29 Dec 2020

French testing system missed 9 of 10 COVID-19 cases after first lock-down

Samuel Tissot


On December 21, Nature published a peer-reviewed accelerated article titled, “Under-detection of cases of COVID-19 in France threatens epidemic control.” In the paper, epidemiologists and data scientists led by Giulia Pullano use mathematical modelling to chart the estimated spread of the virus in France over seven weeks—from the end of lock-down measures, on May 11, to June 28. They compare this estimated spread of the virus to the recorded cases to measure the effectiveness of France’s test and trace system in this period.

During this period, Santé publique France (the public health system) recorded a few hundred cases a day. However, the authors estimate that France’s testing system missed around 90,000 symptomatic COVID-19 infections. This amounts to 86 percent of symptomatic cases. As many cases are asymptomatic, however, the true rate of detection in this period was likely well under 10 percent.

A nurse holds a phone while a COVID-19 patient speaks with his family from the intensive care unit at the Joseph Imbert Hospital Center in Arles, southern France, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

This massive under-detection of the virus, due to a lack of testing, removed the real possibility of stamping out the virus in France after the first wave and of preventing the devastating second wave currently engulfing the country and claiming hundreds of lives every day. Since the end of the first lock-down on May 11, 36,621 people have died from the virus—taking the total number of COVID-19 deaths in France to nearly 63,000.

In a comment published by Nature alongside the paper, Columbia University virologist Jeffrey Shaman stated: “The findings suggest that the overall testing and control system in place was inadequate to contain the virus successfully in this country of around 65 million people.” He added that “many countries, as a result of leadership failures, cultural or institutional barriers, or simple fatigue, have failed in their efforts to achieve or maintain control of the virus.”

The paper found that in this seven-week period, only 31 percent of those with COVID-19-like symptoms consulted a doctor. For the majority of the French population, during this period it was necessary to contact a doctor for a prescription before receiving a test. Shaman concluded that this byzantine process “might have disadvantaged communities that have more limited access to health care, and reduced testing rates.”

This suggests that having only 1 percent of tests turn out positive by itself does not guarantee that the pandemic is controlled. Throughout the seven-week period, the proportion of positive tests never exceeded 1 percent. That the virus kept spreading anyway shows that a massive increase in testing—along with a shutdown of non-essential production, services and educational facilities—is critical to control and eradicate the virus. Even with the production of a vaccine, such measures are needed to save hundreds of thousands of lives in the coming year.

The paper’s findings constitute an indictment of the French government’s criminal policy of malign neglect in response to the pandemic—i.e., to protect profits while the virus spreads throughout the population. The premature end of initial lock-down measures, the reopening of schools and workplaces, and an underfunded and underdeveloped testing system, made a deadly resurgence of the virus inevitable.

President Macron announced a lock-down only on March 16, after a wave of wildcat strikes and sick-outs spread across Europe. Directed by the profit demands of big business, the French government prematurely ended the lock-down on May 11 and forced workers back onto the job. This reckless policy was criticized by scientists at the time.

Numerous media groundlessly speculated, however, that “herd immunity” might have been reached in France. The Pasteur Institute refuted these claims, issuing an estimate that only 4.4 percent of the population had been infected and warning: “our results show that, without a vaccine, herd immunity alone will not be enough to avoid a second wave at the end of the lock-down. Efficient control measures must thus be upheld after May 11.”

To falsely reassure workers that the virus was no longer a threat, the government announced a rapid expansion of testing and tracing. The success of test-and-trace campaigns combined with strict lock-downs in countries with sharp initial outbreaks, like China and South Korea, showed such measures effectively control the virus.

Macron said, “Starting on May 11 we will have a new system to make this step [the end of lock-down] a success.” Then-Prime Minister Édouard Philippe described his government’s strategy as “Protect, test, isolate.” This system was detecting less than 10 percent of new cases, however.

The obstacles the government placed to workers’ access to testing suggest that Macron and his ministers were aware testing capacity was limited. From May 11, most Frenchmen had to obtain a prescription from their doctor before receiving a test. The government claimed this was necessary to prevent abuse of the system; in reality, this deliberately imposed a barrier that cut the number of tests conducted.

It was not until August 23 that the target of 700,000 weekly tests was reached. By then, the virus was out of control and the second wave well under way. On September 11, Prime Minister Jean Castex announced that medical staff were now being prioritized as testing capacity was stretched to its limit. On September 16, staff at 20 testing clinics in the south of France went on strike over poor pay and exhausting working conditions.

By September 17, France’s positive test percentage exceeded 5 percent: according to WHO guidelines, based on the 1 percent positive test rule, the virus was out of control. In September, Macron reportedly rebuked Health Minister Olivier Véran for the 12-day delay to obtain test results. At that time, many people claimed that they were not receiving test results at all.

By October 12, the positive test rate exceeded 10 percent: tens of thousands of positive tests were being returned daily. This preceded a sharp rise in hospital admissions, which was followed by the hundreds of daily deaths ever since. With new cases and deaths at this scale, contact tracing was impossible.

In late September, amid the ongoing resurgence of COVID-19, the government passed its 2021 budget. In this only €9.8 billion went for emergency health spending, while a further €42 billion and a tax cut were handed to the banks and corporations.

The partial lock-down measures adopted in November, which left both schools and factories open, did not stem the spread of the virus. Their further relaxation over the Christmas and New Year period is setting the scene for a further surge of deaths in the new year.

The Nature paper shows that the Macron government’s policy undercut the gains of the first lock-down. In May, a sufficient expansion of testing on a Europe-wide basis could have eradicated the virus in France and across Europe. Instead, billions of euros were given to the banks and corporations, schools and workplaces were reopened, and insufficient testing and tracing failed to contain the virus.

Like its counterparts across Europe and in the United States, the Macron government placed profit before lives at every step of its response to the pandemic. The winter surge in COVID-19 deaths is only getting underway, but this policy of malign neglect has already led to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.

Against the anti-scientific response of the ruling class, there must be an international struggle of the working class armed with a program that uses the best available scientific research in response to the pandemic, unobstructed by the profit concerns of the capitalist elite.

California hospitals overwhelmed as COVID-19 cases hit 2 million

Kevin Martinez


California became the first state last week to reach 2 million recorded COVID-19 cases and is now the epicenter of the virus in the US. In Los Angeles County, the state’s most populous region, there are an estimated 6,500 people hospitalized, four times the number from last month. The number of people in intensive care units (ICUs) is approaching 1,300, double the number from a month ago.

Every 10 minutes another patient in California dies from the pandemic, according to a New York Times database. Nearly every hospital in the state is operating beyond its capacity, putting in makeshift beds and rationing treatment for the most urgent cases. Many nurses and staff are complaining of fatigue and taking much needed leave, while hospitals scramble to make up for the losses in workers.

A man checks in to take a COVID-19 test at a testing site in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom has predicted that hospitalizations could reach up to 100,000 in January under current scenarios. While California was the first state to impose a lockdown in spring, the government’s reopening policies have led to a horrific and preventable surge in cases. Last Thursday alone saw 351 new deaths in the state.

Health officials have been begging the public to stay at home during the holiday season, but Governor Newsom has still not issued a statewide order for people to do so. The lack of clear directives from the state, combined with lack of government aid for struggling workers and small businesses, have led to a perfect storm of viral infections and needless death and suffering.

As people travel for the holidays and spread the disease they will be blamed for the rise in infections. Meanwhile, workplaces, schools and other major congregate settings have been allowed to proceed with no systematic effort for contact tracing.

Mendy Hickey, quality director at St. Mary’s hospital, told the New York Times, “In the beginning, especially, you saw all these pictures and videos from New York and you think, ‘Oh my God, it can never get that bad here,’” adding, “And while we have all the supplies we need, it is that bad here, and we have no staff to take care of patients.” Ms. Hickey told the Times she sometimes works 23 hours a day and, while she was able to spend Christmas morning with her three daughters, she had to return later that day to the hospital.

Since the start of the pandemic, California has seen more than 2.1 million positive cases and more than 24,220 people die from COVID-19, according to the California Department of Public Health.

In the past two weeks alone, there have been an additional 570,000 cases and 3,250 deaths, averaging to record highs of 41,000 new cases and 231 deaths every day. Last week, California reported the highest number of new cases per capita in the past week of any state, according to Johns Hopkins University.

This week will see more than 19,750 patients hospitalized for the virus in California, including 4,228 in ICUs. Both totals are now double the peak recorded during the summer when there were around 7,200 hospitalized with 2,050 in intensive care.

According to state officials, the statewide aggregate of ICU availability has been at zero percent since Christmas Eve. While not every region is operating at no capacity, two regions with zero ICU beds, Southern California and San Joaquin Valley, are now operating under emergency protocols in order to continue treating severe patients, whether or not they have COVID-19.

Only these two regions have been placed under the governor’s stay-at-home order from three weeks ago. The order restricts indoor and outdoor dining at restaurants and closes businesses like salons and barbershops, on top of restrictions already in place for so-called purple tier counties.

The makeshift and arbitrary character of the governor’s color-coded scheme is useless in stopping a virus that does not respect county lines. As mentioned before, countless nonessential businesses and public venues remain open, ensuring that the pandemic will spread unabated.

At a Monday news conference, Newsom said that state Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly will soon provide ICU projections that will guide the timeline by which each region ends its stay-at-home orders. Extensions in Southern California and San Joaquin Valley are guaranteed.

Hospitals throughout the state are so overwhelmed it was revealed over the weekend that Kaiser Permanente would postpone “elective and non-urgent surgeries” at its Northern California hospitals for one week, from now until January 4, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

Health officials are worried of the potential impact that holiday gatherings for Christmas and New Year’s will have to deepen the crisis. A surge was reported in early November and grew worse after Thanksgiving, and now officials fear the Christmas holiday will exponentially increase the number of infections, hospitalizations and deaths in the coming weeks.

Newsom declared in a recent video message that the state projects its numbers will double next month to more than 36,000 hospitalized patients.

Meanwhile, vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna began arriving this week at California skilled nursing facilities. These facilities are in “Phase 1a” of the state’s massive inoculation campaign. The other group in Phase 1a consists of front-line health care workers who deal directly with COVID-19 patients, who already began receiving shots in mid-December.

It is estimated that it will take a month to inoculate all of the state’s 1,200 licensed nursing facilities, which house some of the most vulnerable populations and have been hotspots for the pandemic.

Catastrophe worsens as UK records nearly 100,000 new COVID-19 cases in 48 hours

Robert Stevens


The number of COVID-19 cases continues to surge, with a record 53,135 positive tests announced Tuesday. This was on top of the previous record of 41,385 new cases announced Monday, meaning there have been almost 100,000 cases in the first two days of this week.

Another 414 people were reported dead. In the week to December 29, the number of people in hospital with COVID-19 in England alone rose from 18,063 to 21,787. The main area of increase was in London which saw a 44 percent increase from 1,552 COVID patients to 2,237.

The main entrance to NHS Nightingale Hospital, London, UK (credit: Wikimedia Commoms)

The figures take the number of deaths as measured by the government to 71,567. The true figure is substantially higher and is approaching 90,000. Yesterday, the statistical associations in England and Wales produced figures showing there had been 87,000 deaths where COVID was mentioned on the death certificate. The figures will rise as Scotland and Northern Ireland have not yet released fatality data for the period between December 24 and 28.

The terrible death toll is the outcome of the homicidal herd immunity policy of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government. Apart from during the national lockdown of a few months’ duration, from the end of March, the government has allowed the virus to rip through the population. The new strain circulating in Britain since September is accelerating a catastrophic resurgence of the virus. It is now present on every continent.

Sir Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the National Health Service (NHS), said yesterday, “Now again we are back in the eye of the storm with a second wave of coronavirus sweeping Europe and, indeed, this country.”

By Monday, there were more people in hospital in England (20,426) than the 18,974 patients recorded on April 12 at the height of the first wave.

Hospitals are being overwhelmed with a number having to declare emergencies. The situation in London is the most acute. The London Ambulance Service had one of its “busiest ever days” on December 26, with 7,918 calls—up by more than 2,500 on last year. On Sunday, an internal incident was declared at Queen Elizabeth Hospital due to fears of a shortage of oxygen. The hospital was forced to divert patients to other hospitals in the city.

According to a Sky News reporter at Queen's Hospital in Romford, patients were yesterday being treated inside ambulances “because they don't have enough beds left—that's how bad the situation is”. The Daily Mirror reported, “Some health boards are considering the option of setting up tents outside hospitals to triage patients, as they work in ‘major incident mode’.”

The surge in infections threatens to overwhelm a vaccine rollout taking place at a snail’s pace. At present only 600,000 people have received the vaccine. The delivery of the second required dose, only issued to people among the highest priority, began just yesterday.

A preliminary study of the “estimated transmissibility and severity of the new variant” in England, by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine warns, “In the absence of substantial vaccine roll-out, cases, hospitalisations, ICU admissions and deaths in 2021 may exceed those in 2020.”

It states, “The most stringent intervention scenario with tier 4 England-wide and schools closed during January and 2 million individuals vaccinated per week, is the only scenario we considered which reduces peak ICU burden below the levels seen during the first wave.”

The government has placed great store on the Oxford University-AstraZeneca vaccine, which it has ordered 100 million doses of. The virus is set to receive approval for use in Britain soon. But even if this were available, at the current rate of vaccination most people will remain unprotected. Dr Bharat Pankhania, a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter, said, “It will still take about 50 weeks to immunise 50 million people,” requiring a 24-hour-a-day rollout. The UK’s population is 66 million.

After decades of underfunding and “efficiency savings” cuts, the NHS does not have the staff for such an effort. According to NHS hospitals, mental health services and community providers, there is a shortage of 87,000 staff.

In the spring, the government was forced to build seven “Nightingale” field hospitals. Yesterday it was revealed that, lacking the staff to run them, they have largely been stood down. The Telegraph reported, “The hospital in London’s EXCEL centre is understood to have been stripped completely, with beds and ventilators removed.”

The crisis has escalated so rapidly that there is speculation that Johnson may have to put much of England under the highest Tier 4 restrictions in the coming days and even implement a yet to be defined “Tier 5” level of restrictions. According to reports, Tier 5 may involve the closure of schools and universities.

But Johnson is being pressured by the most rapacious sections of the ruling elite to oppose any such lockdowns, which will require parents to be at home to look after their children and not in workplaces generating profits for the corporations. The Daily Mail’s front page headline screamed yesterday, “Don’t Betray our children.” The Sun cited one Tory backbench MP as stating, “The view of most Tory MPs is that schools do need to stay open. It is the health people who are saying ‘oh gosh, the hospitals will be full’. We know that schools being open does increase the R rate. The question is, is that a price we are willing to pay and in my view it should be.”

Johnson has refused to close schools, with the new term to begin next week. He has only agreed to a slight reopening delay for secondary schools, which will still see all pupils back in classrooms for January 18.

Yet again, the government is rejecting scientific guidance from its own advisers. The Telegraph reported that the “Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), told the Prime Minister that infections could spiral out of control unless secondary schools were closed until the end of January.”

Reopening is being pushed through on the basis that schools will be safe as children will be tested. This is a lie, especially given the fact that only secondary school pupils will be tested. Millions of primary school children and educators responsible for all age groups will not be tested. To reopen according to the government’s proposed schedule, all secondary schools would require 5.5 million pupils being tested just in the space of a week.

There are no qualified staff available for such an enormous, safety critical task. The government announced Tuesday that 1,500 military “personnel are on standby to support secondary schools and colleges across England to roll out COVID-19 testing to students and staff as the new term begins in January.” Soldiers in the classrooms brings the increasing militarisation of society to a new and dangerous stage.

None of this would be possible without the backing of the Labour Party and the education trade unions, who have only called for a delay in the return to classrooms for two weeks to enable testing to be carried out. In an interview with the Guardian , Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), declared, “Our worry is that they won’t make the right decision today and do what they have done all the way through the pandemic, which is to take an ideological line and get schools back before the testing programme can be properly put in place.”

The NEU is refusing to mobilise its more than half a million members to fight the herding back into schools of millions of pupils and staff. The Guardian said of Bousted’s position, “While industrial action is not an option, she said the NEU would be strongly advising members that they have a legal right to work in a safe environment.”

AMLO government falsified COVID-19 data to avoid shutdowns in Mexico City

Andrea Lobo


The government of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) falsified data on the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico City to prevent the alert level being raised to “red,” which mandates a shutdown of “nonessential economic activities.”

In the second largest metropolitan area in the Americas with 21.6 million people, Mexico City and the neighboring State of Mexico have been the epicenter of the pandemic in the country. Together the two entities have recorded 458,000 cases and 34,700 deaths out of 1.39 million cases and 123,000 deaths confirmed nationwide.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the government has connived with corporations and trade unions to cover up outbreaks in factories and other workplaces. Testing levels are so low that Mexico currently has the highest positivity rate—the percentage of tests that come out positive—in the world at 40.6 percent. Moreover, the year is expected to end with 280,000 excess deaths.

Ajusco Medio Hospital workers protesting on November 30 (Facebook, Myriam Lira)

The resulting official figures, which greatly minimize the pandemic’s real spread and death toll, are plugged into a formula with 10 indicators to determine each state’s alert and restriction levels under a “semaphore system.”

On December 4, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell, who leads the pandemic response, provided Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, who belongs to López Obrador’s Morena party, a report with lower figures than the official ones.

According to documents reported by the New York Times last week, López-Gatell’s report stated that 45 percent of hospital beds with ventilators were occupied, and that the positivity rate was 25 percent in the capital. Official data, however, had shown 59 of these beds occupied and a 35 percent positivity rate.

If the official numbers had been used, the semaphore formula would have exceeded the 32-point threshold to activate a red light. When contacted by the Times, the Health Ministry refused to explain the source of the lower numbers.

The authorities did not declare the red light in Mexico City until a new report was filed on December 18. “Yet officials kept the capital open for business for an extra two weeks, its streets thronged with shoppers, its restaurants teeming with diners,” the Times reported.

Even by December 4, numerous hospitals had reached full capacity. That day, local media said the Ajusco Medio Hospital had reached 122 percent general capacity and 116 percent for ICU beds. This major city-run facility in the south of the capital had seen demonstrations by workers throughout November,

By December 18, coronavirus patients in several hospitals were being examined outside the facilities or inside their vehicles, while oxygen tanks bought by families to treat infected patients in their homes were running out in several stores in the capital. As early as September, only one in five patients who had died of coronavirus nationwide had received ICU care.

Last week, the Center for Research and Teaching Economics (CIDE) and Stanford University projected, assuming greater social distancing measures, that demand for hospital beds for coronavirus patients will exceed capacity by 50 percent by mid-January.

On December 24, hospital occupancy had reached 90 percent in Mexico City. There were 5,559 COVID-19 patients hospitalized, 1,455 of whom were intubated, while there were only 619 beds available in total and 205 ICU beds.

Mayor Sheinbaum announced that there will be 1,240 new beds available by December 31, far from what will be needed. Several hospitals, moreover, have reported shortages in medicines, personal protective equipment, and specialized personnel, while exhaustion among medical workers is universal.

In this context, the Mexican corporate media and state officials have focused their attention on the first vaccinations on Christmas and the contracts to purchase 198 million doses for the population of 127 million. According to the current timelines, which are far from certain, Mexico will receive just over 3 million doses by the end of March.

The lies regarding Mexico City figures are yet another exposure of the AMLO administration’s conscious policy of sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives in order not to impinge on the profits of the financial and corporate oligarchy.

As early as January and February, the Chinese authorities and US and European intelligence agencies briefed governments on the health care disaster ahead. Their Mexican counterparts undoubtedly had access to this information, but AMLO continued holding large rallies and calling people to “keep going about our lives as normal.”

On November 30, as the resurgence of cases became clear in Mexico, the World Health Organization specifically asked the López Obrador government to “get very serious” and for Mexico’s “leaders to set the example.” The Mexican president responded to the WHO that he would continue refusing to wear face masks since they are “not indispensable.”

Shutting down commerce, particularly during the Christmas holidays, constituted a major blow for the economy, with further bankruptcies leading to losses in the financial system. The employer organization COPARMEX estimated in early December that nearly 50,000 businesses had closed this year in Mexico City, and about 10,000 more could close if the red light was declared.

On the other hand, there are fears that these closures will increase social unrest as the AMLO administration refuses to provide any aid to workers or small businesses, the majority of whom operate in the devastated informal sector.

Instead of providing income for workers and small business owners to shelter at home, the government has prioritized social austerity to meet interest payments to Wall Street financial vultures and raise the military budget.

In an insulting decision, the Mexico City government announced last week loans of 10,000 pesos (US$500) for small businesses and a one-time check of 2,200 pesos (US$110) for restaurant workers who can prove that they were suspended or fired due to the pandemic. Countless workers in the shut-down “nonessential” sectors, including restaurants, will be forced to work to sustain their families.

At the same time, many economic activities that are not essential for the maintenance of human life and combatting the pandemic will remain open. On June 1, the López Obrador administration declared all transportation, manufacturing, construction, and financial services as “essential” in order to secure the supply of parts, finished goods and services for transnational corporations and the banks.

The known result of these policies has been the deaths of workers and their families on a massive scale. According to researcher Héctor Hiram Hernández Bringas at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), 90 percent of confirmed coronavirus deaths are among manufacturing or manual workers, drivers, maids and pensioners, and 75 percent of victims had no studies beyond high school. The pandemic has also killed more than 2,000 health care workers, the highest number in the world.

Quebec government documents expose its disastrous mishandling of initial pandemic response

Frédéric Charlebois


The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage in Canada, with the number of infections now well past the half-million mark. In the most populous province, Ontario, the situation is so out of control that a partial lockdown (under which many nonessential workplaces remain open) is now in effect for most residents until Jan. 23.

In Quebec, the second most populous province, the rolling 7-day average of new infections has exceeded 2,000 per day for the past eleven days. Since March, more than 194,000 people have contracted COVID-19 in Quebec, and 8,124 have died. So high is the volume of coronavirus patients, several major hospitals have been forced to turn patients away.

Nearly 7,500 Quebec health care workers are currently unable to work because they have become infected with COVID-19 or have had to self-isolate. The remaining staff are facing an arduous and unsustainable workload, with anxiety and symptoms of post-traumatic stress reportedly at record levels.

These catastrophic conditions are not the inevitable product of the virus, but rather the result of the policies pursued by Quebec’s and Canada’s ruling elites. Despite having received multiple warnings about the threat a pandemic would pose prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, and having witnessed the disastrous mishandling of the SARS epidemic in Ontario in 2003, Canada’s governments and public health authorities were completely unprepared. Ontario, for example, failed to restock tons of supplies of emergency equipment bought in the aftermath of the SARS crisis after they expired.

From the outset of the current pandemic, the authorities downplayed its severity so as to defend corporate profits: first by doing nothing that would disrupt economic life, and then, having been forced to impose hastily organized lockdowns, by seeking to “reopen” the economy long before the first wave of infections had even crested.

Radio-Canada (the country’s French-language national broadcaster) exposed the Quebec government’s shambolic initial response to the pandemic in a recent exposé. Through an access to information request, the broadcaster obtained more than 2,000 pages of internal communications, directives and emails from Quebec’s health authorities during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the first four months of 2020.

These documents reveal a staggering, even criminal, level of indifference, and lack of preparation in implementing basic public health measures.

Quebec Public Health Director Horacio Arruda (Wikimedia Commons)

Provincial authorities were aware of the potential threat, but delayed taking action until the virus has spread far and wide among the population. As early as January 12, Quebec’s Director of Public Health, Dr. Horacio Arruda, was saying behind the scenes that “if the virus ever leaves China, it will be problematic for Quebec.” Despite these concerns, public health officials spent the next two months “observing and monitoring” the virus while publicly minimizing its dangers.

While the WHO (World Health Organization) declared an international state of health emergency on January 30, Quebec’s Public Security and Health Ministries did not go into pandemic preparedness until February 26, and failed to update the province’s pandemic plan until March 9.

In the meantime, Arruda and the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government squandered the precious weeks before cases began to rise exponentially, issuing appeals for calm and arguing that “there is no increase in emerging cases” (February 3) and that “there is no active contamination in Quebec” (March 9). This despite the rapid spread of the disease internationally throughout February and early March, and Quebec officially recording its own first case on February 27.

The day after this first case was reported, Arruda continued to downplay the danger. In internal communications, he complained that the coronavirus “takes up a lot of space in the media” and that “there are many public health issues ... that are not being addressed instead.”

This indifference in the face of a deadly danger to the population extended to federal authorities. It was not until March 10 that Justin Trudeau's Liberal government bothered to write to the provinces to inquire about possible shortages of medical equipment, particularly ventilators and PPE (personal protective equipment).

Going back to the timeline of events in Quebec, it was only on March 4 that Public Security wrote to health care institutions to ask them to provide a list of all their medical equipment within two days. On March 14, two days after the WHO declared a global pandemic, Quebec declared a state of health emergency. Five days later Quebec recorded its first COVID-19 death.

The Quebec government’s lack of preparedness is highlighted by its failure to stockpile or secure additional supplies of protective equipment.

As early as January 28, Quebec drugstores were reporting a shortage of protective masks. On February 6, the provincial health network canceled a major call for tenders for unexplained reasons, “out of our control,” and the next day the WHO warned that there was a worldwide shortage of masks.

On February 15, doctors warned that “equipment is at a very low level in hospitals.” But it was only three days later that the province issued an emergency appeal for PPE on the Quebec Electronic Tendering System. It read: “Emergency situation where the safety of people or property is at stake; Reasons: Global shortage of masks. Quebec’s health care institutions and first responders no longer have any stock.” Only on Feb. 21, well over a month-and-a-half after reports of a new deadly virus had begun to emerge in China and more than three weeks after the WHO had declared a health emergency, did Quebec sign its first contract for additional PPE.

That same day the Health Ministry instructed health care institutions to preserve and ration protective equipment.

From February 21 to April 8, PPE was in short supply, and health centres had to operate with equipment reserves equivalent to between 3 and 6 days. On March 31, Quebec Premier François Legault was forced to admit publicly that “there will be a shortage of certain equipment during the next 3 to 7 days.” The next day, Trudeau in turn admitted that there was “not enough protective equipment in emergency reserves” to respond to the crisis.

The rationing or outright absence of personal protective equipment—especially in long-term care facilities—resulted in tens of thousands of health care workers, and the entire population, being unnecessarily exposed to the deadly danger posed by the virus.

This disastrous handling of the pandemic stems from the class policy of capitalist governments throughout North America, Europe and internationally. Their preoccupation has been “keeping the economy open,” that is, maintaining the flow of profits regardless of the cost in human lives. Even in its budget, presented March 10, Quebec’s CAQ government did not include any measures or additional funding to fight the coronavirus.

As the World Socialist Web Site wrote on March 21: “Trudeau, Legault and the other provincial premiers were all criminally negligent in the face of the threat posed by the deadly virus. Large scale preventive and testing measures should have been put in place in January and early February when the deadly outbreak in China was identified as a pandemic threat and the World Health Organization was summoning the alarm. Yet these governments—and their counterparts in the US and Europe—refused to act because the necessary measures were seen as an impediment to big business’s pursuit of profit. Instead, they downplayed the extent of the danger, some going so far as to say that the virus resembled seasonal flu.”

This orientation was evident when Legault began lifting lockdown measures in April, even as the pandemic continued to rage. He publicly advocated the scientifically baseless theory of “herd immunity,” that is, allowing the virus to spread freely in the population, in his failed attempt to reopen schools in the Montreal area, which was then the epicentre of the pandemic in Canada.

As the WSWS noted at the outset of the crisis, such a pandemic was both foreseeable and foreseen. For years, scientists and even public institutions had been pressing for pandemic-preparedness measures.

Numerous reports were written, including one co-authored in 2006 by Canada’s current Chief Public Health Officer, Theresa Tam. Canada’s unpreparedness for the novel coronavirus pandemic is all the more glaring and inexcusable, since it was the country, outside of East Asia, most affected by the 2002-3 outbreak of SARS, a highly contagious respiratory disease similar to COVID-19.

Despite this, the authorities failed to take elementary preventive measures before and at the onset of the crisis. They preferred to lie to the population so as not to harm the profits and investments of the financial oligarchy, with disastrous consequences for the working class and the population as a whole.

The Legault government’s initial inaction and subsequent reckless reopening of the economy, and the decades of cuts to health and elder care implemented by federal Liberal and Conservative and Quebec Liberal and Parti Québécois governments, led to mass death in Quebec, especially in nursing homes. During the pandemic’s first wave, Quebec had one of the highest per capita mortality rates in the world.

The relentless back-to-work drive pursued by all levels of government in Canada, including the reopening of schools in the fall, has created the conditions for a second wave that is now raging across the entire country and threatens to be even deadlier than the first.

The emergence of multiple vaccines underscores that the spread of the virus can be halted through the application of science. But the mass vaccination campaigns announced for 2021 will not reduce the spiraling number of infections and deaths for at least several months.

This makes it all the more urgent that the working class act now to preserve human lives.

In all workplaces, rank-and-file safety committees must be formed, completely independent of the pro-capitalist trade unions, which have uniformly supported the ruling elite’s homicidal “back-to-work” policy. These committees must demand the strictest measures to combat the pandemic—mass testing, massive investments in health care, and the closure of all in-class schooling and all nonessential production, with full compensation for affected workers and small businesses.

The hundreds of billions in bailout money handed out in March to the financial and corporate elite by the Trudeau government demonstrate that there are ample resources to fund the emergency measures needed to curb the pandemic and save thousands of lives. But they are monopolized by the ruling elite.

Boeing’s deadly 737 Max resumes US commercial flights

Bryan Dyne


On Tuesday, American Airlines carried out the first US commercial flight of the deadly Boeing 737 Max 8, nearly two years after it was grounded in the aftermath of two crashes—Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018 in Indonesia and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019—killing a combined total of 346 men, women and children.

The flight, which reportedly took place without incident, was between Miami International Airport and New York’s LaGuardia Airport. American has thus far scheduled the Max 8 to fly a single route, from Miami to New York City and back, once a day.

A Boeing 737 MAX 8 jetliner at the Renton, Washington assembly plant [Credit: AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File]

United Airlines is currently slated to restart flights of the Max 8 on February 11, and Southwest Airlines has said it will resume using the aircraft sometime in the second quarter of next year. Delta Air Lines, the fourth major US carrier, does not own any Max 8 jets.

Predictably, Wall Street hailed the flight, with Boeing stock spiking after the opening bell. The company’s share prices have been on a generally upward trend since late October, increasing by about 50 percent. At that time, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) signaled that it was getting ready to unground the aircraft.

Wall Street, however, is celebrating not just rising share prices. Nearly two years after the second crash, not a single corporate executive or federal regulator involved in designing and certifying the lethal airplane has gone to jail for his role in the deaths of 346 passengers and crew members, as well as one diver in Indonesia who was killed during the search of the wreckage. The relaunch of the plane in the US is further confirmation that, as long as one’s actions are in the interests of the financial oligarchy, one can get away with murder.

It is worth noting that Boeing got off scot free after the first crash, which was largely swept under the rug by the FAA and the media. It was only after the second crash five months later that European and other international regulators grounded the Max 8. Even then, Boeing’s CEO at the time, Dennis Muilenburg, declared that the plane was perfectly safe, and the FAA refused to ground it for two days. President Donald Trump tweeted his support for Boeing and Muilenburg.

So far, the only other country to approve the Max 8 for commercial flights is Brazil. On December 9, even before the American Airlines flight, the jet was put into service by Gol Airlines, Brazil’s largest airline and one of Boeing’s biggest customers. Canadian and European regulators are expected to give their approval soon, with other international aviation safety agencies expected to follow their lead.

The plane was recently ungrounded by the FAA after 20 months of what the agency claims was a “comprehensive and methodical safety review process.” For his part, Boeing CEO David Calhoun hailed the ungrounding as a confirmation of the company’s “core values of safety, quality and integrity.”

No weight can be given to such words. Boeing did everything it could throughout the entire development and production process of the Max 8 to hide fundamental flaws in the plane’s design. The FAA became aware of the risks of the new plane but went ahead and certified it. Neither Boeing nor the FAA, with the complicity of the airline unions, told either airline workers or the flying public of the dangers they faced.

These risks included both inadequate training and poor design. The total training given pilots flying the Max 8 was a one hour video, compared to the normal requirement that pilots spend hundreds of hours on simulators to be certified to fly a new plane. Boeing pushed the claim that virtually no special training, a major cost to airline companies, was required as part of its drive to undercut its major international rival, European-based Airbus. This was given the green light by the FAA and the pilots’ unions.

The mechanical problems of the Max 8 were even more severe. The most well known of these is the now infamous auto-piloting system called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). The software was installed to compensate for the plane’s inherent tendency to stall, a byproduct of attaching a newer, larger engine onto the half-century-old Boeing 737 chassis.

This was done to avoid having to design a new model, thereby sharply lowering the cost and duration of the process of design, production, training and certification. As internal documents that have since come out reveal, Boeing’s fatal rush to market a new medium-range commercial jet, intended to serve as the company’s workhorse aircraft, was, like all subsequent decisions, driven by considerations of profit, market share and stock price, with safety at best a secondary consideration.

MCAS was designed and installed as a relatively inexpensive fix to the stalling problem. The existence of this system was not even mentioned in the pilot training manuals. Pilots were not told that the plane’s computers were given the ability to override pilot controls if the system deemed it necessary. Boeing ultimately gave MCAS 10 times the control over the pitch of the plane than it told test pilots, meaning it could crash the plane given faulty inputs.

This is exactly what happened in both crashes. Each plane’s angle of attack sensor wrongly indicated a stall, and because only a single sensor was tied to MCAS, rather than the industry redundancy standard of two or three sensors for critical functions, the software forced both flights into an unrecoverable dive. Black box recordings of the pilots bear this out. They plunged to their deaths, along with hundreds of others, desperately trying to manually override MCAS.

Documents that have surfaced in the past two years from numerous investigations into the Max 8 show that Boeing was very aware of the problems with the MCAS and the Max 8 as a whole. Leaked internal emails reflect dismay and incredulity among employees over the development of the Max 8. One commented, “This is a joke. This airplane is ridiculous.” A different message stated, “I’ll be shocked if the FAA passes this turd.”

Mark Forkner, Boeing’s chief technical pilot at the time of the aircraft’s development, called MCAS “egregious,” and noted that it was “running rampant” in Boeing’s simulators, causing crashes.

But despite such incriminating evidence, no criminal charges have been laid and there have been no high-level arrests. Most notably, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, controlled by the Democrats, despite publishing a damning report showing Boeing risked countless lives, proposed no actions to hold executives or officials accountable. There were no calls for criminal prosecution, nor were any financial penalties imposed. Now, with the relaunch of the Max 8, both the company and its big shareholders are positioned to reap massive profits, potentially at the cost of more human lives.

Fascists enter parliament as COVID-19 devastates Romania

Andrei Tudora & Tina Zamfir


Elections in Romania were held on November 6, as the COVID-19 pandemic that has now killed more than 15,000 people ravaged the country. The election was marked by an unprecedented abstention—only about 30 percent of the electorate turned up to vote—and by the emergence of the fascist Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR) party, which took 9 percent of the vote.

How has a hitherto unknown political entity, founded last year and which as late as September polled less than 1 percent, managed to become essentially the third political force in the country, after the Liberal-Save Romania alliance and the ex-Stalinist Social Democratic Party?

The answer is found in the response of the international ruling class to a mortal crisis of capitalism, sharply intensified by the coronavirus pandemic. Fearing that its disastrous handling of the pandemic will trigger an outpouring of workers’ struggles, the Romanian ruling elite is working to build a fascist movement that it hopes to use against the working class. All the main bourgeois parties, media and cultural figures are implicated in this filthy operation.

The Parliament of Romania (Pixabay)

The chief responsibility lies with the Social Democratic Party (PSD), the chief party to emerge from the Stalinist bureaucracy after it restored capitalism in Romania and across Eastern Europe in 1989. The PSD has provided both material and crucial political support for the rise of fascism.

During the pandemic, the National Liberal Party (PNL)-led government has followed the policy of the ruling class internationally—“herd immunity.” After a belated, one-month lockdown, authorities essentially stopped efforts to contain the virus. The economy and schools reopened, with contact tracing all but nonexistent.

The result has been a social catastrophe. Factories, schools and hospitals became epicenters of the disease, with mass casualties in care homes for the elderly and disabled. With a health care system already rotting on its feet, Romania has had one of the EU’s highest death rates. The government has been widely accused by health experts of doctoring numbers to delay taking even minimal measures. Facing a mounting death toll and an imminent collapse of the hospitals, authorities closed schools and kindergartens one month after opening them.

Throughout the year, the PSD denounced every measure, however minimal, to contain the virus. This let the government justify its reactionary policies by citing the pressure of parliamentary opposition.

The PSD, heir to the Stalinist Communist Party, increasingly adopted the language and methods of the far-right networks deployed internationally to protest COVID restrictions. It is an open secret that this summer’s demonstrations against the use of masks—attended by a motley crew of religious zealots and neo-Nazi groups—were held with the PSD bosses’ blessing. Lower-level party officials supervised the events, which received saturation coverage in PSD-aligned media.

One of the more prominent groups at the anti-mask demos was the AUR, headed by 34-year-old George Simion. A lifelong provocateur, Simion comes from the milieu of far-right football thugs. He has spent much of his career agitating in the neighboring Romanian-speaking Republic of Moldova. He participated in a violent provocation with ethnic Hungarians in Romania, before launching a bid for the EU parliament candidacy in 2019, which although unsuccessful received wide media attention.

The backbone of the new party is made up of the religious fundamentalist elements, represented by party co-founder Claudiu Tarziu. Tarziu was a leader of the Coalition for Family, an umbrella organization of fascists of different religions, both Orthodox and Protestant. It gained notoriety as the main vehicle for a failed referendum in 2018 to change the definition of the family in the Romanian constitution and exclude gay couples from marriage. The referendum was organized by the then-PSD government, which also campaigned for it.

As a writer for various Orthodox rags, Tarziu’s defining feature is his unashamed fascination with the fascist Romanian Iron Guard of the 1930s.

Another dubious and indicative figure around the party is Calin Georgescu. A career bureaucrat working for the UN and the Romanian government on environmental and “sustainable development” issues, he is associated with the Club of Rome, a Malthusian think tank. Repeatedly interviewing him, the Romanian press has given ample attention to his social Darwinist ramblings. He is the AUR’s candidate for prime minister.

Another ominous element in the AUR’s physiognomy is the presence of retired army generals. The most notorious is former Chief of Staff Mircea Chelaru. As an active duty general, he was involved on two occasions in erecting busts of the former fascist dictator Ion Antonescu, once in front of an army barracks and then in a church courtyard.

The AUR received wide attention in the media in the weeks prior to the election. Simion conducted friendly interviews on national television and with three of the best-known journalists in the country.

The rush to prepare the new political formation for election involved a concerted effort from the main bourgeois parties. An investigation by Galatimedia blog, quoted by G4 media, revealed that in one county, most AUR candidates were in PSD or PNL movements; in many cases, they were even PSD or PNL local elected officials.

Cosmin Gusa, a political spin doctor and media mogul employed by both major bourgeois parties, hailed the new formation after the election, praising its “unifying, patriotic message, street fighting against excesses to which Romania is subjected.”

While a number of journalists and politicians have expressed concern over the fascists’ entry into parliament, all of them, including mainstream media and pseudo-left commentators, are characterized by a criminal degree of complacency. Appeals are made and assurances given that the major parties—the very same forces that created and nourished the AUR—would “isolate” the new party. Another argument is that the new formation is similar to many other “anti-establishment” parties that have sprung up in Romania in the last two decades.

The weeks following the election already have proven how fraudulent these claims are. The AUR has been given legitimacy and was invited by the president to official talks to form a new government. Simion has held high-level discussions with PSD leaders and the party has been given the leadership of four parliamentary committees.

The AUR is similar to far-right parties internationally, such as the AfD in Germany and the Vox party in Spain. It is a hand-crafted weapon of the ruling class, which is terrified of explosive social anger in the working class. Its references to the Iron Guard—one of the most murderous and demented organizations in history—must serve as an urgent warning to workers in Romania and internationally. There is no way to defeat the danger of fascist reaction save the independent mobilization of the working class internationally against capitalism and for socialism.

Excess deaths in Russia spike

Andrea Peters


While Russia’s official death toll from coronavirus stands at just over 55,000, recently released data from the country’s statistical agency Rosstat reveal a sharp uptick in excess deaths since the start of this year. The real number of COVID-19 victims is likely at least double or triple that officially reported, if not more. October and November each posted record death rates.

Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said on Monday that mortality in Russia increased by 13.8 percent during the first eleven months of 2020 as compared to the previous year. Of that increase, 81 percent “relates to COVID-19 and the consequences of COVID-19,” she stated, adding that the figures still remain to be fully analyzed.

An examination of the Rosstat data conducted by Reuters found more than 240,000 excess deaths between April and November alone. The news agency writes, “Rosstat data, tallied by Reuters, showed that less than half the total number of such excess deaths - at 116,030 since the start of the pandemic in Russia in April - can be attributed directly to the coronavirus. This is still more than double the preliminary death toll figure reported on a daily, cumulative basis by the Russian government coronavirus crisis centre.”

A woman wearing a face mask to protect against coronavirus walks past a graffiti dedicated to the victory of the Soviet Union in the World War II, in St.Petersburg, Russia earlier this year. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

Other news outlets, such as the Guardian, maintain that Russia’s COVID-19 deaths are closer to 186,000. Whatever the precise number contained in the Rosstat data, Golikova’s remarks make clear that the Kremlin has been grossly understating the coronavirus death toll.

More than three million Russians have contracted COVID-19 since the outbreak started, with infection rates hovering between 25,000 and 29,000 a day for the past few weeks. On this basis, the government is insisting that the situation in the country has stabilized in most regions. Nonetheless, infections continue to climb in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, as well as cities in western and central Siberia, which have been particularly hard hit by the virus.

On December 28, Golikova stated that the federal government did not order a second nationwide lockdown this fall because it was prepared for the second wave of the virus, making restrictions on work, school, and transportation unnecessary. The country’s spiraling death rate proves this claim to be false.

In Saint Petersburg, with a population of nearly five million, just 8.7 percent of beds at medical facilities remain unoccupied. A local military hospital recently opened its doors to civilian patients in order to alleviate the burden on the city’s overstretched healthcare system. Saint Petersburg’s Lenexpo Exhibition Complex has been converted into a field hospital. Across the country, authorities are scrambling to add beds to handle the influx of COVID-19 patients.

Shopping and family gatherings happening during the New Year holiday are expected to increase infections. Without another lockdown, this spread will be exacerbated by the return to work and school in mid-January, when the vacation period comes to a close.

In early December, the country began mass inoculations with the Russian-developed Sputnik V vaccine. Despite the official fanfare that accompanied news of Sputnik V’s registration in August, distribution of the vaccine has remained relatively slow. Thus far, 700,000 doses have been administered, with another 300,000 expected in the final days of 2020. Given that Sputnik V requires a two-dose regimen spread across two months, only a tiny percentage of the Russian population of 140 million people has been fully vaccinated—about 20,000 people, according to government sources.

An ongoing issue is the fact that Sputnik V was registered and approved for use prior to the completion of phase three trials—the final stage in the vaccine testing process—which are still underway. Opinion surveys show widespread concern within the population over the safety of the vaccine. According to the Levada Center, 58 percent of respondents say they would not be willing to be inoculated with Sputnik V, with a third of those citing the fact that phase-three has not yet been completed and another third indicating concerns over side effects.

These poll results are similar to ones released in August when the vaccine was first announced, indicating that the government’s efforts to convince the population of the safety of Sputnik V have fallen flat. According to a mid-December news report in the Moscow Times, the 70 inoculation points set up across the capital city are underutilized, with far fewer people coming in to receive the vaccine than the facilities can handle.

On Monday, Sputnik V was approved for use in individuals over the age of 60, and the government is making a renewed push to increase the share of the population that is inoculated. The Russian government has said that it aims to vaccinate seventy percent of the adult population by November 2021.

On December 27, echoing comments made earlier in the month by the country’s defense ministry, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov decried attacks on Sputnik V by press outlets in countries with an anti-Russian agenda.

Major media in the US, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, have taken advantage of the roll out of Sputnik V prior to the completion of phase three trials to press forward with their anti-Putin agenda. They do not care in the slightest about the health and wellbeing of the Russian people, millions of whom they know would perish in the war for which they are braying against Moscow.

Given the dangers involved in exposing the general population to a drug that has not been fully tested, the decision of the Russian government to approve and begin mass inoculations with Sputnik V speaks to a degree of desperation in the Kremlin in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. With popular anger mounting over its inept response to COVID-19 and failure to provide genuine financial relief to ordinary people, the Putin government evidently thought that registration of Sputnik V in August would give his administration a boost. Instead, it may be having the opposite effect.

It is unclear as to whether Sputnik V is dangerous. The UK-based firm AstraZeneca just signed a memorandum of cooperation with the Russian government regarding the incorporation of elements of Sputnik V into AstraZeneca’s own vaccine, in an effort to boost the latter’s efficacy and extend the length of time for which the vaccine gives the recipient immunity. Joint trials will be conducted.

Numerous countries have signed contracts with Russia to buy Sputnik V, with Hungary and Argentina receiving doses and vaccine components this week.