Study finds close to 185,000 unrecognized COVID-related deaths in the United States

Benjamin Mateus

A study published in the Lancet last week found that the number of unrecognized COVID-related deaths in the US is an astronomical 185,000.

The scale of death the coronavirus pandemic has wrought in the United States since last year has been unprecedented in its modern history. COVID-19 and the social mayhem the pandemic has perpetuated, with drug overdoses, rising homicides, worsening chronic diseases, has cut down the population’s lifespan by an astounding 1.5 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The last such decline occurred in 1943 at the height of World War II.

However, the actual COVID-19 death toll remains elusive and may take several years to make a thorough accounting. Nonetheless, future pandemic prevention efforts need to know how these deaths occurred. It has been noted that declines in overall life expectancy directly correlate to the population’s well-being and prosperity.

The disruption of social and health services, delayed treatments for chronic diseases, the stress caused by isolation, compounded by the tens of millions of the population infected with COVID-19, have contributed to the grim figure of over 625,000 reported deaths thus far. As the Delta variant continues to spread unchecked, these numbers will continue their upward trajectory.

Recently, a team of experts from the COVID-19 Emergency Response at the US CDC published their findings on the estimate of unrecognized COVID-19 deaths across the country from March 2020 to May 2021, 15 months. They estimated that the total COVID-19 deaths in the US at 766,611, with 184,477 (24 percent) not documented on death certificates.

Figure: Death certificate reported and unrecognized COVID-19 deaths from March 8, 2020, to May 29, 2021. Lancet Study.

The study was published in the Lancet just last week, but there has been barely a whisper in any media outlet. The scale of this death in the US from COVID-19 is unprecedented, placing it even above the death toll from the 1918 Influenza pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans. The silence is deliberate.

Deaths caused by COVID-19 are nationally notifiable in the United States. States and territories utilize the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (NNDSS) to report the number of cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections and deaths to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

As of May 29, 2021, the ending date for data collection in the Lancet study, the CDC COVID Data Tracker had reported 589,526 COVID-19 deaths. On the same date, the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) had aggregated a slightly lower figure of 582,135 COVID-19 deaths, accounting for some lag time with filing death certificates.

Estimates of excess deaths allow assessment of the “burden of mortality potentially related to the COVID-19 pandemic,” either directly from COVID-19 or with the disease as a contributing factor. It is typically calculated by calculating the difference between the observed number of deaths in a specific time and the expected number of deaths for the same period compared to recent historical trends.

However, as the authors of the study note, excess deaths cannot distinguish COVID-19 deaths that were “misclassified” from deaths that occurred because of avoiding emergency care due to fear of accessing health care systems, hospital overcrowding, interruption, and disruption of treatments, or even from a drug overdose, for that matter.

When deaths are reported to the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), a death certificate is issued, providing information on the deceased’s demographics, place and date of death, events leading to the individual’s death from which a single underlying cause of death is selected. If additional contributing factors are deemed pertinent, these may be included if due diligence is taken.

However, to classify these cause-specific deaths based on standardized codes can take several weeks, if not months. Additionally, many COVID-19 related deaths may be underestimated because infected individuals may not have sought medical care. Or when they did, the virus was no longer detectable. Other factors include lack of testing availability or improper specimen collections that may have led to a missed diagnosis of COVID-19 related fatality.

Even if a patient is diagnosed with COVID-19 and is hospitalized, often they linger for weeks before they succumb, leading to an incorrect attribution “to a cause other than COVID-19 because of the time between identification and death.” In many cases, SARS-CoV-2 infections can exacerbate chronic medical conditions or cause massive infections, heart or kidney failure, and the death certificate incorrectly omits COVID-19 as a causative factor. Ultimately what is or is not written on the death certificate is final.

In conducting their study, the authors explained, “To better quantify and estimate the number of excess deaths [due to COVID-19] that were not captured as COVID-19 deaths or unrecognized on death certificates, we developed a regression model, using 2020-2021 all-cause mortality data reported to NVSS and SARS-CoV-2 viral surveillance data for six age groups across 50 states, New York City, and the District of Columbia.”

To estimate “COVID-19-attributable unrecognized deaths” among all the excess deaths that did not have COVID-19 listed as a cause of death, all death certificates that annotated COVID-19 as contributing to or causing death were subtracted from the excess deaths before conducting their regression analysis. This avoids double counting and reducing the potential underestimation.

Their analysis found 184,477 unrecognized deaths between March 8, 2020, and May 29, 2021, a period of almost 15 months, with a range estimate between 172,810 to 196,035 deaths. When these figures are then added back to the COVID-19 deaths reported through death certificates, the authors estimated the actual death toll from COVID-19 through the end of May 2021 at 766,611, with a range of 754,944 to 778,170. In simple terms, more than three-quarters of a million people who did not have to die.

More unrecognized deaths had occurred early in the pandemic. Not surprisingly, April 2020 had the most significant figure with 36,850 deaths (20 percent) when the first wave of infections crashed into the United States, establishing the country as the epicenter of the pandemic for almost an entire year. December 2020 and January 2021 were the next highest, with the devastating winter surge coinciding with the holidays. Also, 151,592 deaths (82 percent) occurred in individuals 65 years and older. Though people over 65 make up only 18 percent of the population, they represent more than 80 percent of all deaths from COVID-19.

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) divides the country into ten regions. Region Four includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and had the most significant number of unrecognized deaths, with just over 44,000 accounting for almost 24 percent of all such deaths. Regions Five and Six secured second and third place, which includes the upper Midwest and South/Southwest. However, the most considerable per capita rate of unrecognized deaths fell on Region Seven, which includes Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska.

The study also analyzed the data according to reported COVID-19 deaths and total COVID-19 attributable deaths, and the reader is encouraged to review these data. What it demonstrates concretely is the massive loss of life that the ruling elite have allowed to befall the population in the hopes of staving off any economic repercussions. The enormous rise in the Wall Street financial indices and the accumulation of obscene wealth in the hands of the financial aristocrats correspond to the misery and death that has befallen the population.

Every means to stave off a human catastrophe from the ravages of the virus exists on a social scale. In no uncertain terms, given the advancement in technology, in medical expertise, in resources, and capacity to distribute them to the population, that the pandemic has been allowed to create the singularly most deadly event in the United States’ modern history is a damning indictment of the capitalist system.

Extreme wildfires along the US West Coast generating their own weather

August Quill

In the wake of the hottest days on record with temperatures reaching far into the triple digits this month, California and the western United States are in the throes of a worsening fire season.

Firefighters battle the Tamarack Fire in the Markleeville community of Alpine County, Calif., on Saturday, July 17, 2021. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Extreme heat throughout the region as well as in western Canada, has sparked a growing wave of wildfires and tens of thousands of evacuations. The National Interagency Fire Center reports that, as of Wednesday, 78 large fires are burning in 13 states and have so far destroyed 1,346,736 acres.

The growing wildfires are just one expression of the intensifying effects of climate change around the world. Many areas of the country and beyond, including in Siberia, are suffering from record heat and raging fires. Meanwhile, historic flooding has overwhelmed Detroit, Michigan and much of Louisiana, displaced more than 1 million people in central China, and washed away entire towns in Southern Germany where the official death toll is approaching 200 and some 700 are still missing.

The Dixie Fire continues to rage north of California’s state capital Sacramento. The fire broke out on July 14, only 10 miles east of the town of Paradise in Butte County, California. Paradise was threatened by the North Complex Fire last year after it had been destroyed during the 2018 Camp Fire only two years prior. The Camp Fire has been called the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history, having claimed 153,336 acres, 18,804 buildings and 85 lives, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The Dixie Fire in comparison has scorched 59,984 acres and has led to no loss of life and no major destruction of property at the time of this writing. The formation of a pyrocumulonimbus cloud generating high winds and lightning combined with the fact that the fire is only 15 percent contained is a worrying sign, however. Pyrocumulonimbus clouds are formed when heat forces air to rapidly rise to high altitudes, where any moisture evaporated by the inferno quickly cools and condenses creating thunderstorms.

“It’s very crazy” Cory Mueller, a National Weather Service meteorologist with the Sacramento Region, told CNN. “You don’t want to see lightning strikes coming off a fire—it’s obviously dangerous for anyone fighting the fire, but when you see it, it means you’re likely having very intense fire growth.”

Both the 2018 Camp Fire and the currently raging Dixie Fire are believed to have been caused by the poorly maintained equipment of the Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E). During the containment process in 2018, investigators discovered that above-ground power transmission lines owned by PG&E had been knocked over by high winds causing many of the initial conflagrations. Disaster could have been mitigated or averted entirely had PG&E shut off electricity in grids likely to have downed lines in the wake of high winds, but company policy drafted in the aftermath of a wave of customer complaints over unplanned outages during the 2017 North Bay Fires precluded such action.

The Los Angeles Times noted that regarding the currently blazing Dixie Fire, “Pacific Gas & Electric said its utility equipment may have sparked the fire after an electric worker found two blown fuses and a tree leaning onto a power line conductor in the area near the ignition point of the blaze.” That PG&E was not only allowed to continue operating even after pleading guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in 2019, but was then allowed to cease filing a bankruptcy claim in 2020 in order to qualify for access to a fraction of the 21 billion dollars offered up by the California Wildfire Insurance Fund is beyond criminal in light of the Dixie Fire’s developments.

However, PG&E’s greed-driven neglect of infrastructure maintenance is only partially responsible for California’s much broader trend of wildfires and other extreme weather events, which in the final analysis are brought on and exacerbated by manmade climate change.

Three other large fires raging throughout the state are believed to be the result of naturally occurring lightning strikes: the Lava Fire in Siskiyou County, the Beckwourth Complex Fire in Plumas County and the Tamarack Fire in Alpine County. These fires, which began on June 25, July 3 and July 4 respectively, have consumed a grand total of 170,709 acres and 163 structures and have led to the evacuation of over 70 communities in northern California.

The unusually early start to this year’s fire season, combined with a near statewide drought have made fighting these fires harder than in previous years. Six of the seven firefighters injured this season have been hurt fighting the Lava Fire. Even with 117 Fire Engines, 29 hand crews, 17 helicopters, 24 dozers, 22 water tenders and over 1,420 personnel on scene it has taken Cal Fire over three weeks to reach 77 percent containment of the Lava Fire. The lengthy process is largely due to limited road access and few nearby sources of water.

Without frequent air drops of water, firefighters have had to turn to using hand tools, clearing away dry vegetation and digging firebreaks under backbreaking mountainous conditions in daytime temperatures that have averaged 91 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius) over the past month. Due to the annual nature of the fires—and their intensification in recent years—it is criminal that nothing has been done to establish access to water sources in fire prone areas.

To the north of the Golden State, in Oregon the Bootleg Fire, which has been burning in the Fremont-Winema National Forest since July 6, is the largest fire currently raging in the United States and is the third largest in the state’s history. It has consumed 388,350 acres and destroyed 67 homes along with 117 minor structures and has led to the evacuation of over 2,000 people from their homes in Klamath County. The Bootleg has, like the Dixie Fire, created a pyrocumulonimbus cloud. This is the second consecutive year major pyrocumulonimbus clouds have generated on the North American continent, with the Creek Fire which burned from September through December last year near Shaver Lake, California, having formed one.

In addition to the Dixie and Bootleg, there was an earlier pyrocumulonimbus storm in Canada around the northwestern border between Alberta and British Columbia. A total of 710,117 lightning strikes were observed by the North American Lightning Detection Network in the 15 hours between 3 p.m. June 30 and 6 a.m. July 1, and at least two individuals died when a burning utility pole fell on them as they were taking shelter in a pit near their home in Lytton, British Columbia according to the Vancouver Sun.

Man-made climate change was first theorized in 1896 by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius. A Canadian steam engineer and amateur climatologist, Guy Stewart Callendar, would go on to expand on Arrhenius’s theories, inadvertently proving in 1938 that the Earth’s average land temperature had risen steadily over the course of the previous five decades. Spurred on by Callendar’s discoveries, another Canadian scientist, Gilbert Plass, developed computer models aimed at exploring how infrared radiation and increased atmospheric carbon dioxide would affect global temperatures before presenting his discoveries to Time in 1953.

In 1959, at a symposium held to commemorate the centennial of the American oil industry by the American Petroleum Institute and the Columbia Graduate School of Business, Edward Teller, whose work as a theoretical physicist on the Manhattan Project made him something of an expert on global catastrophes, shared his concern that the increased greenhouse effect created by the unmitigated use of fossil fuels would lead to the melting of the polar ice caps and subsequent flooding of coastal cities across the country. In short, scientists have been sounding alarm bells for years, alarm bells which the capitalist governments of the world have been unwilling and unable to heed.

More than six decades after Teller gave his speech in New York City, twenty-seven years after the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change went into effect, sixteen years after the Kyoto Protocol expanded on the former, six years after the Paris Climate Agreement was signed to replace its “unfair” predecessor and the only historically significant decline in global pollution was the result, not of a deliberate, rational plan by any government to phase out fossil fuels in favor of clean renewables, but of a pandemic that has claimed millions of lives the world over and temporarily impacted the output of major corporations and global polluters.

Mass abstention in Bulgarian elections

Markus Salzmann

The July 11 parliamentary elections in Bulgaria highlighted the deep political crisis in the eastern European Union state. Slavi Trifonov’s protest party ITN (“There Is Such a People”), which emerged victorious, is supported by fewer than one in 10 eligible voters.

A pedestrian walks by political adds in the Bulgarian city of Kyustendil (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

This result exemplifies the political situation in Eastern Europe, where the majority of the population harbors deep mistrust of the entire political elite.

Overall voter turnout was only 42 percent. Even in the capital Sofia, not even half of those eligible to vote went to the polls.

In the Kardzhali region turnout was only 28 percent. With 24.1 percent of the ballots, the ITN achieved a razor-thin lead over the right-wing conservative GERB of former Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, which received 23.5 percent of the vote.

The Coalition for Bulgaria, an amalgamation of several “left-wing” parties around the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) and the Bulgarian Communist Party (BKP), lost votes once again, garnering only about 13 percent. Also represented in parliament are the Democratic Party (DB), the Turkish minority Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DSP), and the anti-corruption party ISMV.

This was the second parliamentary election this year. Already in April, voter turnout reached a historic low of 47.5 percent. At that time, Borisov’s GERB came in first by a narrow margin. However, the deeply discredited party was unable to find a coalition partner. The former coalition partner of GERB failed to retain representation in parliament, and other potential partner parties refused to cooperate.

Despite this, Trifonov turned down the mandate to form a government after the April elections. Observers assume he was speculating that his party would emerge strongest from new elections. As a result, President Rumen Radev installed Stefan Yanev as interim prime minister.

The results of the new elections are a slap in the face for Bulgaria’s entire political establishment. Borisov, who had ruled almost continuously for nine years, is hated by a large part of the population, as had already become apparent after the 2017 election.

To achieve a tiny parliamentary majority, GERB entered into a coalition with the fascist United Patriots (OP) party alliance. The alliance included the National Front for the Salvation of Bulgaria (NFSB), the Bulgarian National Movement (IMRO), and the far-right party Attack.

For two months last year, thousands of people demonstrated almost daily against the prime minister and the government. They demanded their resignation, new elections and fundamental reforms in the state apparatus.

Borisov, who began his career in the Stalinist BCP, is seen as the embodiment of a system marked by corruption and the intertwining of oligarchy, politics and the state. Although the protests were organized by equally discredited figures, they expressed widespread opposition to the political and social conditions in the country. According to Transparency International, the country has the highest level of bribery in the EU.

In the EU, Borisov was valued as a reliable partner despite his numerous scandals. His party, which openly formed coalitions with fascist forces, remains a member of the European People’s Party (EPP). In European capitals, Borisov was praised primarily for his pro-European orientation and distance from the Kremlin.

The recklessness of his government’s policy was particularly evident in the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus has claimed over 18,100 lives in Bulgaria since the pandemic began. In addition, there have been mass layoffs and a dramatic reduction in wages in many industries.

But like the other parties, Trifonov’s ITN is in no way an alternative to GERB. The 54-year-old Trifonov has been known in Bulgaria for decades as a singer and entertainer. He only recently founded the ITN, in February 2020.

Similar to a number of other prominent and wealthy individuals in other countries, Trifonov has been able to capitalize on anger toward the established parties. Despite touting his hostility toward the “elite,” he is well connected with the country’s political and economic bigwigs.

His understanding of democracy was expressed in a Facebook post he made immediately after the election. Despite a record abstention, he spoke of a “good day for Bulgarian democracy.”

ITN’s election program consists of little more than vague statements against corruption and for greater prosperity. In foreign policy, Trifonov stands for a continuation of the pro-European course and strives for rapid entry into the euro zone, a policy attended by massive social attacks against the population in recent years.

After the election, the ITN initially announced that it would establish a minority government and name a cabinet. This was expressly intended to exclude coalition negotiations with other parties. The planned cabinet of mostly unknown economic and financial experts was to be headed by Nikolay Vassilev. Vassilev was a minister several times between 2001 and 2009 and belonged to the right-wing National Movement for Stability and Progress (NDSV).

In the face of fierce opposition on social media to the announcement that such a discredited politician without any democratic legitimacy would become prime minister, Trifonov withdrew his announcement three days later.

Now ITN wants to enter coalition talks with two unspecified parties, according to an announcement by Vice-Chairman Toshko Yordanov. Negotiations are likely with the DB and the ISMV, which likewise focused its election campaign solely on corruption. ITN representatives have announced that new proposals for a cabinet will be made soon.

Political experts in Sofia assume that attempts to form a government could again fail. “Just like after the April election, I expect a highly fragmented parliament with no single party able to form a cabinet,” said Genoveva Petrova of Alpha Research.

Ruzha Smilova, who teaches political science at Sofia University, expressed a similar view. “Even if ITN were to join forces with the protest parties, they would not have a majority in parliament,” Smilova said. “Trifonov would have to seek support for certain policies from the traditional parties, with which he has so far refused to cooperate.”

To prevent the ruling class from once again cobbling together a right-wing, anti-working class government, workers in Bulgaria and throughout Eastern Europe must draw the lessons from the experience since the restoration of capitalism 30 years ago. It was not socialism that failed then, but Stalinism.

The criminal responsibility of Chilean State for COVID-related crisis

Mauricio Saavedra

Two recent studies published in major health journals (one in The Lancet and the other in Science) shed further light on how long-standing class war and malign neglect policies against the poorest sections of the working class have played out during the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile. They add weight to a mountain of evidence that the state’s class-based health care system bears criminal responsibility for the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands and the spread of the disease in the working class population.

The latest epidemiological study, released by the Chilean Ministry of Health on Wednesday, reported 1,907,154 accumulated cases since March 2020 and 43,855 deaths associated with the coronavirus. This tragedy is the product of deliberate policies. The rapid and unabated spread of coronavirus across every part of the nation is due to the prioritization of the economic interests of the corporate and financial elite above all else.

Health Minister Enrique Paris addressing Congress 20 July 2021 to explain his decision to allow a tourist with the Delta variant to travel without first quarantining. (MINSAL)

The venal and reactionary Chilean bourgeoisie is today clamoring for an end to all forms of restrictions and confinement when the Gamma variant, estimated to be twice as infectious as the original virus, is the most dominant strain and the Delta variant is now in circulation. For them, even Health Minister Enrique Paris’ pro-business “Step by Step Plan” of placing only the most heavily infected communities in quarantine and lockdowns is intolerable.

The fascistic UDI (Independent Democratic Union) and Republican parties are the most vociferous in calls to end lockdowns, and are riling small and micro-business owners and the middle class who are being crushed by the near absence of government assistance during the pandemic. Any further confinements “will only provoke disaster and bankruptcy,” UDI deputies prophesy, knowing full well that their bourgeois patrons have reaped a bonanza during the past year and a half.

However, the entire capitalist state, from the right-dominated administration of billionaire President Sebastian Piñera to the Congressional left and the corporatist unions have allowed the lives, health and wellbeing of millions to be sacrificed so that the main export sectors remained operational and the richest families could double their obscene levels of wealth from $21 billion in March 2020 to $42.7 billion in April 2021.

Negligible state handouts forced working class families to violate lockdowns for food and work as Chile’s extreme social inequality was only exacerbated in the past 16 months. Tomás Pérez-Acle, from the Science and Life Foundation, reported to El Mostrador at the beginning of June that “78 percent of those infected are under 49 years of age,” and that “44 percent of the people in the ICU are under 50 years of age.” Not only are they the demographic that has been vaccinated the least, they are of working age.

Health care unions rally in support of questioning of Enrique Paris. (Credit: Guillermo Correa, El Porteño)

The left parliamentarians approved bills facilitating the suspension of hundreds of thousands of contracts, forcing workers to eat into their unemployment insurance under the “Employment Protection Law,” allowed massive layoffs and agreed to postpone collective bargaining negotiations. Of the 2 million jobs destroyed during the pandemic, only half have been recuperated and many are under worse contracts.

To this day, absolutely nothing has been done to resolve the lack of potable water, electrification and sewerage in hundreds of squatter settlements. Nor has anything been done to deal with the overcrowded western and southern working class communes of Greater Santiago, where social distancing remains impossible.

Riots against hunger, the lack of running water, government negligence and indiscriminate police violence have been met with authoritarian measures and a permanent state of emergency since March of last year. With the support of Congress, Piñera passed draconian laws beefing up the repressive apparatus and allowing the use of the military for policing operations, even as human rights organizations filed a case in the International Criminal Court against government and military authorities for crimes against humanity.

In contrast, Congress introduced populist measures (such as three withdrawals of personal savings from private pension funds) in order to secure the support of better-off sections. The government permitted the wealthy unimpeded travel and opened the country to international tourism, in that way allowing the Alpha, Lamda, Gamma and now Delta variants to proliferate. Meanwhile, they militarized the borders to deny entry to desperate refugees fleeing from economic crises in Venezuela, Bolivia and other parts of the Americas and initially refused to vaccinate those who had entered.

Despite high vaccination rates in Chile, this year the country has recorded some of the highest numbers of daily cases since the outbreak of COVID-19: almost two-thirds of all infections were recorded in the first sixth months of 2021 and nearly half the fatalities.

At the beginning of 2021 the international media sang only praise for Chile—the poster boy of free market economists—because of its vaccination progress. They were forced to backtrack by April as cases surged, despite more than half of the population being inoculated. By June, the government grudgingly acceded to a blanket lockdown of densely-populated Santiago following some of the worst COVID-19 case numbers since the pandemic began.

In a telling interview published in the German magazine Der Spiegel in June, Soledad Martínez, a Chilean public health expert, revealed just how disastrous the official response has been.

“The situation is catastrophic,” Martínez explained. “We are a really negative example. You shouldn’t do things the way Chile does. So I can only warn: no country in the world should now act as if everything is over and suspend measures such as mask-wearing.”

Martínez described how, following the aggressive vaccination plan predominantly with the Sinovac vaccine, “measures of social distancing (were) thrown overboard,” allowing the virus to spread greatly. “We health scientists have warned about this, but unfortunately we have not been listened to. To me, it feels like watching a train wreck in slow motion. It could have been prevented.”

“We have high death rates, and younger people are dying. What is particularly terrible is that, unfortunately, pregnant women and their unborn babies also die or have to be intubated—with an uncertain outcome. These fates are extremely depressing,” she added.

Intensive care units have been overloaded for months (in reality, collapsed) and patients are today being redirected to outpatient and primary care facilities or are treated at home.

“Opening new beds also requires personnel,” protested Dr. Manuel Nájera, vice-president of the Society of Epidemiology. “There have been discussions about setting up field hospitals, but the lack of personnel is a problem for opening more beds all at once. Today there are fewer staff due to the collapse, fatigue, medical leave. Of course, we are calling for opening more beds, because the affected population numbers are very high; the demand for critical hospitalization is exceeding the installed capacity we have. Why were sufficient measures not taken in advance? It does not make any sense.”

This catastrophic scenario has been confirmed 10-fold by reports at the national and regional level by the Medical Association and the health unions.

¥ Metropolitan Region regional president of the doctor’s college, Francisca Crispi, told CNN Chile that the situation of the health care network “is extremely serious. We have reached an occupation of 99% of critical beds with more than 2,500 critical beds occupied, which we have never seen in the history of our country.”

Jose Luis Espinoza, the president of Chile’s National Federation of Nursing Associations (FENASENF), said his members were “on the verge of collapse.”

¥ The health care system in the Valparaíso region, the second most populous area, is in a state of collapse: the Claudio Vicuña Hospital in San Antonio has a 100 percent occupancy rate, while the Carlos Van Buren Hospital has 97 percent occupancy.

Dr. Ignacio de la Torre, regional president of Valparaíso Medical Association, told local media that “it is not only the risk of getting sick from COVID, at this moment any patient with a complex disease has serious difficulties being attended in a timely manner and with the necessary quality.”

“The minister always says that we can still resist, but I do not know how much the health team can resist ... this level of stress, taking into account that in the region we have even had cases of suicide by people who have been mistreated and, in addition, had the stress of working exhausting shifts,” added Francisco Álvarez, president of the Federation of University Health Professionals Valparaíso-San Antonio.

¥ President of the Biobío region Medical Association, Dr. Germán Acuña, explained to Diario U de Chile that nurses, kinesiologists and physicians were directed to solely work as intensive care personnel. “There is staff burnout, a bed is not just a piece of furniture with a ventilator, it is all the associated staff. The administration people are also tired. We would like to have 20, 30 more beds but we don’t know if we can have the staff,” he explained.

¥ Maule Regional president of the Medical Association, Dahiana Pulgar, said that “we are in an extreme situation. In ICU beds, Maule is facing an overwhelming work overload, with beds that are not available because there are no personnel, they are on medical leave.”

The paper published in The Lancet July 2, the combined effort of academics from the University of Pennsylvania and several Chilean universities, concretely explains what has been known for decades: that the two-tiered Chilean health system, starved of funds, personnel, infrastructure and resources, plays a significant role in unfavorable outcomes. This has only been exacerbated during the pandemic.

From data collected in 2017 and 2018, the report found that Chilean patient-to-nurse ratios are “substantially worse than international standards” and it also has one of the lowest nurses-to-doctors ratios among countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

“Nurse workloads across public hospitals vary substantially, from nine to 24 patients per nurse, a remarkable difference in a public hospital system,” the academics explain. While a nurse in a private hospital cares for an average of 8.7 patients (still high in accordance to international standards) public hospital nurses care for an average of 14.7 patients.

“Every additional patient added to the average nurse’s workload increased patients’ risk of in-hospital death by 4%. Patients in hospitals with 18 patients per nurse, compared with those in hospitals with eight patients per nurse, had 41% higher risk of death, were 20 percent more likely to be readmitted within 30 days of discharge, had stays that were 41 percent longer…”

This brazen disregard for the well-being of health professionals reflects the state’s attitude toward the working class as a whole. This is made graphically clear in the paper published in Science Magazine at the end of May. The report published by multiple universities and institutes from the UK, US and Chile assesses “how social factors propel (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic in an economically vulnerable society with high levels of income inequality.”

The study, which focused on the first four months of the outbreak of COVID-19 from March 2020 in Chile, conclusively demonstrates that infection fatality rates were higher in the poorest communes because of comorbidities, continued mobility during lockdown periods and lack of access to health care. “Disparities between municipalities in the quality of their health care delivery system became apparent in testing delays and capacity. These indicators explain a large part of the variation in COVID-19 underreporting and deaths and show that these inequalities disproportionately affected younger people.”

The focus of the study was Greater Santiago, which today is home to 8.1 million people. The report states that while the region accounted for 36 percent of Chile’s total population by the end of August 2020, it recorded 55 percent of the confirmed COVID-19 cases and 65 percent of the COVID-19-attributed deaths.

Map of Greater Santiago (Wikimedia commons)

The true value of the study is its focus on correlating disease and death with poverty. “The maximum incidence (of infections) in Vitacura (among the most exclusive communes in Santiago) was 22.6 weekly cases per 10,000 individuals during the middle of May, whereas (the southern working class commune of) La Pintana reported a maximum of 76.4 weekly cases per 10,000 individuals during the first week of June.” In other words, the infection incident rate in working class communes was more than three times higher than in the bourgeois communes.

COVID-19 fatality rates recorded show the same correlation: “the highest rate of 4.4 weekly deaths per 10,000 individuals is observed in San Ramon … whereas Vitacura reported a maximum of 1.6 weekly deaths per 10,000 in June.”

Because the South and West zones have four times fewer beds per 10,000 people and four times lower proportion enrolled in the private health system than the East zone, “(n)otably, more than 90% of the COVID-19-attributed deaths in the South and West zones occurred in places other than health care facilities, compared with 55% in the East zone.”

In the Health Ministry’s July 11 summary of community indicators and COVID-19 cases in the Metropolitan Region (see map), the incidence rate continues to impact working class western and southern communes by up to twice as much as in the wealthy northeastern communes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed how successive governments have ravaged Chile’s national health care system. Chile began spreading the gospel of the free market in health care under the fascist-military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet as early as the 1970s. It is this policy of sustained socioeconomic shock therapy, adhered to by the right, the fake left and the unions that has laid the groundwork for the incalculable loss of life today.

Canadian government summits on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: a political fraud

James Clayton & Keith Jones

Over the course of two days this week, Canada’s federal Liberal government is holding two separate “emergency summits” on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. These meetings will do nothing to uproot anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim hatred. Rather, they are grotesque political stunts, organized to obscure the real issues behind a spate of violent anti-Muslim attacks and a troubling growth in hate crimes targeting Jews; and to shape public discourse in line with the domestic and global interests of Canadian imperialism.

The government used Wednesday’s “National summit on Antisemitism” to equate left-wing opposition to the crimes of the Israeli state and Zionism with anti-Semitism. Today, they will pretend that the past two decades of Canadian history did not happen. The complicity of Canadian imperialism in the scapegoating of Muslims, its staunch support for the Israeli state’s ongoing dispossession and repression of the Palestinian people, and its alliances with far-right forces—including those who promote hostility to Jews and Muslims—whenever politically expedient, will be covered up with weasel words. Everything will be chalked up to “racism” and empty appeals for “Canadians of all faiths to come together” will be made. But the fact remains: the violence which the Canadian state condones and perpetrates against Palestinians, Afghans, Libyans, Syrians, Yemenis and Iraqis, and has justified in the name of a spurious “war on terror,” is spilling over into far-right attacks on Muslims in Canada.

Canada’s Ukraine Ambassador, Roman Waschuk, addresses a memorial gathering in Kiev for the soldiers of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which while collaborated with the Nazis in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jew. Members of the two organizations often marched under German command and in German uniforms. (Photo Credit: Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade)

The twin summits are the Liberal government’s pragmatic, impromptu response to several recent events. Israel’s latest eruption of genocidal violence against the Palestinians, which claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians, sparked widespread public outrage and large demonstrations in Canadian cities. The brutal June 8 attack in London, Ontario that killed four members of a Muslim family, the Afzaals, shocked the country.

On June 10 the Liberals poached one of the three Green Party MPs, Jenica Atwin. She had clashed with Green Party leader Anamie Paul, a staunch Zionist, including over tweets labelling Israel an apartheid state, and had been threatened by Paul aide Nathan Zatzman, with deselection as a Green candidate for her criticisms of Israeli state violence. Trudeau and his top advisers viewed Atwin’s defection as a pre-election coup. But the government immediately came under fire for embracing an “apologist for Hamas” from much of the corporate media, the Conservative opposition and sections of the Liberal caucus. The Liberal top brass quickly prevailed upon Atwin to make dutiful public mea culpas. But even before then, and as part of the same effort in political damage control, they decided to act on demands from the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the country’s leading pro-Zionist organization, and B’nai B’rith for an emergency summit on anti-Semitism.

As this was playing out, the NDP, taking up a call from the National Council of Canadian Muslims, pressed for a national summit on Islamophobia in response to the London terrorist atrocity. Initially Trudeau was non-committal, but on June 11, the same day the government announced its national summit on anti-Semitism, the House of Commons unanimously adopted a non-binding motion from the NDP MP for London-Fanshawe, Lindsay Mathyssen, calling for the emergency summit on Islamophobia.

The very fact that the government has chosen to convene separate “emergency summits” speaks volumes as to their worth. It wants to frame anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as if they are entirely separate maladies: one, say a cancer-like disease and the other a psychosis of the mind. In reality, they are two symptoms of a malignant capitalist body politic. Far-right elements have been emboldened by the sharp shift of establishment politics in Canada and internationally ever further to the right, including the vilification of immigrants as threats to Canadian and Quebec “values” and the promotion of militarism and imperialist violence.

Canada’s ruling elite fully embraced Washington’s “war on terror,” which demonized Muslims in the Middle East and at home as extremists and potential terrorists. For a decade and a half the “war on terror” played a central role in Canadian political life, serving as the pretext for foreign aggression and war and for a massive expansion of the powers and reach of the national security apparatus. All the while, Ottawa and Washington had, and continue to have, a completely mercenary relationship with Islamist extremist organizations, at times using them as proxies in their regime-change operations, as in Libya and Syria, and other times citing their presence to justify new foreign interventions.

Muslims have been the targets and victims of some of the most egregious crimes of the Canadian ruling class and its state over the past two decades. These include:

· The invasion and decade-long occupation of Afghanistan by Canadian troops, which featured house-to-house searches and arrests and the transfer of Afghan captives to be tortured by the CIA without any due process whatsoever.

· The provision of covert diplomatic and military support for the US invasion and destruction of Iraq in 2002, including weapons, Canadian Navy ships, refuelling and intelligence. Canada was deeply complicit in a war that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and destroyed Iraqi society.

· The Canadian military’s participation in the destruction of Libya during the NATO-led air war of 2011.

· The extra-legal torture and persecution of Maher Arar, and the vilification directed at Omar Khadr, a Canadian child soldier in Afghanistan, who, with Ottawa’s complicity, was tortured and detained at Guantanamo Bay for 10 years.

· The campaign of the Harper Government against “barbaric cultural practices,” which sought to whip up animosity against Muslims.

· The chauvinist campaign Quebec’s ruling elite has mounted to depict immigrants, especially Muslims, as a threat to Quebec values. This has resulted in Bill 21, which bans the wearing of religious symbols, such as the hijab, by teachers and public officials in positions of authority, and denies public services to Muslim women who wear the niqab or burqa.

· The unbroken record of pandering by Conservative and Liberal governments to India’s far-right, Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, which has systematically persecuted the country’s Muslim minority. This has also involved Canada’s two main parties fashioning electoral appeals to BJP sympathizers among Indo-Canadians.

Could the murder of the Afzaal family by a right wing-terrorist and ongoing violent attacks on Muslim women in Edmonton have something to do with this sorry history? No effort will be spared at today’s conclave to cover up these connections.

If the conference on Islamophobia aims to cover up the horrific record of Canadian imperialism in devastating the lives of millions of people throughout the Middle East, the conference on anti-Semitism is aimed at criminalizing left-wing opposition to militarism and war. By labelling virtually all criticism of the far-right Israeli government’s brutal suppression of the Palestinian people as anti-Semitism, the Trudeau government and other backers of the summit are adding fuel to an international slander campaign that aims to tar left-wing criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.

The anti-Semitism conference was not aimed at exposing the far right, which is the real source of anti-Semitic hatred and violence and is on the rise in Canada. On the contrary, the Canadian ruling class is increasingly politically aligned with these elements. It is significant in this regard that Canada’s corporate media has remained virtually silent on the vicious Islamophobic campaigns by close international allies, like French President Emmanuel Macron, and the support extended by the German ruling elite to the anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD), now the official opposition in the German parliament.

Instead, the political establishment has focused in recent years in denouncing and trying to effectively criminalize criticism of Israel from the left. Both the federal government and Ontario provincial parliament have adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, which equates criticism of the Israeli government and the Zionist project of creating an exclusivist Jewish state through the dispossession of the Palestinians, as anti-Semitic. This was the definition used by the British ruling class and the Blairite right within the Labour Party to witch-hunt former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters by branding them anti-Semites. As the World Socialist Web Site previously observed, “The level of cynicism involved” in this smear campaign “beggars belief. Anti-Semitism, racial hatred directed towards the Jews, is historically identified with the far right, especially with Nazi Germany, though it had many adherents within the British ruling class, including among the Royal family. Now the left is being targeted as the source of anti-Semitism even as the fascist Alternative for Germany has been elevated to the position of official opposition in the Bundestag and similar formations, including Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, are being cultivated by the ruling elite throughout Europe.”

The increasing willingness of many people to publicly call Israeli state crimes by their proper name has disturbed the ruling class. The rampages of right-wing Israeli mobs through the streets of East Jerusalem crying “Death to Arabs!”—a call for genocide effectively endorsed by the Israeli government whose supporters were shouting the slogan—occasioned large public demonstrations of protest in Canadian cities. The Israeli and Canadian authorities immediately sought to spuriously conflate these demonstrations with anti-Semitism. Likewise, left-wing political figures have been targeted. Niki Ashton, a New Democratic Party MP who is fraudulently portrayed as a “socialist” by various pseudo-left groups, was the object of a vicious smear campaign in March for agreeing to speak alongside Corbyn at an online meeting. Palestinian activists at a Toronto demonstration who defended themselves against a violent assault carried out by the local leader of the Jewish Defense League were accused of “anti-Semitism” by Toronto Mayor John Tory.

There has also been a rise in real anti-Semitic attacks, which themselves are facilitated by the deliberate conflation of the state of Israel with Judaism on the part of the ruling class. In May a shop in Toronto's Kensington Market shop was spray painted with anti-Semitic graffiti. A young man “of no fixed address” was arrested and charged with a hate crime.

Tellingly, the man tasked with pointing the finger at “left-wing anti-Semitism” at yesterday’s summit was Irwin Cotler, a “human rights” lawyer, former Liberal cabinet minister and the Trudeau government’s “Special Envoy for Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism.” Cotler, who chaired the anti-Semitism event, earned his “human rights”’ credentials defending the far-right Russian dissident/Israeli politician Natan Sharansky in his bid to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel in the 1980s. Sharansky, who held several cabinet positions in Israeli governments 20 years ago, was a vocal supporter and architect of Israeli expansion into the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Cotler has made a lucrative career conflating expressions of political opposition to Israeli state crimes against the Palestinians with “anti-Semitism,” and in recent years has been among the most strident voices in the Canadian establishment calling for aggression against Iran and China.

The claim that political opposition to Israeli state crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is tantamount to “anti-Semitism” hobbles the fight against real acts of anti-Semitism, which is a scourge, and as the events of the 20th century demonstrated, a mortal threat to the working class.

But the Canadian government is determined to cover up the source of that threat, which is not principled political opposition to the crimes of the Israeli state and its imperialist patrons, but rather the political far right, including active fascist networks which operate freely inside Canada’s own military and police ranks. Just last year, an individual inspired by these elements attempted to assassinate Prime Minister Justin Trudeau! The same political elements who attempted the overthrow of American democracy on January 6 are active in Canada, with anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as their stock in trade. One can only imagine what “position” the Canadian government would have contorted itself into had a fascist coup in the capital of its closest political ally succeeded.

Perhaps a clue can be found in Ukraine, where the Canadian state is happy to align itself with an ultra-right regime led by parties that celebrate far-right Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis and in the Holocaust. Canada’s own deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, has been engaged in a desperate campaign to cover up her own grandfather’s past in Ukraine as the publisher of a pro-Nazi newspaper during WWII. How can this be squared with “combatting anti-Semitism”?

This week’s Canadian government-sponsored summits will solve nothing, and their utterly fraudulent character will be apparent to a growing number of workers who see that the Canadian state condones and facilitates the very crimes it claims to be so outraged by.

The fight against Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, which are crucial questions for the world working class, requires a principled commitment to historical truth. The one thing the Canadian government cannot do is to undertake an historical investigation of how its own actions directly contributed to the murder of the Afzaal family, and to a climate where various ethnic and religious groups, including Jews, can be scapegoated by the far right with impunity.

Pandemic slashed US life expectancy by 1.5 years in 2020

Trévon Austin

Life expectancy in the US plummeted by 1.5 years in 2020, according to a report released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), marking the largest one-year drop since 1943, when young men were dying every day on the battlefields of World War II. The precipitous decline is a continuation and acceleration of a downward trend in US mortality since 2015.

Life expectancy is defined as an estimate of the average number of years a person born in a given year may expect to live. The metric does not precisely predict actual life span, instead being a measure of a society’s general health. The drastic fall in 2020 reflects the accelerating decay of American society under the pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been allowed to run rampant under a bipartisan “herd immunity” policy, resulting in more than 35 million infections and over 625,000 deaths so far.

National Guard members assisting with processing COVID-19 deaths and placing them into temporary storage at LA County Medical Examiner-Coroner Office in Los Angeles, Jan. 12, 2021. (LA County Dept. of Medical Examiner-Coroner via AP)

According to the report, if an American child were born today and lived his or her entire life under the conditions of 2020, the child would be expected to live 77.3 years, down from 78.8 in 2019. Life expectancy for American males declined 1.8 years from 2019 to 2020, while life expectancy for American women dropped by 1.2 years from 2019. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, US life expectancy has not been so low since 2003.

The report estimated COVID-19 deaths contributed to approximately 74 percent of the decline in life expectancy. Researchers discovered disparities among racial groups, with the virus being responsible for 90 percent of the decline in life expectancy among Latinos, 68 percent among the non-Hispanic white population and about 59 percent among the non-Hispanic black population. There was no data on Asian Americans or other racial groups in the report.

According to CDC data, black Americans are hospitalized with COVID-19 at 2.9 times the rate of white Americans and die at two times the rate. Nonwhite Hispanics are hospitalized at 2.8 times the rate and die at 2.3 times the rate of white Americans. Federal data indicates life expectancy for black Americans has not fallen so much since the mid-1930s amid the Great Depression. While health officials have not recorded Hispanic life expectancy as far back, the 2020 decline was the largest recorded year-to-year drop.

The report’s authors and bourgeois publications, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, were quick to attribute the discrepancy among racial groups to “systemic racism” inherent in American society. In reality, these differences reflect the disproportionate impact the pandemic has had on the working class and poor. Minorities are more likely to be employed in jobs deemed “essential” by the ruling class and forced to expose themselves to the deadly disease.

Poor workers more commonly depend on public transportation, risking exposure with every outing, or live in multigenerational homes in cramped conditions more conducive to spreading the virus. Experts say it is also possible Hispanics are disproportionately affected because many are undocumented and ineligible for federal pandemic relief or unemployment benefits. Additionally, there are obstacles related to accessing coronavirus tests, treatments and vaccines for the undocumented.

The overall decline in life expectancy reflects the pandemic’s massive toll on American society and its broader impacts on social health, including a record-high number of deaths from drug overdoses and other so-called deaths of despair. In 2020, more than 93,000 Americans died from drug overdoses. This staggering figure is more than 10 times the estimated 9,000 overdose deaths recorded by the CDC in 1988, around the height of the crack epidemic.

Experts state approximately 11 percent of last year’s decline stems from accidents or unintentional injuries. Drug overdose deaths, which spiked 30 percent during the pandemic, made up about one-third of unintentional injuries in 2020. The report also noted an increase in homicides and diabetes, which together accounted for about 5.5 percent of the decrease in life expectancy. Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, which suggest growing alcohol abuse, accounted for nearly 2.5 percent of the decrease.

These “deaths of despair” cannot be separated from the broader impact of the pandemic. With hospitals overwhelmed with coronavirus patients, addiction treatment and other mental health programs have been cut when they are needed most, due to the social isolation and financially insecurity spawned by the pandemic. The stress and depression caused by job loss, housing insecurity, and the pandemic itself have exacerbated issues with substance abuse. According to the American Medical Association, more than 40 states have recorded increases in opioid-related deaths since the pandemic began.

Researchers noted even if COVID-19 deaths decline in 2021, the socio-economic effects of the pandemic will linger for years. A study last month from the Virginia Commonwealth University found the pandemic widened the life expectancy gap between the US and 16 other high-income countries. Researchers found the gap increased from 3.05 years in 2018 to 4.69 years in 2020.

More than 225,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus so far this year—a number expected to increase significantly as deadly variants continue to spread among the population. This massive loss in life is not simply a result of the deadly disease but the consequence of a deliberate policy pursued by capitalist governments across the globe.

Since the onset of the pandemic, governments around the world responded to the greatest public health emergency in a century by pumping trillions into the stock markets and corporations to prop up world capitalism. Determined to extract this money from the working-class, governments have forced workers into unsafe plants and factories to continue production. The ruling classes of the world allowed the virus to spread and have even welcomed its deadly rampage in pursuit of the disastrous “herd immunity” policy.

The entire response to the pandemic has been guided by the prerogatives of the wealthiest sections of society. The world’s billionaires added more than $4 trillion to their collective wealth in the first year of the pandemic. Over the same period, nearly 3 million people succumbed to the virus. The victims include both the young and old and are disproportionately working class and poor.

The pandemic has laid bare the grim reality of capitalism, which subordinates all aspects of social life to the pursuit of profit. Furthermore, it demonstrates the inability of the capitalist system to deal with a global crisis.