German teachers’ union backs in-person learning as COVID-19 deaths soar

Martin Nowak & Christoph Vandreier

The wave of deaths and new infections sweeping across Germany and Europe is the direct result of the policies of the federal and state governments. Businesses, schools and day care centres were kept open and the most basic safety standards disregarded to secure corporate profits. The current lockdown in Germany deliberately allows many businesses and schools to remain operational.

In enforcing these inhumane policies, the federal and state governments, consisting of a broad range of political coalitions, can rely on the close cooperation of Germany’s trade unions. The German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) supported the billion-dollar bailout packages for banks and corporations back in March.

IG Metall, Verdi and Germany’s other major unions subsequently did everything in their power to ensure that the country’s auto plants, distribution centres and public transport remained fully operational, even under the most adverse and unsafe conditions, thereby exposing workers to massive health risks. This was the path taken to make good the billions handed out to the rich.

Schools and day care centres were also kept open to ensure that parents went to work, although it has been proven scientifically that schools are key factors for the spread of the pandemic. According to the figures issued by the main official health institute, Robert Koch Institute (RKI), over 20,000 teachers, teaching assistants and child care workers have been infected so far, along with 40,000 children. Seventeen teachers and care workers have died from COVID-19.

The German government finally responded and announced the closure of schools, initially until January 10 and now until the end of the month, only after parents and teachers increasingly expressed their opposition and pupils took strike action to demand safe conditions. In fact, most of the current “lockdown” took place during the Christmas vacations when schools were closed anyway. In addition, schools and day care centres were specifically told to ensure in-person care for the children of workers employed in non-essential businesses, thereby turning schools into mere custodial institutions.

This criminal policy is supported by the main teacher’s union, the Education and Science Workers’ Union (GEW), which has close links to the German government. When the federal and state governments announced the “lockdown” over Christmas, the union threw its weight behind the fraudulent scheme, describing school closures as “most regrettable.” It also immediately renewed its five-point program for restoring full regular operation of schools and day care centres beginning January 11.

In doing so, the GEW demands fall short of the official recommendations of the Robert Koch Institute, which proposed the dividing up of classes when the incidence of coronavirus infections exceeds the level stipulated by the RKI. The GEW, on the other hand, called for alternating classes to start only in the fifth grade, an age when children no longer need all-day care and parents can go to work despite reduced school hours, thereby guaranteeing dividends for the corporations.

The GEW plan does not envisage any dividing up of groups for day care centres, including high-risk groups, which, the union declares, should only receive “advice from company doctors”!

According to the wretched GEW, schools and day care centres can resume operations in January without mobile ventilation systems, which would cost just 100 euros ($US123) per student. Such ventilation could be installed, the union states, only when windows cannot be opened, i.e., the union expects lessons to take place with frequently opened windows in freezing weather.

In light of this policy, the union’s other demands such as the “purchase of digital terminals,” the creation of “hazard analyses” and improved hygiene, free tests and flu shots, are nothing more than window dressing aimed at cloaking the criminal dangers involved by continuing in-person schooling. With its limited demands for safety measures, the GEW is only covering up its support for the unsafe opening of schools and day care centres.

An example of such diversionary measures was provided by the GEW in Bavaria with its legal action aimed at obtaining a temporary injunction to ensure compliance with the minimum distance of 1.5 meters at schools. The union deliberately filed the claim as a representative action and not, for example, in support of a teacher’s individual claim. This meant the court was able to dismiss the claim on formal grounds alone. The necessity of the distance compliance at schools was not even addressed in the court and the lawsuit merely provided the background music for the unsafe opening up of schools.

In fact, the GEW has supported government policy throughout the entire period of the pandemic. As the pandemic spread across Germany and scientists and the WSWS called for the closure of businesses and schools, Federal Education Minister Anja Karliczek (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) declared on March 12 that nationwide school closures were “not on the agenda at this time” and that efforts were being made to “maintain normal operations for as long as possible.” The GEW supported this policy at the time with a cynical emergency program “for hot water, disinfectants, soap and disposable towels.”

Following the spring closure of schools after widespread opposition to their continuing operation, a comprehensive campaign to reopen them began just a few weeks later. Here again, the GEW took the lead and, in the midst of the first wave of the pandemic, formulated conditions on April 14 for “a gradual opening of day care centres and schools.” The demands merely called for improvements in washrooms and toilets, minimum distances to be upheld and the pompous but meaningless slogan of “making hygiene a top priority.”

Finally, at the end of the summer vacations, federal and state governments decided to switch to unprotected regular operation. The only token measures advised were regular ventilation of school rooms and, in some places, the obligation to wear masks. The GEW has rejected the latter measure on several occasions and most recently in August described mask wearing as “pedagogically nonsensical.”

In the contract negotiations for public sector workers held in September and October, the GEW demonstrated that its policy of opening up schools was an integral part of a broad offensive against employees. Together with the Verdi, GdP and IG BAU unions, the GEW negotiated a drastic reduction of real wages for the majority of teachers, garbage workers, care workers, bus drivers and other occupational groups, who have stood in the front line during the pandemic.

At the same time, the unions ensured that the massive discontent on the part of workers over unsafe working conditions, the risk of contagion and excessive work schedules was quashed and that businesses could operate as usual, although conditions remained entirely unsafe. For the majority of workers who participated in large numbers in the unions’ warning strikes, workplace safety and pandemic control were at the center of their concerns. For their part, the unions refused to raise a single demand related to workplace safety.

**** Photo: GEW chairperson Marlis Tepe (Ziko van Dijk, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The GEW has also gone so far as to support the federal government’s vaccination rankings. On December 18, GEW president Marlis Tepe described the fact that police officers are to be vaccinated before teachers and child care workers as “fundamentally okay.” According to the union, a highly equipped state apparatus has priority over the health of teachers, students and teaching assistants.

With its policy of opening up schools, the GEW is continuing its decades-long function as an accomplice of the state apparatus. In Berlin, for example, the union worked closely together with the city’s former Social Democratic Party (SPD)-Left Party coalition and now cooperates with the current SPD-Left Party-Green Party Senate to run down the city’s education system. Working hours for teachers and other staff have increased without wage compensation, vacation and Christmas bonuses have been cut and wages reduced.

The coronavirus pandemic has revealed the thoroughly reactionary nature of the unions. Far from representing the interests of workers, they enforce the program of pandemic fatalities and massive social inequality. The result is tens of thousands of deaths, mass layoffs and loss of income for workers to ensure fabulous profits for a small elite.

As the pandemic death toll mounts, governments delay administration of second vaccine dose

Benjamin Mateus

Almost 1.9 million people around the world have thus far perished in the coronavirus pandemic. Since the beginning of December, a seven-day average of some 600,000 new cases has been registered worldwide each day, with little evidence of the current winter surge abating.

The United States is the global epicenter of the pandemic. It reported a single-day record of 3,738 deaths on Tuesday, with another 233,513 new cases pushing hospital admissions for COVID-19 to a new one-day high of 131,215. The case fatality rate hovers around 1.6 percent. But with infections at the present rate, the death toll will inevitably be even more ghastly.

Nurses and physicians on a COVID-19 unit in Texas [Credit: Miguel Gutierrez Jr.]

In Los Angeles County, ambulance workers have been issued a memo by the county Emergency Medical Services Agency stating that “effective immediately, due to the severe impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on EMS and 911 receiving hospitals, adult patients in blunt traumatic and non-traumatic out-of-hospital cardiac arrest shall not be transported [if] return of spontaneous circulation is not achieved in the field.”

In short, if after 20 minutes of attempts to resuscitate a patient, the patient does not breathe spontaneously, he or she will not be transported to a hospital.

LA County Supervisor Hilda Solis told CNN: “Hospitals are declaring internal disasters and having to open church gyms to serve as hospital units. Our health care workers are physically and mentally exhausted and sick.”

The health crisis in the nation is projected to grow even more catastrophic. There have been 365,859 deaths in the US since the first death was reported in February of last year. According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, the death toll will hit around 502,600 by February 4. The IHME expects that another 135,000 people will die in the next four weeks, an average of 4,800 deaths a day.

Despite these dire statistics, state and local governments across the country are forcing teachers back to the classroom and falsely promising a safe environment for students and educators.

Governments around the world refuse to enact the broad-based public health measures—including the shutdown of all schools and non-essential businesses, with full income protection for workers and small businesses—that are required to contain the pandemic and save lives. In the face of the resulting explosion of infections and deaths, some countries are moving to stretch out the administration of COVID-19 vaccines, in short supply and poorly organized, by delaying the second dose of the two-dose regimen. Their position is that partially vaccinating more people more quickly will save more lives than offering fewer people the complete regimen.

Both in the UK and the US, public health officials and scientists have claimed that Pfizer-BioNTech’s mRNA vaccine offers a remarkable efficacy, above 90 percent after the 12th day following inoculation, with just a single dose.

The second dose of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which was rolled out this week in the UK, will be administered 12 weeks after the first. The Wall Street Journal wrote, “An AstraZeneca spokesman said the UK regulator’s dosing advice was ‘supported by strong evidence,’ including the elimination of COVID-19 hospitalizations by one dose. The vaccine was about 70 percent effective at three weeks after the first dose and stretching the time of the second dose, the regulator said.”

The evidence for these assertions remains to be presented.

According to a comment published in the Lancet on the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine’s efficacy, the two-dose regimen given three to four weeks apart showed a 70.4 percent efficacy 14 days after the second dose. The half-dose followed by the full-dose regimen had shown 90 percent efficacy, which is being further evaluated in trials. The two standard doses given three to four weeks apart provided only 62 percent efficacy against COVID-19 infection.

Why suddenly a single standard dose of the vaccine should generate such a high efficacy rate remains unexplained.

Pfizer has gone on record saying that its vaccine has not been evaluated for delays in giving the second dose. The quoted 95 percent efficacy develops only 12 days after the second dose is provided. “There are no data to demonstrate that protection after the first dose is sustained after 21 days,” the company stated. A New England Journal of Medicine study published last week found only 50 percent efficacy after one dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

At the World Health Organization January 5 press briefing in Geneva, Dr. Alejandro Cravioto of the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) explained that only under “exceptional circumstances” should the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine be given weeks after the scheduled second dose.

Dr. Joachim Homback, SAGE executive secretary, clarified these remarks, stating that these recommendations were based on limited clinical data on a delay in the second dose of around six weeks. Patients in the Pfizer phase three clinical trials were given the dose in the range between 19 and 42 days, though a majority received it within 19 to 28 days. Scientists have emphatically stated that evidence supporting a delay in the second dose of these vaccines beyond the six-week recommendation is lacking.

With regard to the Moderna vaccine, which will most likely receive emergency use authorization by the EU very soon, Moncef Slauoi, chief adviser to the US Operation Warp Speed vaccine program, stated this week that federal officials were considering halving the doses to overcome production and distribution bottlenecks. However, a Moderna company spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal that its vaccine trial and emergency use authorization were “linked to two shots of its vaccine one month apart… it couldn’t comment on regulatory discussions involving other dosing options.”

In the case of Moderna’s vaccine, the author of another New England Journal of Medicine study, published on December 30, Lindsey R. Baden, MD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, reported that a secondary analysis demonstrated a 95.2 percent efficacy 14 days after the first shot of the vaccine. However, this was not the protocol for the trial and remains speculative, requiring additional studies to confirm such a one-dose regimen.

Shortcuts are often reactionary knee-jerk reactions, and scientists are no less immune to them than politicians and heads of state. In the present instance, they are a response to the ever-growing social crisis emerging from the refusal of governments, all of which are controlled by capitalist elites, to take the measures needed to protect and care for the population at large. Attempts to depart from the science behind the vaccine trials will only instill further distrust in the public and create new and unforeseen crises.

Hundreds of thousands in UK spend Christmas and New Year homeless as pandemic worsens

Barry Mason

On any given day one in every 185 people in the UK do not have a home.

The annual report by homeless charity Crisis issued last month is based on research by Heriot-Watt University. It states, “More than 200,000 households will be experiencing the worst forms of homelessness this Christmas, including sleeping on the streets, hunkered down in sheds and garages, stuck in unstable accommodation such as B&Bs or sofa surfing far away from their support networks…”

The numbers of homeless has been rising for the past five years reaching a peak of 219,000 at the end of 2019—up from 207,600 in 2018. Crisis attributes a slight drop this year to the effects of the Everyone In scheme which the Tory government was forced to bring in as it responded to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The scheme saw around 15,000 homeless put up in hotels or other emergency accommodation in an effort to control the number of pandemic cases that threatened to overwhelm the National Health Service.

A homeless person sleeping on Euston Road in London last week (credit: WSWS)

Homelessness is not only the visible form of those having to sleep rough on the streets, the report notes. More than nine in ten (95 percent) of homeless households in England are hidden from view, “drifting from sofa to sofa or trapped in insecure, temporary accommodation.”

Crisis chief executive Jon Sparkes commented, “Homelessness is dangerous and devastating, and yet this Christmas there will be thousands of people sleeping on strangers’ floors, freezing in flimsy tents or trapped in rundown B&Bs with nowhere else to go and no one to be with.

“It’s unquestionable that the emergency measures taken to support people sleeping rough into safe accommodation, and the introduction of a ban on evictions, had a significant impact and protected the lives of thousands. With the economic damage of the pandemic set to be long-lasting, and with millions expected to be out of work by early next year, there is a very real risk homelessness will increase unless urgent action is taken.”

These calls have fallen on deaf ears. The Everyone In scheme was rapidly ended in May and replaced in September by a paltry £91.5 million fund. This was to be shared by fully 274 councils in order to fund their plans for rough sleepers over the next few months. It was topped up by just £15 million through the Protect Programme in November. A third lockdown is now underway with the government committing no more funding and Everyone In consigned to the scrapheap.

The Crisis report notes that poverty, destitution and poor housing problems are acute in regions in the north of England. Here homelessness has increased by 20 percent over the last five years.

London Councils represents the 32 London boroughs and the City of London. A separate report by the organisation in December stated that 63,000 London households, two thirds with children representing 90,000 individuals, would not spend the Christmas holiday period in their own permanent home. They would instead be in bed & breakfast accommodation, hostels or some other form of short-term accommodation, because of the severe lack of social housing in the capital where housing has become the prerogative of the rich elite. The figure for those in temporary accommodation in the capital are the highest for 15 years.

London Council’s Executive member for Housing and Planning, Darren Rodwell, who is leader of Labour-run Barking and Dagenham Borough Council, noted that “almost 90,000 children in the capital,” were “living in homeless households and set to spend Christmas in temporary accommodation…”

The homeless crisis in London can only worsen because “As well as skyrocketing temporary accommodation figures, councils face the nightmare scenario of extreme pressures on rough sleeper services that need to cope both with Covid-19 and cold weather snaps. And this is all taking place against a backdrop of horrendous budget constraints.”

These points are correct but Rodwell conceals the role of Labour who are operating in the words of party leader Sir Keir Starmer as a “constructive opposition” to Boris Johnson’s Tory government. Moreover, Labour councils nationally have, for over a decade, faithfully imposed the austerity cuts demanded by the Tories in central government.

The Shelter housing charity published its annual report on homelessness in December, Homeless and Forgotten. Shelter estimates the numbers of homeless and living in temporary accommodation in England to be 253,000, a figure it declared the highest figure for 14 years.

Shelter wrote of the report, “Rising homelessness is already a major problem—with the latest figures showing 115,000 more people are homeless and trapped in temporary accommodation than a decade ago—but Shelter argues the economic chaos caused by Covid-19 risks turbo-charging the crisis. The charity’s analysis of government data shows the number of people in temporary accommodation jumped by 6,000 in the first three months after the pandemic

“However, the number of people experiencing homelessness is undoubtedly higher, as many people will be undocumented by councils because they are sleeping rough or sofa-surfing.”

The shocking statistics highlighted by the report include the fact that 68 percent of those living in temporary accommodation are in London—one in every 52 people living in the country’s capital city. Outside London, over the last five years homelessness has increased by 16 percent in the northwest of England and the Midlands it has grown by 400 percent and 300 percent respectively.

The report notes, “One in six homeless households (17%) are in emergency B&Bs and hostels--where poor conditions and gross overcrowding are rife. The use of emergency B&Bs alone has increased by a staggering 371% over the last ten years.”

Shelter’s chief executive Polly Neate commented, “Over a quarter of a million people—half of them children—are homeless and stuck in temporary accommodation. This should shame us all. With this deadly virus on the loose, 2020 has taught us the value of a safe home like never before. But too many are going without, because of the chronic lack of social homes. Many people will spend Christmas in grim, dangerous places, cut off from loved ones and faced with a daily struggle to eat or keep clean…”

The Health Foundation charity, on December 28, highlighted the role of inadequate housing in exacerbating the pandemic. It noted, “Going into the COVID-19 pandemic, one in three households (32% or 7.6 million) in England had at least one major housing problem relating to overcrowding, affordability or poor-quality housing.”

It adds, “The pandemic has highlighted the health implications of housing. Poor housing conditions such as overcrowding and high density are associated with greater spread of COVID-19, and people have had to spend more time in homes that are overcrowded, damp or unsafe. The economic fallout from the pandemic may lead to an increase in evictions.”

An expression of the severity of the growing social crisis in Britain was the decision of the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF, to hand a £25,000 grant to School Food Matters, a community organisation. The money is being used to provide 18,000 nutritious breakfasts across 25 schools during the Christmas and February half-term breaks. This is the first time in the agency’s more than 70-year history that it has made such a gesture to provide relief for people living in Britain. Such funds are generally used to provide support and relief in so-called developing countries. Today, they are necessary in the fifth richest country in the world that is socially polarised to an extent not seen since the Second World War.

The Tory government refused to even acknowledge that such were the terrible social conditions that the UN is funding the feeding of children there. Leading Conservative MP and co-founder of a £5.5 billion emerging markets fund house, Jacob Rees-Mogg, attacked UNICEF’s grant to School Food Matters. Speaking in parliament December 17, he said the agency’s role was to look “after people in the poorest and most deprived countries in the world where people are starving where there are famines and where there are civil wars, and they make cheap political points of this kind giving I think £25,000 to one council. It is a political stunt of the lowest order…”

The Tory government launched a similar attack on UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston in 2018 upon the completion of his devastating indictment of social conditions in the UK after he had visited nine areas of the country. In his report, Alston noted of a situation which has dramatically worsened during the pandemic, “In England, homelessness is up 60% since 2010, rough sleeping is up 134%. There are 1.2 million people on the social housing waiting list, but less than 6,000 homes were built last year.”

World Bank report warns of extended downturn in global growth

Nick Beams

The global economy faces at least a decade of low growth, wiping out limited gains in poverty reduction and per capita income growth. In addition, the risk is that a rise in COVID-19 infections, continued stagnant investment or a major financial crisis produced by the escalation of debt could result in an even worse outcome.

That is the scenario set out by the World Bank in its semi-annual report on the state of the global economy issued on Tuesday. It said that at best the world faces a “slow and challenging economic recovery.”

A person wearing a protective face mask as a precaution against the coronavirus walks past stuttered businesses in Philadelphia, Thursday, May 7, 2020 (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

After a contraction of 4.3 percent in 2020, the bank forecast growth of 4 percent for 2021. However, that is based on a number of assumptions that are already in the process of being shattered.

Its forecast was predicated on “proper pandemic management and effective vaccination limiting the spread of COVID-19 in many countries.” But as World Bank president David Malpass acknowledged, the rollout of vaccinations had already run into problems.

“Even in advanced countries there have been difficulties in pushing ahead with vaccination programs, and that is true in poor countries as well,” Malpass said.

Stronger language has been used elsewhere, with the situation in the US, the centre of the pandemic, being rightly described as “chaotic” and a “mess.”

While he did not use the term, Malpass pointed to what has been characterised as “vaccine nationalism.” He noted that “advanced economies” had reserved vaccines beyond their capacity to distribute them, and expressed the hope that some of these supplies would be freed up for poorer countries.

Even on the World Bank’s most optimistic scenario, the level of global gross domestic product in 2021 is expected to be 5.3 percent below pre-pandemic projection, equivalent to a loss of output of $4.7 trillion.

Growth could be much lower. The report warned that if infections continued to rise—the present situation—and if vaccine rollouts experienced logistical problems—as is now the case—then global GDP may only expand by 1.6 percent this year. If financial stress, caused by rising debt, which was identified in the report as a significant risk, led to major corporate and government defaults then the world economy could contract again in 2021.

The report noted that even if the pandemic is brought under control, its effect on global growth could be “longer lasting than expected.” Debt had surged above already-high levels and although banks were relatively well capitalized “a wave of bankruptcies could erode bank buffers, putting some countries at risk of financial crisis.”

The report said that timely and equitable access to vaccines around the world would “necessitate global cooperation” and that only when the pandemic was contained in all countries “will each country be safe from a resurgence.”

It also emphasised that global cooperation was “critical” in meeting the challenges posed by the pandemic both in bringing it under control and in developing measures to ensure “sustainable and equitable” global growth.

However, here the pious pronouncements of the World Bank run into the two central contradictions of the global capitalist economy: the subordination of all social and health considerations to the demands of private profit, which has meant that no effective measures have been developed to combat the health emergency; and the division of the world into rival nation-states, which has blocked global cooperation and fuelled the growth of antagonisms.

As for “equitable” economic measures, Malpass acknowledged that the stimulus programs in the major economies, based on the massive financial asset purchasing programs of the world’s major central banks, were aggravating social inequality.

“Stimulus mechanisms are working to concentrate wealth at the top rather than adding wealth from the bottom up. People at the bottom are going down even as people at the top are going up,” he said.

This is the predominant global trend. In the major economies, as the working class faces what the World Bank characterises as the worst economic blow outside the two world wars and the Great Depression, the wealth of the financial oligarchy has been boosted by hundreds of billions of dollars as a result of the gusher of free money flowing from the central banks.

Ruling out any prospect for a return to “business as usual,” the report noted that the pandemic was “tipping millions into extreme poverty, and is expected to inflict lasting scars that push activity and income well below their pre-pandemic trend for a long period.”

In more than 90 percent of emerging market and developing countries, the pandemic has caused per capita incomes to fall. For a quarter of these countries, it is “expected to erase at least 10 years of per capita income gains.” Two decades of poverty reduction has come to a halt and in low-income countries, economic activity shrank by nearly 1 percent in 2020, the first aggregate contraction in a generation.

Throughout its analysis of the pandemic, the World Socialist Web Site has emphasised that the pandemic has acted as trigger event, exacerbating the underlying contradictions of the global capitalist economy that had been building up over decades.

This is confirmed by the World Bank report. In his foreword Malpass noted that the collapse in investment in emerging market and developing economies in 2020 followed “a decade of persistent weakness” and that the experience of past crises raised the concern that “investment could remain feeble for years to come.”

“If history is any guide,” the report said, “unless there are substantial and effective reforms, the global economy is heading for a decade of disappointing global growth outcomes.”

However, recent history has already shown that there are no such reforms waiting to be implemented. In fact, the very measures implemented in response to the 2008 crisis—the combination of austerity measures coupled with the injection of trillions of dollars of free money into to financial system—have created the conditions for a debt crisis.

The report noted: “Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, starting in 2010, a fourth wave of debt accumulation was underway, with the largest, fastest, and most broad-based increase in global debt in five decades.”

The three previous debt waves since the 1970s all ended with widespread financial crises and the major concern in the fourth wave is that it saw a “protracted period of weak investment and slowing growth despite surging debt.”

In other words, the debt has not been used to finance productive activity but incurred to fuel financial speculation.

“The pandemic,” it said, “has made the fourth wave more dangerous by increasing its risky features.” While “unprecedented monetary policy accommodation” has calmed financial markets, “historically low global interest rates may conceal solvency problems that will surface in the next episode of financial stress or capital outflows.”

Taken as a whole, the World Bank report amounts to an indictment of the bankrupt capitalist economic and political order. Refusing, because of their profit interests, to undertake meaningful measures to deal with the pandemic and with their laser-like focus on financial markets, the ruling elites have created a social and economic catastrophe.

Five Canadian health care workers die within a week as COVID-19 infections rise sharply nationwide

Carl Bronski

COVID-19 infections continue to spike across Canada at a record pace of more than 7,000 new cases per day. Health Canada reported that as of January 5, 618,000 Canadians had contracted the virus since last March. There have been 16,230 deaths. Over 4,000 COVID-19 patients are currently hospitalized.

Sheila Yakovishin (Photo credit Unifor)

Field hospitals have been opened in Ontario and Alberta to cope with a rapidly collapsing hospital infrastructure. In London, Ontario a refrigerated truck has been pressed into service to take the overflow of corpses from a local morgue.

Within the past week alone, five health care workers have died from the virus, two in Alberta, two in Ontario, and one in Quebec.

Although there is no overall centralized tracking system breaking down particular industry sector deaths, at least 31 health care workers have died from COVID-19 in Canada. Fifteen of these deaths were in Ontario.

As of late July, health care workers had accounted for about 20 percent of all COVID-19 cases in Canada. Especially hard hit have been workers at long-term care facilities and retirement homes, which have been the epicentre of the pandemic in Canada. More than 12,000 residents of nursing homes and seniors’ residences have perished thus far.

Sheila Yakovishin, who worked at Berkshire Care Centre in Windsor, Ontario, succumbed to the virus on December 31. Yakovishin was 60 years old and had worked at the facility for almost 32 years.

Erica Hooker, executive director of Berkshire Care Centre, described Yakovishin as a dedicated and well-loved member of the community. “Despite having other health issues, Sheila always persevered and put the care of others before her own. She had a giant heart, and it showed each and every day in the care and support that she provided to residents and to her colleagues,” she commented.

The COVID-19 outbreak was declared at Berkshire Care Centre on December 11. At least 82 patients at the facility have tested positive for the virus, as well as 38 staff, according to the Windsor-Essex County Health Unit. At least 7 residents have died of the virus since the beginning of the current outbreak. Across the Windsor-Essex region, there are 20 long-term care and retirement homes facing pandemic outbreaks, with hundreds of active cases among residents and staff. Prior to the Christmas holiday break, three local schools declared outbreaks along with several greenhouse operations.

Sheila Yakovishin was a member of Unifor. “On behalf of our union, I express the deepest condolences to Sheila’s family and all those who knew and loved her. As the New Year begins, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage unchecked in Ontario’s for-profit long-term care homes,” said Unifor President Jerry Dias in a statement. “It must be stopped, we must protect health care workers from this disease.”

Dias has no shame. He and his union have backed the reckless return-to-work drive for non-essential workers implemented by the corporate elite, the Conservative provincial government of Premier Doug Ford and federal Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Dias is a major booster of the “progressive” federal Liberal government and has complimented Ford and his Tories for “rowing in the same direction” as Trudeau, corporate Canada and the trade unions, even as the pandemic response of both levels of government has led to an utter catastrophe for working people.

Canada’s health care and seniors’ care systems, which have been deliberately underfunded by all governments whatever their political stripe for decades, are buckling under the strain. Officials in Ottawa and Toronto have admitted that contact tracing has largely collapsed, which has resulted in a further acceleration of transmission. Labs are overstretched, resulting in long delays in obtaining test results. Outrageously, health care workers still struggle to find adequate protective equipment more than ten months after the virus made its first appearance in Canada.

The shambolic state of the health care system in the face of a second pandemic wave that all serious experts warned was inevitable is the responsibility of the entire political establishment.

Ford’s boast that his government would erect an “iron ring” around long-term care facilities has proven to be a cruel hoax. On Monday, the Ontario government reported that there were active COVID-19 outbreaks in 219, or more than a third, of the province’s long-term care homes.

“Large numbers of staff infections” put seniors’ residences and care homes “under tremendous pressure, forcing them to seek help from outside agency workers,” a Toronto-area care worker told the World Socialist Web Site. “These workers are often put in a terrible position: under-trained, under-prepared, poorly paid and forced by the nature of their work (and lack of full-time employment at a liveable wage) to go from facility to facility, endangering themselves, their families, and the people they care for.”

Yakovishin’s New Years’ Eve death follow the December 28th demise of 61-year-old Jose Marie Corral, a health care aide at Calgary’s Bethany Riverview continuing care home. The particulars of a second Alberta health care worker who lost their life in recent days have not yet been released. On January 2, Oscar Anibal Rodriguez, an orderly at the CHSLD Sainte-Antoine long-term care residence in Quebec City, died. Rodriguez was in his late fifties. The outbreak at the Quebec residence is graded by the provincial government as “critical” with over one hundred infections and 12 deaths during the current outbreak.

Vaccinations had already begun at the Sainte-Antoine facility, but Rodriguez had not yet received his initial inoculation. Less than one percent of the Canadian population has received a vaccination to date as a result of an ongoing fiasco in the distribution of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines across the country.

The latest health care worker death was confirmed yesterday, when it was announced that Maureen Ambersley, a registered practical nurse in Mississauga, had succumbed to the disease. Ambersley, who worked as a nurse for 16 years, died Tuesday aged 57. She leaves behind her two children aged 26 and 28.

Both workers at long-term care facilities and family members of residents have been protesting at hard-hit facilities across the country. On January 2, protestors gathered at a 254-bed Tendercare facility in the Toronto borough of Scarborough to demand better care and protections.

During the second wave of the pandemic, 64 of the home’s residents have already died from the virus. Over Christmas, 77 staff members were off sick with the infection. Another 60 residents are currently infected.

Workers in Ontario’s home care residences continue to receive substandard pay, work grueling schedules, and struggle to receive adequate personal protective equipment. At the same time, residents of the care facilities receive dwindling service and attention.

New year begins with record COVID-19 deaths in Germany

Martin Nowak

The new year began in Germany in an even more deadly fashion than the old one ended. Despite greatly reduced health authority capacity over the New Year holiday, the past seven days represented the worst week of the pandemic to date, with more than 4,500 deaths reported in Germany. On Tuesday, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI)—the government health agency—reported another 1,019 deaths and 21,237 infections within the previous hours.

The situation in large parts of Germany is characterised by overcrowded crematoria, hospitals on the brink of collapse and mass death. According to the DIVI register, 82 percent of all intensive care beds in Germany are currently occupied, about a quarter, or 6,000, with coronavirus patients. More than half of these must be ventilated.

Central train station in Frankfurt, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Undertakers and crematoria report they can no longer keep up due to the large number of the dead. In Saxony in particular, additional storage capacity has already had to be created in several places, or the dead have been transported to crematoria far away where capacity is still available.

At the same time, reports are piling up about hospitals and care facilities on the verge of collapse; overworked nursing staff; doctors making decisions about who can receive life-saving treatment and who cannot; and hospitals that can only maintain their operations with the support of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces).

The Vogtland region of Saxony leads the country in new infections, with an incidence value of 929—meaning 929 out of 100,000 inhabitants, or just under 1 percent, have been infected with the virus, setting aside the number of unreported cases—in the past seven days. Of the 13 districts and cities in Saxony as a whole, only two have an incidence value below 300; all others are far above that.

Large parts of Thuringia, northern Brandenburg and several districts in Bavaria also have similarly high numbers.

Tobias Wenzel, head of the undertakers’ guild in Saxony, put the situation in a nutshell when speaking to broadcaster NTV shortly before Christmas: “We, the undertakers, are just emptying the old people’s homes. That makes me sad and angry at the same time.”

Wenzel also described how he and his colleagues are confronted with desperate and explosive political questions from many relatives: “Why are the old people’s homes not prepared for the second wave? Why are those politically responsible for this still in office?” Excellent questions, indeed.

The federal and state governments in Germany stood idly by in the autumn as the pandemic continued to gain ground. Even when the health authorities had already officially given up tracking due to being overloaded, no effective containment measures were taken. Schools, day-care centres and businesses remained fully open until shortly before Christmas.

Saxony, governed by a coalition of the Christian Democrats (CDU), Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens, only became the biggest coronavirus hotspot at the end of last year. Until the beginning of October, the daily number of new infections was always below 300, but since that time, the situation has worsened explosively.

At the end of October, new infections per day in Saxony rose above 1,000 for the first time. At the end of November, it was above 2,000, on December 7 above 3,000 and on December 14 above 4,000. Currently, in Saxony alone, with 4 million inhabitants, there are more than 3,300 COVID-19 patients in hospital, 600 in intensive care; the number of active cases is 32,300.

With a seven-day incidence of over 400, the rate in Saxony is more than twice as high as the German average. The mortality rate, with 3,383 deaths, also exceeds all other federal states, by two times, measured against the number of inhabitants. Due to the limited activity of general practitioners, laboratories, health offices and authorities during the Christmas holidays, the figures are probably much higher.

Hospitals are approaching their limits in terms of absorbing new patients. Four of the 13 counties in Saxony have fewer than 10 free intensive care beds, another five fewer than 20. Given this situation, further record numbers of deaths in January are inevitable.

However, there was and is an alternative to this catastrophe. The present situation is a direct consequence of the policies of all the establishment political parties. In Saxony, the CDU-SPD-Green coalition has been governing for a year. After the state had been largely spared during the first wave in the spring, the state executive has pursued an unspoken herd immunity policy, playing down the danger of the COVID-19 pathogen.

An important role in this was played by the “Brake pad” study, produced on behalf of the state government by Dresden Technical University, under the direction of Prof. Reinhard Berner. The study, discredited among teachers and educators, examined the blood samples of 2,000 pupils and teachers for the first time in May and then again during the autumn holidays.

The study was “absurd,” as the WSWS said at the time, because it cited results as evidence that schools or day-care centres were safe obtained under conditions where the pandemic had barely begun. In both periods, there were fewer than 100 new infections per day in the whole of Saxony (not per 100,000 inhabitants), i.e., only about one-hundredth of the daily infections since November.

The Dresden study did not remain an isolated case. Various federal states presented similar studies declaring schools and day-care centres to be safe. If necessary, study results to the contrary were falsified and covered up. Even then, however, the claim that there was no risk for children, and that they would even contain the pandemic, was incompatible with the findings of other scientific studies.

In the meantime, it is beyond doubt that keeping schools and day-care centres open contributes significantly to the spread of the pandemic. There are numerous documented cases of mass outbreaks at schools, as well as of teachers who presumably became infected and fell fatally ill while at work, like Soydan A. in Berlin.

Professor Berner also spoke out in favour of a herd immunity policy on several occasions. In April, he promoted allowing the virus to “slowly spread” within the child population, and in early September, he defended the governments’ relaxation of the containment measures in an interview with the Sächsische Zeitung: “We can’t prevent every infection.”

The Saxony state government not only played down the coronavirus danger but also sought to make far-right virus deniers socially acceptable and regularly offered them a platform. As it had done previously for Pegida, Pro Chemnitz and other far-right movements, the state executive of State Premier Michael Kretschmer (CDU) expressed much understanding for the “concerned citizens” or denied their far-right sentiments.

At the end of April, on the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birthday, the city council allowed Pegida to hold a rally on Dresden’s Altmarkt. As late as May, the state premier held a personal discussion with coronavirus deniers in the Dresden Großer Garten (Great Garden) in a very confined space and without wearing a mask. The right-wing extremists were allowed to demonstrate in the same way on several occasions. On November 7 in Leipzig, several thousand not only violated the coronavirus requirements under the eyes of the police but also attacked journalists and counter-demonstrators. Expressions of solidarity between the police and right-wing extremists were also reported several times.

While the far-right coronavirus deniers were able to spread their anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, the state government put a no less right-wing programme into action. Although infections escalated, by November at the latest, it stuck to its useless “lockdown light.” Schools, day-care centres and businesses continued to operate without restrictions into December. Only public events, gastronomy and the like were restricted.

Only when the Saxony-wide incidence rate exceeded the 400 mark—eight times the RKI guideline value for school closures—and school protests began in several German cities, did the Saxony state government react and suspended regular operations in schools and day-care centres from December 14 until January 8. In the same week, non-essential retail stores were closed, but otherwise, the government limited itself to appeals to work at home as much as possible.

The indifference of governments contrasts sharply with the social solidarity within the population and the willingness of medical staff to make sacrifices. On December 14, for example, Görlitz hospital issued an “urgent call for help” via Facebook “due to increasing cases” and “decreasing availability of hospital staff.” Within a few days, more than 100 people came forward, 34 of whom are now working in three shifts until February to help with patient care (serving meals, cleaning rooms, helping with personal hygiene, etc.). Among them are short-time workers, unemployed, pupils, pensioners and students.

As far as is known, the so-called lockdown in Saxony is to be extended beyond 10 January 10. However, no one should be under any illusions. Other state governments are already pushing for relaxations amid the mass dying. The state education ministers of Baden-Württemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia, with support from business and politician, are pushing for the opening of schools and kindergartens.

Only the independent intervention of the working class to close schools, kindergartens and factories, with full compensation to teachers, workers and others, can ensure that the pandemic is brought under control and the deadly danger to millions is averted.

Landslide in Papua New Guinea kills 15 gold miners, children

Patrick O’Connor

A landslide in Papua New Guinea’s Central Province buried alive 15 people, including 3 children, on December 28.

The horrific incident occurred between 4 and 5 a.m. Heavy rains triggered a large movement of mud, trees and logs which engulfed a makeshift long hut at the base of a hill. Makeshift rescue efforts were unsuccessful, after people attempted to dig through the mud using only shovels and sticks.

Bodies recovered from the landslide (Credit: Central Province administration)

News of the disaster took more than a day to emerge due to the remoteness and inaccessibility of Saki village, in Central Province’s Goilala District. With no mobile phone coverage and no roads, access requires a helicopter trip or a two hour walk. The area is only around 100 kilometres north of the country’s capital Port Moresby—the lack of basic transport and communication infrastructure reflects the enormous poverty in the former Australian colony.

Local authorities have organised helicopter lifts for supplies, including digging equipment, floodlights and food.

The landslide ruined villagers’ food gardens. Takeso Fona, leader of an emergency committee formed by local residents to support landslide survivors, told the National: “What are we going to do? We can grow new food crops but between now and when it is ready for harvest, we would have starved. We grew sugarcane, kaukau [sweet potato], banana and other produce that were to be harvested soon. Our children can survive for now with the food we currently have. But once it is finished, that will be a problem.”

Efforts to recover all of the bodies have continued this week. Those killed were alluvial gold miners and their families, reportedly from nearby villages, Tolukuma, Sobu, Goura and Mondo. They had been panning and digging tunnels in the hillside, searching for flecks of gold.

Site of the landslide disaster (Credit: William Samb parliamentary office)

Local parliamentarian and government minister for transport and infrastructure, William Samb, visited the area after the landslide and blamed the victims for their plight. He told other miners: “You are cutting through the mountain side, cutting down trees that hold the ground together. You need to move to a safer location away from the cliffside. You cannot be digging through the mountain side, then build your home on top. It is dangerous.”

These statements are an attempt to deflect scrutiny of the government’s responsibility for the disaster.

Alluvial mining is legal and officially encouraged in Papua New Guinea. Mining licences are not required if people extract minerals on their own land by non-mechanical means. Estimates of the number of people involved in makeshift, individual gold mining efforts vary from 60,000 to more than 100,000. Some of those involved are children, who have to skip school to help their families.

Living in terrible conditions, the miners endure well documented health and safety risks. These include poisoning from mercury and cyanide, which are frequently used to separate gold from rock and earth.

Women panning for gold near Porgera mine (Credit: Human Rights Watch)

Papua New Guinea is in the top 15 gold producing countries. Most of the gold is produced in enormous mines, including Ok Tedi (formerly owned by BHP Billiton and now nationalised), Lihir (owned by Australia’s Newcrest Mining), and Porgera (co-owned by Canadian-based Barrick Gold and China’s Zijin Mining).

Many of the mines have appalling environmental and human rights records, with company goons assaulting and murdering any local residents who oppose mining operations. Ok Tedi’s Australian corporate owners are responsible for the country’s worst ecological disaster. In the interest of maximising profits, instead of constructing a dam to house poisonous waste water, for two decades the company dumped the waste directly into the Fly and Ok Tedi Rivers, ruining the river systems and surrounding land.

While Papua New Guinea’s enormous mineral wealth has generated vast profits for transnational mining corporations, and personal wealth for a tiny layer of politicians and officials, ordinary people in the country remain among the world’s most impoverished.

For tens of thousands of people, the desperate search for flecks of gold provides the only means of survival.

Alluvial mining produces nearly 4 tonnes of gold annually, approximately 5 percent of total production in the country. This provides an important taxation revenue stream that the government has encouraged.

In March last year, Mineral Resource Authority official Roger Gunson declared: “From the grassroots miners working the rivers and streams to boost their rural household income, through to the national government collecting taxes, the sector is one of the largest small and medium enterprise [sectors].”

Alluvial gold miners take their finds to regional towns where they are purchased by licensed gold dealers based in Port Moresby. Most of this is then sold on to the Perth Mint, in Western Australia. The state government-owned Perth Mint processes more than 90 per cent of Australia and Asia’s gold production, equivalent to more than 10 percent of world gold production.

Last June, the Australian Financial Review published an exposé of Perth Mint’s ties with Papua New Guinean gold dealers. The newspaper suggested that Mint executives had “repeatedly ignored staff concerns around purchases from small-scale gold miners in PNG, a practice heavily criticised for using child labour, degrading the environment through the use of mercury, and promoting conflict.”

One of the gold dealing companies, Golden Valley, was owned by Justin Parker, an individual previously convicted of killing the company’s helicopter engineer in June 2015. Golden Valley sold the Mint around 80,000 ounces of gold in 2019, worth some $200 million. Golden Valley allegedly encouraged the use of child labour and traded gold for supplies of mercury, encouraging villagers on the island of Bougainville to use the toxic substance to extract more gold.

The Australian Financial Review reported: “Mint insiders said buying from Mr Parker was highly profitable, as the margin from Golden Valley was 10 times higher compared to other corporate customers such as Newcrest or Lihir Gold.”

Mint executives announced they would no longer process gold sourced from Papua New Guinean alluvial miners only after two of the world’s largest banks, HSBC and JPMorgan, threatened to sever ties.

The broader exploitative relationship between world imperialism and Papua New Guinean gold miners remains unaltered, however. With tens of billions of dollars’ worth of minerals and oil at stake, the lives of ordinary people in the impoverished country count for nothing within ruling circles internationally.

UK government refuses to publish list of airstrikes in Yemen involving civilian casualties

Jean Shaoul

The British government has refused to publish its database supposedly logging civilian casualties from murderous airstrikes in Yemen carried out by the Saudi-led coalition, which is armed by the UK and US.

While the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has listed a staggering 516 potential International Humanitarian Law (IHL) violations by the coalition of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the real number is far higher.

Destroyed house in South Sanaa, Yemen. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government is intent on maintaining the barbaric House of Saud’s control over the Arab Peninsula. It is suppressing any information that Riyadh or its backers are committing war crimes and avoiding accusations that the UK is violating its own rules against supplying arms likely to be used in violation of IHL.

The UK is a crucial supplier of weaponry to the coalition, having licensed more than £6.5 billion worth of arms in the five years since March 26, 2015, when the bombing began. Many of the bombs, missiles, and aircraft components are licensed via the opaque and secretive Open Licence system that is “more flexible” than a standard licence and “avoids the need to apply for a new licence for every export.” The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) therefore estimates that the real value of the UK’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia since the start of the war is £18 billion, around three times the official figure.

In July 2019, the Court of Appeal, in a case brought by CAAT, ruled that the government had failed to assess whether British-supplied weapons would be used in Riyadh’s murderous war in Yemen, in breach of both IHL and Britain’s own laws prohibiting the sale of weapons when there is a “clear risk they might be used in violations of international humanitarian law.” It banned further sales pending a review of the government’s vetting procedures, which had revealed that the government had simply stopped recording whether suspected violations had occurred.

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) has shown that the Saudi-led war against Yemen—waged with the full backing of Washington and London—has killed over 100,000 people, mostly civilians. The attacks have targeted food production, schools and hospitals, creating the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Around 24 million of the country’s 28 million people need humanitarian aid, with at least half the population on the brink of starvation. Many thousands have died of starvation, including at least 75,000 children under five, while the worst cholera epidemic in modern history has infected 1.2 million.

In September, a United Nations expert panel concluded that Saudi-led forces had been responsible for IHL breaches and concluded that those who armed the perpetrators, including the UK, could be “aiding and assisting” war crimes.

From the start of the war in April 2015, the Saudi bombing campaign has depended on the UK. More than half of Saudi Arabia’s combat aircraft used for the bombing raids are UK-supplied, as well as bombs, missiles, intelligence and elite Special Forces commandos used to target civilians, as even the MoD’s own limited database shows.

The government carried out a review of its vetting procedures and ignoring the documentary evidence, concluded that any IHL violations committed by the Saudi coalition were “isolated incidents.” It used this whitewash to resume arms sales to Riyadh in July 2020. The CAAT is now seeking a Judicial Review into the legality of the government’s decision.

Glimpses into the scale of the government’s deception have been revealed by the MoD’s answers to parliamentary questions showing the omission of several air strikes that breach IHL, as recorded by security, human rights groups and humanitarian groups, including the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) and the Yemen Data Project.

The MoD confirmed that most of the incidents listed by Labour’s shadow international trade secretary Emily Thornberry were not on its database, including attacks in January 2018 on a bridge and a market in Al-Mufdhah area that led to the deaths of 17 people and the wounding of more than 20 others, and a September 2015 air strike on a funeral gathering in Khabb wa al-Sha’af neighbourhood that killed 30 people.

The origins of the war lie in the 2011 Arab Spring, when mass protests broke out against the 32-year-long dictatorial rule of US and Saudi-backed president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who turned the military on the protesters. Following Saleh’s resignation, his vice-president Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi took over, promising reforms in an election without any opposition candidates. Houthi rebels in the north of the country rejected Hadi’s cosmetic reforms and, with the support of the former dictator, captured the capital Sana’a, forcing Hadi to take refuge in Saudi Arabia.

In March 2015, Saudi Arabia invaded Yemen, claiming that the Houthi rebels were Iran’s proxies, and seeking to reimpose Hadi, expecting a speedy victory for its military coalition with the UAE and other Arab countries. While the Saudis prosecuted the war by air, launching about 257,000 air strikes, the UAE blockaded Hodeidah, Yemen’s principal Red Sea port, seized the strategically located Socotra Islands and provided many of the ground troops, along with local or tribal militias operating in unstable and fluid alliances—some backed by Riyadh and some by Abu Dhabi. The UAE pulled out of the war in late 2019 amid growing disagreements with the Saudi-backed Hadi government, accusing it of aligning with the Islah party, viewed as close to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Under the pressure of a military onslaught, Yemen has fragmented into three areas. The first is controlled by the Houthis in the north. The second is controlled by the UAE-backed secessionist Southern Transitional Council (STC) in the south, and the Republican Guards on the western coast, led by former president Saleh’s nephew. The third, in the eastern provinces, is controlled by Hadi’s dwindling forces.

In November 2019, the US and France brokered the Riyadh Agreement, signed by the Hadi government in exile and the STC, for a power sharing deal. Nevertheless, the war continued as the Houthis reused to agree a ceasefire.

In December, a new government under Prime Minister Maeen Abdulmalik Saeed was sworn in, in Riyadh, in what was heralded as a reconciliation between Hadi and the STC that would fight the Houthi rebels. Days later, when this new government flew into Aden airport on December 30, it was greeted with a huge explosion, killing at least 22 people and injuring dozens more. The new cabinet was unhurt, but the blast killed five members of the International Red Cross.

Riyadh blamed Iran and the Houthis, a claim they denied, while the STC--which had declared self-rule in Aden in April, triggering clashes with Hadi’s forces--viewed the new government as a Saudi puppet. The STC calculated that Riyadh would favour the northern part of the country and take over the oil and gas fields in the south, eliminating the STC as a political and economic force. The agreement made no mention of taking back control of the Socotra Islands from the UAE, the STC’s erstwhile backer which is reportedly considering establishing military bases there that would also serve Israel. Saudi forces ordered the arrest of Abdel Nasser al-Bawa, a senior STC military and pro-secessionist official, accusing him of being involved in planning and carrying out the attack.

For the imperialist powers in London and Washington, and their regional proxies, Yemen and the humanitarian crisis engulfing its people are merely collateral damage in the struggle for domination over the energy rich-Middle East.