding the Breonna Taylor case. Anonymous Grand Juror #3 firmly supports the fact that no additional charges were allowed at the conclusion of their service.” The grand jurors are remaining anonymous for fear for their own security.

This past week, Palmer wrote the Kentucky Prosecutors Advisory Council stating, “At minimum, my daughter deserves, as do all aggrieved victims, a competent and capable prosecution team which is committed to properly investigating the case, evaluating the law from an unbiased lens, presenting the evidence and allowing the grand jurors to perform the functions guaranteed to them under the law.”

Cameron insisted that the “grand jury agreed” with the story that the police put forward when they broke in and began their rapid fire shooting spree killing Breonna Taylor.

“While there are six possible homicide charges under Kentucky law,” Cameron stated at his press conference announcing the charging decision in September, “these charges are not applicable to the facts before us because our investigation showed, and the Grand Jury agreed, that Mattingly and Cosgrove (police) were justified” in firing their guns.

Cameron in fact did not present the possibility of six homicide charges against police to the grand jury, spurring the three jurors to set the record straight.

Kenneth Walker III, Breonna’s boyfriend, maintains that there was knocking at the door, but no verbal warning from police was heard, he further stated that he fired a warning shot at what he believed were unidentified intruders.

Detective Brett Hankinson, since terminated from the LMPD, who fired shots from an outdoor patio into the apartment, was the only one charged with three counts of wanton endangerment in the first degree for recklessly firing 10 bullets, with some of them entering into an occupied neighboring apartment.

Protests over Taylor’s murder in Louisville were amplified after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May triggered protests in cities across the US and internationally. The Democratic Party has consistently worked to suppress the protests, which are of a multiracial and multiethnic character, by promoting racial identity politics.

The working class, regardless of an individual worker’s race or ethnicity, is the target of police violence. While African Americans are disproportionately victims of the police killing, police violence is ultimately a class issue, finding its source in the capitalist system and the historic levels of social inequality it has produced.

A report last week by the Manual RedEye, a student newspaper in Louisville, exposed the fact that during the administration of Democratic Governor Steve Beshear the Kentucky State Police had been trained with a slideshow which favorably quoted German dictator Adolf Hitler and Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

The slideshow was part of a course which urged officers to be “warriors” and “ruthless killer[s].” This reactionary, racist, and fascist ideology and culture is endemic to police departments across the US and internationally.

The police are special bodies of armed men tasked with protecting the property interests of the rich. Changing the racial composition of police forces and prosecutors, presented as a solution by the Democratic Party, along with implementing racial sensitivity training, body cameras and other reforms has done nothing to slow the pace of murder and brutality meted out by the police.

According to the latest tally by killedbypolice.net, at least 818 people have been shot and killed by the police this year, on track to match the approximately 1,000 victims in each of the last five years.

Australian billionaires celebrate skyrocketing wealth while pandemic forces workers into poverty

Max Boddy


While workers face Great Depression-style unemployment and poverty, the wealth of Australia’s elite has soared. The Australian Financial Review (AFR) annual rich list for 2020 has revealed that 200 individuals and families increased their combined fortunes by more than $82 billion during the past year, to a total of $424 billion.

Despite, or in many cases because of, the COVID-19 pandemic, the total wealth in the hands of this tiny proportion of the population jumped by more than in the previous year, before the coronavirus crisis emerged. The $82 billion rise, or 24 percent, far surpassed the $59 billion, or 21 percent, increase on the 2019 list.

There is an air of triumphalism in the coverage of this result. In a video introducing the Rich List, editor Michael Bailey said the “big trend, amazingly, was that the total wealth pot actually went up” when “everyone assumed it was going to be going down because of coronavirus.”

Australia now has 104 billionaires, up from 91 the year before, and the cut off for being added to the list rose to $540 million, up from $472 million in 2019. At the top of the list are two “ore-ligarchs,” iron ore magnates Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest. Each more than doubled their worth, to a combined wealth of over $52 billion, mainly on the back of growing ore sales to China.

The top three positions on the AFR rich list [Screenshot: https://www.afr.com/rich-list]

By contrast, millions of workers have been pushed into poverty and destitution. A Foodbank report in October revealed that food relief requests have risen by 47 percent, on average, since the pandemic began. Some 43 percent of food insecure people were going a whole day without food, compared to 30 percent last year.

Glorifying the obscene wealth accumulated by those on the Rich List, the AFR magazine included numerous photos and descriptions of the billionaires’ luxury mansions and other property holdings.

One example is Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-chief executive of tech company Atlassian, who rose to fifth on the list this year with a personal fortune of $16.93 billion. His primary residence is the $100 million Fairwater estate on Sydney Harbour’s Point Piper beachfront, “the only nine-figure house sale in Australia.”

Cannon-Brookes has reportedly spent almost $250 million on property over the past decade. His holdings include a $24.5 million purchase in Newport on Sydney’s northern beaches and the $18.5 million former residence of Germany’s consul-general in Sydney’s Woollahra, as well as his $15 million New South Wales Southern Highlands farm, Widgee Waa. His most recent purchase was an empty block of land on Sydney’s northern beaches, bought for $1.425 million after one day on the market.

Much of the wealth at the top still rests on the financial parasitism and speculation that has seen property prices surge over the past decade, forcing millions of households to take out massive loans just to buy a house. The property tycoons, with combined fortunes of $81.56 billion, dominate the list.

An AFR article trumpeted that “four of the 10 richest Australians made their wealth in the property industry and retain billionaire status even amid the uncertain economy and global health crisis” and “almost a quarter of the richest 200 built their empires in the property sector.”

However, the largest increase in wealth was extracted by the “ore-ligarchs.” This was due in part to mines remaining open throughout the pandemic. The super-profits made by the mining magnates allowed them to develop and roll out mass testing of their employees—a service never provided to the rest of the population.

Chris Ellison, a West Australian mining businessman, joined the billionaires club this year. His company developed equipment that has the capacity to test up to 10,000 people a day and deliver results in three hours.

This meant that when Brazil was devastated by the spread of COVID-19, which caused the shutting down of some mining operations, Australian exporters were able to step in and rack up billions in profits.

The collective wealth of the 12 individuals on the Rich List whose wealth is in some way derived from mining in Western Australia hit $79.8 billion, swollen by a massive $43.8 billion in 18 months.

Another sector boomed thanks to the pandemic. Afterpay, a pay later technology company, boosted its profits because millions of people sought delayed payment options as they faced the prospect of unemployment and poverty. Its founders, Anthony Eisen and Nick Molnar, rose from the bottom of last year’s rich list to numbers 50 and 51, worth $1.86 billion each.

Yet the Rich List insisted that such individuals, whose wealth and lifestyle is unimaginable to the majority of people, have also struggled during the pandemic.

“The burdens of the COVID-19 lockdown across Australia didn’t discriminate between the super-rich, the poor and those in between,” the AFR claimed, while conceding that the super-rich were better off “financially to weather the crisis.”

In reality, Australia’s federal, state and territory governments, Liberal-National Coalition and Labor alike, have played a large part in boosting corporate profits during the pandemic. First, assisted by the trade unions, they have kept most large industries open, including mining, manufacturing, construction and warehousing operations.

Second, they handed out unprecedented subsidies, incentives and cheap loans totalling some $400 billion, with the lion’s share going to big business.

As a result, the decades-long accumulation of obscene wealth at one end of society, acquired through the creation of poverty, devastation and misery at the other end, is accelerating.

The Rich List was launched in 1984, the first full year of the trade union-backed Labor government of Bob Hawke, which began a vast redistribution of wealth towards the top. Then the 200 richest people had a combined wealth of $6.4 billion. There has been a 66-fold increase in wealth for the top 200 in 36 years.

The pandemic is rapidly widening the social gulf. According to modelling conducted at the Australian National University, another three quarters of a million people have already been thrown into poverty by September’s cuts to JobKeeper wage subsidies and JobSeeker welfare payments. About 4 million people, or 16 percent of the population, are now living in poverty.

Chinese government blocks Jack Ma’s major IPO

Nick Beams


The world of global finance capital has been delivered something of a shock by the sudden and unexpected decision of Chinese government regulators to block the initial public offering (IPO) of the financial firm Ant, a spinoff from the Alibaba firm controlled by one of the country’s richest oligarchs, Jack Ma.

The Ant IPO, which was to have been launched today, was aimed at raising around $37 billion. As such, it was set to be the largest such launch in history, beating the previous record set by the IPO of the Saudi Arabian oil giant Aramco last year which raised $29.4 billion.

Ant Group logo. (Original graphic)

The floating of the company, set up six years ago as the means Alibaba used to handle digital payments, was halted on Tuesday when the Shanghai Stock Exchange, which together with Hong Kong was to organise launch, said it would not go ahead.

The decision came after four Chinese regulatory agencies summoned Ma to a meeting on Monday. Following the meeting, Ant issued a statement that Ma and regulators had exchanged views regarding the “health and stability of the financial sector” and that the company was committed to implementing regulations.

But it was not enough to halt the suspension of the IPO. In its statement, the Shanghai Exchange said Ma had been called in for “supervisory interviews” and there had been “other major issues,” including changes in “the financial technology regulatory environment.”

Those changes, it said, “may cause your company to fail to meet the issuance and listing disclosure requirements. Our exchange has decided to postpone the listing of your company.”

The decision to block the IPO was clearly taken at the highest levels of the Chinese government.

As Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade policy and economics at Cornell University and an expert on China, told the Wall Street Journal: “The fact that [Chinese regulators] waited so close to the listing to pull it is very striking. This sort of thing doesn’t happen without everybody in the top echelon of the political realm coming on board.”

The underwriters for the IPO included Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and China International Capital Corp. Investors, including China’s national pension fund and US firms such as BlackRock and Fidelity Investments, were in line to reap what the Wall Street Journal described as “windfalls” from Ant’s market debut.

Wall Street banks, including Citigroup, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley were set to share in at least $300 million in fees as a result of the IPO—a payout described by the director of a Hong Kong-based financial recruitment firm, cited by the Financial Times, as “humungous.”

There appear to be two interconnected issues involved in decision to block the IPO at this stage—one financial and the other political.

The financial issue centres on the operations of Ant and the influence it has on the Chinese financial system which have been of concern for Chinese regulators for some time. It has organised a vast amount of consumer transactions. It also sells insurance and mutual funds to millions of people. Significantly, Ant has designated itself as a technology company and not a financial firm in order to try to avoid the regulations to which banks are subject.

In a comment published by the official Chinese newsagency Xinhua on Monday, the head of the consumer protection bureau at China’s central bank, Guo Wuping, criticised “fintech companies [for] abusing their hegemonic position” and rather than “taking from the people their data to benefit the people, [they use] it to further some company interests.”

Guo said fintech companies charged higher fees for their lending products than the credit cards issued by banks and they often lured people into overspending so that “some people in low income groups and young people fall deep into debt traps.”

An unnamed senior executive at a major international bank in Hong Kong told the Financial Times that the move was a signal that Beijing “wants to put Ant on a leash before the monster becomes uncontrollable.”

The political conflict came into public view at a financial conference held in Shanghai on October 24. The keynote speaker was China’s vice-president Wang Qishan. Wang is close to China’s president Xi Jinping, and functioned as the head of the president’s so-called anti-corruption drive from 2012 to 2017—the means used by Xi to consolidate his power.

Making his first public appearance in almost a year, Wang told the conference there had to be an emphasis on financial stability. “There should be a fine balance between encouraging financial innovation, invigorating the market, and building regulatory capacity,” he said. “Safety always comes first.”

In his address to the conference Ma directly took issue with Chinese regulators in comments that challenged the positions advanced by the vice-president.

The Chinese leadership has been attempting to present itself as the upholders of the international and financial order as it seeks to win global support to counter the economic warfare being waged against it by the United States.

Ma directly took issue with one of the central foundations of the international banking order—the Basel accords under which banks are required to maintain sufficient liquid assets to cover financial risks.

“The Basel accords are like an old people’s club,” Ma told the conference. “We can’t use yesterday’s methods to regulate the future. There’s no systemic financial risk in China because there’s no financial system in China. The risks are a lack of systems.”

He attacked the major Chinese state-owned banks for having a “pawnshop” mentality, meaning they demanded collateral for loans. Ant’s business model is based on doing away with such constraints.

Ma told the conference “many of the world’s problems” flowed from “only talking about risk control, not talking about development, not thinking about young people’s or developing countries’ opportunities.”

As Martin Chorzempa, a research fellow at the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics, commented to the Wall Street Journal, Ma’s remarks “looked like a direct contradiction to the lines being proposed by one of the most powerful people of China. This looks like a huge violation of the norms of relations between the government and the private companies.”

Ma was speaking in support of his own immediate interests as he sought to increase the power of his financial conglomerate. But he would not have done so without the belief that his views had support in key sections of the Chinese economic and financial oligarchy which has come into conflict with at least some of the constraints imposed by the Communist party leadership.

No doubt that was the conclusion drawn in ruling circles in Beijing. As the Financial Times noted: “The dramatic turn of events is a reminder to Chinese businesses and their investors that they still answer to the Communist party—no matter their pedigree.”

Sri Lankan government rejects total lockdown amid surging COVID-19 infections

Pradeep Ramanayake


Confronted with rising anger among workers, who forced the closure of an infected factory, Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse on Sunday announced an extension of a lockdown in selected areas and “home quarantine” for suspected cases. At the same time, he tried to blame ordinary people for the resurging COVID-19 pandemic in the country.

Last week, the MAS Holdings-owned Bodyline garment factory, which employs about 6,000 workers, was compelled to close down. One member of a 200-strong team tested positive. When 145 team members were tested, another 34 were found to be infected. Workers’ opposition forced the factory to shut.

MAS is a giant company, with factories in 15 countries employing around 99,000 workers, producing apparel for international brands such as Victoria’s Secret, Marks & Spencer and Calvin Klein.

Nurses protesting in Kandy last July

Rajapakse made his announcement in a discussion with the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19 at his office. The media ran reports painting those measures as the government intensifying “the battle against rapid spread of COVID-19.” In reality, the decisions are aimed at continuing corporate operations, particularly factory production for exports, forcing workers to stay on the job.

Basil Rajapakse, the president’s younger brother, who heads the PTF, said on Monday: “The majority opinion was to impose a nationwide curfew.” He added that health authorities wanted to “stop everything at least for 10 days.” However, the lockdown “was limited to the Western Province.”

Since one coronavirus infected worker was found accidentally on October 4 at a Brandix Fashion Wear factory at Minuwangoda, the number of cases nationally has rapidly increased, to over 12,000 with 24 deaths, as of Wednesday. These numbers understate the toll because the government is not conducting systematic testing.

The president extended a lockdown of the Western Province until November 9. Major commercial, industrial and administrative institutions are located in this province. In the North-Western Province some areas in the Kurunegala district have been isolated also.

However, these restrictions do not affect big business or state institutions. Last week, President Rajapakse told the cabinet that economic activities would continue without hindrance, despite the pandemic. The Colombo government and the ruling class are following similar, criminal pro-business policies as their counterparts in other countries.

After the country felt the impact of the global coronavirus earlier this year, Rajapakse declared that the government had uniquely handled the pandemic and was able to control it, unlike other countries. Over recent weeks this lie has been exposed as the pandemic began to spread.

During the last nine months the government has taken no measures to overhaul the health system, which has been increasingly run down during the past four decades under successive governments.

Last week, the head of the National Operation Centre for Prevention of COVID-19 Outbreak, Army Commander Shavendra Silva, said the first contacts of infected patients would undergo home quarantine but would not be sent to designated quarantine centres. That is because there is inadequate space and funds. Yesterday, it was reported that nearly 64,000 persons are already in “home quarantine.”

The government is not recommending systematic polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests for people in home quarantine. Tests should only be conducted on the 10th day of quarantine, the president has ordered.

Rajapakse cynically emphasised “the importance of conducting continuous and regular random tests.” Yet the government has just 25 PCR test machines, which can process about 8,000 samples daily, state health spokesman doctor Jayaruwan Bandara said. One machine was broken for days and only repaired this week.

An editorial in the pro-government Island newspaper indicated the run-down condition of the public health sector. It warned that limited intensive care units could be overwhelmed soon. “The country has only 641 hospitals with 84,728 beds (3.9 beds per 1,000 persons),” it stated, “and most of them were overflowing with patients even before the COVID-19 outbreak. They usually have patients lying under beds and in corridors.”

There are only 91 medical officers and 212 nurses per 100,000 persons. The editorial added: “These numbers are not sufficient. Frontline health workers are burnt out, and some of them have even contracted COVID-19.”

Already, about 100 health workers, including doctors, nurses and other hospital employees, have been infected.

An incident recently reported in the Kaduwela area, near Colombo, demonstrated the impact of the government’s policies on the lives of the affected people. A man who tested positive for the virus had to stay at home for four days. When he called the relevant authorities, he was told there was “no room in hospitals.” He spent all four days outside his house, fearing that his wife and children would become infected.

The government last week decided to use a low-cost Rapid Antibody Test (RAT), which is not widely endorsed by epidemiologists. Sri Lankan medical expert Ravi Rannan Eliya told the Daily Mirror: “RAT tests are not as accurate as PCR, since a majority of those who tested positive are asymptomatic in Sri Lanka.”

Rajapakse is blaming ordinary people in order to cover up the responsibility of the government and the ruling class. At the meeting last Sunday he said: “This is not a virus dropped by the government. It is a worldwide health issue. People have a great responsibility. Obviously this situation has arisen because the people have given up that responsibility.”

Rajapakse’s priority is propping up the corporate elite, not funding the health sector. The government has released to big business, via the Central Bank, funds totalling 178 billion rupees, but for 2021 the government has allocated only 159 billion rupees ($US873 million) for health expenditure.

At the same time, the government has set aside 500 billion rupees for the military and internal security agencies. The Rajapakse regime is preparing to suppress working class unrest.

The government is keeping the economy open for the benefit of the business elite, particularly for export production. Export Development Board chairman Prabhash Subasinghe last week said exporters should capitalise on the European Union’s recently extended Generalised Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP) tax concessions.

Sri Lankan exporters have a “natural hedge because of the GSP,” while “creating a cost advantage to the European importers,” Subasinghe said.

The EU is the biggest market for Sri Lankan exports, while the US is the largest importer of Sri Lankan textiles. Giant supply chains are reaping huge profits from apparel and other imports from sweatshops in Sri Lanka, as well as those in Bangladesh, Vietnam and other impoverished countries.

Foreign investors, some in partnership with local big business, are running factories in Board of Investment (BOI) approved operations, including in free trade zones (FTZ), amid the deadly pandemic, with the Rajapakse regime’s blessing.

Some 1,615 factories outside the FTZs employ 580,000 workers, while 133,000 workers are employed inside FTZs. According to the BOI figures, however, only 28,670 PCR tests have been conducted among these more than 700,000 workers. Even with such low numbers of tests, more than 1,500 workers have tested COVID-19 positive.

According to BOI director general Sanjaya Mohottala: “All the factories in general are strictly adhering to health and safety guidelines. The BOI is strongly upholding the relevant regulations.”

The reality is the opposite. When the government announced the reopening of these factories at the end of April, the employers adopted minimum safety measures, only to abandon them within a few weeks.

It is on record that the Brandix Fashion Ware management did not allow workers at its Minuwangoda plant to seek medical treatment, even when hundreds of them showed symptoms of infection during September. When the company was compelled to carry out the testing of all workers in early October, more than 1,000 employees were found to be infected.

The only concern of the Rajapakse government and big business is the extraction of profit from workers’ labour power, not human lives.

Biden nears narrow Electoral College victory while Republicans lead in Senate

Patrick Martin


Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden moved to within a single state of claiming victory in the US presidential election Wednesday, as television networks called Wisconsin and Michigan for the former vice president, and Fox News and the Associated Press called Arizona for him as well. A narrow Biden victory, now the most likely outcome if vote-counting is allowed to proceed, would be well below the double-digit win forecast by many polls.

Biden now has 264 electoral votes, only six fewer than the 270 required to win the White House, while Trump has 217 electoral votes. Vote counting is continuing in four states that have not been called—Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Nevada. Trump leads in the first three, but the votes still to be counted are primarily Democratic, either mail-in votes or votes cast in urban centers.

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020, in Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

In Pennsylvania, the counting of mail ballots throughout Wednesday, most of them in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas, cut Trump’s statewide lead from 700,000 to 212,000, with more than 900,000 votes still uncounted. The process is expected to take until Friday if it is not interrupted by one of several lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign seeking to halt the count.

In Georgia, Trump’s lead has shrunk from more than 100,000 to 38,000 as counting has continued of the huge number of votes cast in the Atlanta area, which went heavily for Biden. In North Carolina, Trump’s lead stood at 77,000, but about 250,000 ballots remained to be counted, mainly in urban centers like Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, Asheville and the Raleigh-Durham area. In addition, mail ballots that will be counted if postmarked by Nov. 3 continue to be received in North Carolina.

Given the electoral arithmetic, Trump must win the three states where he is ahead and overcome the Biden edge in one of the states where the former vice president has a narrow lead. This seems unlikely since the Wisconsin vote count has been completed, Biden’s Michigan lead is growing rather than shrinking as uncounted votes in Detroit, Grand Rapids and Flint are tabulated, and the outstanding votes in Arizona and Nevada are mail-in ballots, which have tended to favor the Democrats.

After the Wisconsin secretary of state announced that vote-counting had been effectively completed, with Biden holding a lead of 20,533 votes, about 0.6 percent of the total vote, the Trump campaign announced that it would seek a recount. The recount would not take place until after Dec. 1, when the state government officially certifies the final results based on submissions from township clerks.

The Trump campaign has also filed a lawsuit seeking to halt vote-counting in Michigan, claiming that Republican observers have been denied sufficient access to facilities in Detroit where mail ballots are being checked and tabulated. A bevy of lawsuits were filed in Pennsylvania, including one submitted directly to the US Supreme Court, where Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett has just taken her seat. That lawsuit asks the court to reverse its previous decision to allow Pennsylvania to accept mail ballots until Friday, as long as they were put into the mail by Election Day.

Also on Wednesday, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in Chatham County, Georgia, in a bid to delay or block the counting of absentee ballots. Campaign officials said they were considering filing similar suits in a dozen other counties in the state.

Trump’s refusal to accept his apparent defeat at the polls, including a loss in the popular vote that already exceeds his three million vote deficit in 2016, could lead to a protracted period of political uncertainty, court intervention and provocations aimed at mobilizing fascist supporters against his political opponents.

In the congressional elections, the Democratic Party performed even more poorly than Biden in the presidential contest. In the Senate, the Democrats needed a three-seat gain to take control, but so far have made a net gain of only one, winning Republican seats in Colorado and Arizona but losing the seat of Senator Doug Jones in Alabama.

The other seriously endangered Democratic incumbent, Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, edged ahead of his Republican challenger John James Wednesday afternoon. Republican incumbents defeated well-financed Democratic challengers in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas, while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell won reelection easily in Kentucky.

The result is likely to be a 50–48 Senate, with the edge to the Republicans, while two seats are still to be determined in Georgia. In the contest for a full six-year term in Georgia, Senator David Perdue was leading his Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff, but a Libertarian candidate was taking 2.3 percent of the vote. If Perdue fails to win 50 percent of the vote (he is at 50.4 percent at this writing), the two candidates would advance to a runoff in January.

A runoff has already been set in the second contest, which is for the remaining two years of the term of Senator Johnny Isakson, who resigned because of ill health. Democrat Raphael Warnock and appointed Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler advanced to the runoff, with 32 percent and 26 percent of the vote, respectively.

If Biden wins the presidency, giving a Vice President Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, control of the upper house would be determined by the outcome of the two Georgia runoff contests on Jan. 5, 2021, just as the new Congress is assembling and only 15 days before the inauguration of the new president.

The Democrats retained control of the House of Representatives, but they actually suffered a net loss of seats, perhaps as many as half a dozen, rather than the gain of 10–20 seats predicted by pre-election polling.

At least seven Democratic incumbents have been defeated, including Colin Peterson in Minnesota, Abby Finkenauer in Iowa, Joe Cunningham in South Carolina, Kendra Horn in Oklahoma and Xochitl Torres Small in New Mexico. Two first-term incumbent Democrats lost their seats in south Florida, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala, defeated by Cuban-American Republicans who ran strident anti-communist campaigns.

Other Democrats who were trailing Wednesday as vote-counting continued included Max Rose and Anthony Brindisi in New York, Susan Wild and Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania (where huge numbers of mail-in votes remain to be counted), and Harley Rouda in California.

Democrats appear likely to win only five seats now held by Republicans, including two seats in North Carolina that were remapped as heavily Democratic districts, forcing the Republican incumbents to retire, a seat in the Atlanta, Georgia, suburbs won by Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux, and seats in Arizona and California where Democratic challengers held narrow leads with many votes still to be counted.

More significantly, Democratic challenges to nearly two dozen Republican-held seats seemed to be failing, including incumbents in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Nebraska, Arkansas and Washington, and Republican-held open seats in Virginia, Indiana, Texas, Colorado, Montana and California.

Despite the retirement of a seven Republican incumbent House members in Texas, dubbed the “Texodus” in the media, not a single seat in the huge state changed hands. Every incumbent, Democratic and Republican, was reelected, and Republicans won every one of the seven vacant seats.

Most of the 11 CIA Democrats first elected in 2018 have won reelection, including Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Jared Golden in Maine, Andy Kim, Tom Malinowski and Mikie Sherill in New Jersey, Chrissy Houlahan in Pennsylvania, Elaine Luria in Virginia, and Jason Crow in Colorado. Abigail Spanberger in Virginia was narrowly ahead of her Republican opponent by 5,000 votes out of 450,000 cast. Max Rose in New York was trailing badly, while Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania was awaiting the count of mail ballots that might offset a deficit in the same-day voting.

The results of the voting for both president and Congress has exploded the credibility of polling organizations that predicted a near-landslide for Biden as well as a Democratic takeover of the Senate and significant gains in the House of Representatives. Four years after the 2016 debacle, pollsters working for the corporate media clearly have no way of measuring, let alone understanding, the deep-seated anger among working people generated by the deepening crisis of capitalism.

Official academics downplay the risks of school reopenings as pandemic rages across the US

Benjamin Mateus


Last month, the Atlantic published an article by Professor Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, titled “Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders,” which has since been promoted by multiple media outlets to pressure communities to resume in-person learning in K-12 schools and universities across the United States. The New York Times has been early and steadfast in its endorsement of the policy.

In her article, Oster argued that “fear and bad press” led to the slowing down and cancellation of school reopenings in late summer, even in places “with relatively low positivity rates” like “Chicago, L.A., and Houston—all remote, at least so far.” As her article title suggests, Oster seeks to allay these fears by asserting that schools are not super-spreader locations, where one person transmits COVID-19 to multiple others.

Young boy protesting the opening of schools following an outbreak of COVID in Brooklyn, New York. (Credit: Reuters Carlo Allegri)

In reality, COVID-19 is often transmitted in “super-spreader” fashion because its aerosolized form allows it to linger and concentrate in a closed space, with poorly-ventilated and overcrowded classrooms being highly conducive to this type of spread.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) reported Monday that there were 61,447 new child COVID-19 cases last week, bringing the total in the US to 853,635. This represents 11.1 percent of all US cases, up from 2 percent in April. In October there were nearly 200,000 new cases in children, predominately in Western states such as Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Utah. Other states reporting a greater rise among children include the Dakotas, Kentucky, Michigan and Wisconsin, where recent surges have been significant. These rapid rises coincide with the expansion of school reopenings in recent weeks.

The basis of Oster’s data was limited to the last two weeks of September, where she notes that infections in schools were very contained. She writes: “Our data on almost 200,000 kids in 47 states from the last two weeks of September revealed an infection rate of 0.13 percent among students and 0.24 percent among staff. That’s about 1.3 infections over two weeks in a school of 1,000 kids or 2.2 infections over two weeks in a group of 1,000 staff. Even in high-risk areas of the country, the student rates were well under half a percent.”

According to CISION PRWeb, only 38 percent of K-12 school students were attending schools in person on Labor Day. However, by Election Day that figure exceeded 60 percent, with 35.7 percent of schools offering in-person learning every day, 26.5 percent in a hybrid schedule of 2-3 in-person days per week and 37.8 percent of schools only offering virtual learning.

There are more than 53 million K-12 students enrolled in schools in the US, meaning that over 30 million students are attending schools that now offer some form of in-person learning. The Brown University data set represents 200,000 school children during a period of time when schools were largely being conducted remotely and community transmissions were low.

With close to 10 million cases of COVID-19 in the US, the seven-day moving average has climbed from 35,000 at the end of summer to over 85,000 cases per day. Hospitalizations across the US have exceeded 50,000, and the number of daily fatalities is climbing again. Just yesterday the number of new cases exceeded 108,000.

The conclusions reached by Dr. Oster should be treated with the utmost skepticism. The siloed approach of the study is not appropriate for the complex, dynamic disease transmission of COVID-19, which is spreading amid a complete lack of any coordinated governmental effort to locate the contagion at a granular level. The study is analogous to a blurry, static photograph taken from a film reel. However, these are real-life situations with deadly consequences that require the utmost precision and careful analysis.

In her efforts to downplay the impacts of reopening schools, Dr. Oster is joined by her new colleague at Brown University, Dr. Ashish K. Jha. After working with the Harvard Global Health Institute and serving as a frequent guest on cable news programs throughout the pandemic, Dr. Jha was recently appointed the Dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health.

In an interview Monday with Education Week, Dr. Jha stated callously: “Obviously, if going back to in-person education was going to lead to a lot of infections and deaths, you’d say OK, that’s a cost we can’t bear. But districts that are being too cautious are doing enormous harm to children and families in their communities.”

Seemingly oblivious to the deepening surge of COVID-19 cases across the US, Dr. Jha added: “I’m not saying schools should never close. They probably should at some point if things get really horrible.”

Such casual asides by Oster, Jha and their ilk demonstrate deep resentment of and contempt for the working class, including the more than 50 teachers, staff, maintenance workers and students who have perished from COVID-19 since schools began reopening in late July.

The arguments put forward by these upper-middle-class “liberal” academics follow a similar logic to that proposed by the Great Barrington Declaration of “focused protection,” as advocated by Stanford University neuroradiologist and Trump acolyte Dr. Scott Atlas. This variant of herd immunity is intended to ensure that the workforce is fully engaged in producing profits and not parenting.

More principled academics have approached the question of school reopenings with greater concern. Zoe Hyde, a senior research officer at the University of Western Australia, stated recently: “If community transmission rises, then you will see outbreaks in schools. This has become very apparent in Europe as they battle their second wave.” She added, “It’s quite likely we are not spotting a lot of the infections which are occurring in children.”

Kim Powers, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, commented, “While we know we are only seeing part of ‘the iceberg’ of all infections, we don’t exactly know how much of that iceberg we are seeing.”

As part of its homicidal efforts to achieve “herd immunity” through the mass infection of the population, the Trump administration has aggressively pursued school reopenings. Democrats and Republicans at every level continue to support this reckless policy, while the teachers unions have worked with Democrats to promote the fraud that schools can “safely” reopen with a slight increase in funding.

Numerous studies from case reports, modeling analysis and clinical epidemiological research have found that not only are children able to be infected but are a critical component of community transmission. It is precisely for this reason that it becomes necessary for health departments to make all efforts to follow-up and test children in the chains of transmission.

Additionally, it has been recognized that some children can develop severe Kawasaki-like symptoms that can have significant morbidities and even be fatal. More recently, it has been determined that post-viral syndrome, also known as “long-COVID,” impacts a substantial percentage of the population, including children and young adults. Patients can have an assortment of dysautonomia disorders, which can cause their heart rates to race at dangerously high levels. Others suffer from chronic fatigue and poor concentration for several months.

What is required is a comprehensive strategy of public health measures, including scaled testing, a massive investment in contact-tracing resources, and offering isolation and quarantine facilities that can monitor and treat individuals while safeguarding their families and communities’ livelihood.

Stated bluntly, there is no national contact-tracing infrastructure in the United States. Presently, there are only 53,116 contact tracers in the country, a four-fold increase since April but a far cry short of the more than 100,000 that are recommended. As of October 8, only six states have reached their per capita benchmark: New York, Massachusetts, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Utah, as well as Washington D.C. However, as the surge proceeds, even these limited systems are becoming overwhelmed. It has been estimated that fewer than 5 percent of those infected are traced in time to stop them from transmitting to others.

The continued reopening of schools amid a raging pandemic is unconscionable and will only exacerbate the spread of COVID-19 throughout the US and internationally.

Rank-and-file educators must recognize that they can help bring an end to the pandemic through unifying their efforts against state and federal mandates to resume in-person learning. The official bourgeois academics and health experts, as evidenced by the likes of Oster, Jha and Atlas, place the profit interests of the ruling class above the safety and lives of the working class.

Schools and the children who attend them are society’s most precious resources. Educators play a pivotal role in society as community leaders and stand in a position to sway considerable influence within the broader working class. Only through coordinating their efforts with the working class, in preparations for a general strike movement, will teachers and education workers be able to close schools and ensure that adequate resources are provided for high-quality remote learning and the social needs of working-class families.

COVID-19 cases spike across US as health care workers struggle with understaffing in hospitals

Alex Johnson


With infections and deaths from COVID-19 reaching extraordinary levels in the United States, opposition among nurses and health care workers is brewing against the unmitigated spread of the disease and unpreparedness of hospitals for the deluge of sick patients.

The US is experiencing a sharp increase in coronavirus cases, which is coinciding with dangerous upticks in hospitalizations. Daily confirmed cases have hovered near or above 100,000 over the past several days, reaching record-shattering numbers, surpassing the number of infections in April, when the virus was at its peak. The total death toll now stands at nearly 240,000 as of this writing.

Nurses picket University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago in September

Nowhere are these conditions being expressed more catastrophically than in hospitals, which are witnessing a flood of COVID-19 patients that risk bringing the nation’s health care system to the breaking point. An estimated one-quarter of US counties have reported a peak of new cases in the past month, including most cases in states where officials were most eager to prematurely reopen their economies.

These include Ohio, Indiana, North and South Dakota, Wyoming and Wisconsin. Capacity levels are also becoming more acute, as 80 percent of hospital beds in cities such as Atlanta, Minneapolis and Baltimore near full occupancy.

Shortages of health care workers are reaching disastrous levels. In Montana, which is seeing a dramatic rise in infections, staffing shortages caused by the pandemic have shut down a clinic in the state’s capital. Employees at one Northwestern regional hospital who have been exposed to COVID-19 have been told to continue working despite the danger.

In St. Vincent Hospital in Billings, one of the largest cities in Montana, three COVID-19 units were expanded last week, after the state reported its second-highest daily cases on record. Michael Skehan, St. Vincent’s chief operating officer, called the situation facing the hospital a “crisis.” One healthcare worker from the hospital told NBC News, “I never thought we would be anywhere close to where we are now. I’m a good nurse—and the nurses I work with are good nurses—but we are broken.”

In North Dakota, a state where cases are growing at a rate faster than any other, hospitals are being compelled to forgo elective surgeries again because of the surge. Many hospitals are debating plans to potentially request government assistance to hire more nurses, in the face of the abysmal staffing levels.

Despite the imminent crisis facing hospitals, nurses and health care workers are being forced to contend with the virus with little to no changes in hospital conditions or adequate protection. The anger of health care workers has been expressed in several recent demonstrations demanding safe conditions.

In San Luis Obispo, California, workers at 11 Tenet-owned Hospital conglomerates voted overwhelmingly for strike action in opposition to unsafe conditions and hospital neglect. The 4,300-workforce across the region voted by 96 percent in favor of the strike.

Tenet is a multinational and investor-owned health care corporation with 65 hospitals and more than 500 health care facilities. The company has boasted more than $1 billion in profits in 2020 so far and received more than $250 million in CARES Act-related bailout money from the California state government. The company denounced the strike vote in an official statement and is threatening to hire strikebreakers. “Our hospitals will remain fully operational and patient care will continue uninterrupted,” the company said.

In Connecticut, more than 400 nurses held a two-day strike in mid-October over low wages and severe shortages of personal protective equipment. Dozens of nurses picketed outside William W. Backus Hospital in Norwich to charge the hospital with “unfair labor practice,” with many nurses chanting “PPE over profits.” The Backus Federation of Nurses, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, called the limited strike to allow workers to blow off steam, while behind the scenes it negotiated a sell-out contract that failed to address nurses’ demands.

In Redding, California, health care workers at Shasta Regional Medical Center (SRMC) staged a picket protest outside the hospital for two hours on October 28, demanding a change in the hospital’s patient staffing levels, which have remained intolerably low for months.

According to the California Nurses Association (CNA), health care workers sent Casey Fatch, CEO of the SRMC, a petition a month ago outlining more than 200 staff concerns relating to patient safety protocols and staffing policies. Hospital management, however, has responded to nurses’ demands with a callous dismissal, with Fatch telling a local newspaper, “staffing levels are appropriate and adequate for our census and patient level of care needs.”

The unions have rejected any struggle to unite nurses and other health care workers across the state in a common struggle against the health care monopolies and unsafe staffing levels that threaten both frontline workers and patients. Instead, the AFT, the United Nurses Association of California/Union of Health Care Professionals (UNAC/UHCP) and other unions announced on October 29 that they had sued Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for failing to protect health care workers during the pandemic.

There is no doubt that the Trump administration and OSHA are criminally responsible for conditions that have led to the infection of more than 192,000 health care workers and at least 771 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But equally guilty are the Democrats, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. It was Cuomo who inserted liability protections for nursing home chains into the state budget. A Biden administration will be just as committed to the profit interests of the health care giants as Trump and the Republicans.

The Washington Post reported that the lawsuit was the outcome of frustration on the part of “labor advocates and Democrats” over OSHA’s criminal refusal to enforce safety guidelines in hospitals and other workplaces. During the summer, a judge dismissed a similar lawsuit filed by the AFL-CIO while the pandemic was raging across industries after lockdown measures were lifted.

The OSHA filing is a publicity stunt on the part of the unions, which have done nothing to protect health care workers. That is why nurses, physicians, and other health care workers must form rank-and-file safety committees, independent of the unions, to unite their struggles and enforce health and safety. This must be combined with the development of a powerful political movement of the working class against both corporate-controlled parties, to fight for socialism, including the replacement of for-profit medicine with a socialized system guaranteeing free, high quality care for all.