Hospitals throughout US South remain inundated with COVID-19 patients as Delta variant surge continues

Alex Johnson

The Southern region of the United States is continuing to see an explosive growth of hospitalizations and deaths which is being fueled by the highly infectious Delta variant of COVID-19. The latest wave of virus is taking a dangerous toll on hospitals in multiple states, as the enormous influx of sick patients is causing strains on hospital staffing and placing untold pressure on health care workers.

While states such as Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia have seen slight declines in their hospitalizations since the initial onset of the Delta wave in August and early September, deaths in all four states have shot upward in recent weeks, demonstrating that fatalities are catching up with the monstrous rise in infections which has been driven by the bipartisan push to reopen schools and lift all pandemic restrictions combined with low vaccination rates.

In Georgia, daily deaths from COVID-19 have risen nearly ten-fold since August 1, according to data from the Georgia Department of Health. An average of 93.7 Georgians a day are currently dying of the virus, which represents a 977 percent increase since the beginning of August.

A nurse enters a monoclonal antibody site, Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021, at C.B. Smith Park in Pembroke Pines, Florida (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

The disaster facing the South has been one of the main contributors to the catastrophic resurgence of the pandemic in the US since early July. The country is now averaging over 2,000 COVID-19 deaths and about 150,000 new infections every day, the highest levels since the deadly winter surge.

Despite the Biden administration’s recent announcement of a vaccine or testing requirement for business with more than 100 employees, about 770,000 shots per day of the vaccine are being dispensed nationwide, well below the peak of 3.4 million a day in mid-April. The slow rate of vaccinations has also rendered a large chunk of the population vulnerable to the Delta variant, with 46 percent still unvaccinated—including all children under the age of 12.

In Tennessee, intensive care units remain dangerously full and have begun to create disruptions in hospital systems across the state. Hospitalizations have plateaued at well over 3,000 since the beginning of September. West Tennessee Healthcare, a critical access hospital in Bolivar, east of Memphis, currently has at least a dozen patients admitted into its facility, five times the two or three patients that the facility usually sees. Half of them are sick with COVID-19, according to Hospital CEO Ruby Kirby.

Conditions have worsened to the point where the hospital’s health operators are being forced to transfer ventilated patients to intensive care units (ICUs) in larger cities like Memphis or Nashville, which also have a very limited number of open beds. “We’re managing them, but it is putting a strain on the system, trying to hold these patients in these hospitals until we can get them moved,” Kirby told WKU Public Radio. While COVID-19 hospitalizations statewide have declined slightly over the last week, more than a thousand COVID patients remain in ICUs across Tennessee.

Like many states that have become epicenters for the latest Delta wave, staffing has reached dangerously low levels at hospitals which are flooded with COVID-19 patients. Many hospitals in Tennessee are now receiving help from the state’s National Guard, while the state has even offered money to help pay for travel nurses.

In eastern Tennessee, hospital operators say even offering high pay isn’t enough to fill all the openings left by nurses who’ve left the COVID-flooded ICUs due to working arduously long hours and suffering burnout. One chief medical officer, Dr. Harold Naremore of Blount Memorial Hospital in Maryville, told WKU the challenges the hospital is facing are “very frightening” because “there’s no more staff to bring in.”

At North Carolina’s Duke University Hospital in Durham, 99 percent of adult inpatient beds were occupied on average each day in the week ending on September 11—the ninth-straight week that the hospital has been at 98-100 percent capacity. According to the data, an average of 81 of those patients had confirmed or suspected COVID-19, meaning COVID patients filled about one out of every nine beds on average each day. In the intensive care unit, all ICU beds were occupied on average each day last week.

At the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Hospital, 86 percent of adult beds were occupied on average each day that same week, and 83 of those beds were filled with COVID-19 patients. About one in seven beds were filled with a COVID patient each day. At WakeMed in Raleigh, 88 percent of inpatient beds were occupied on average each day. Of those beds, more than a quarter were filled with COVID-19 patients—a daily average of nearly 150 suspected and confirmed COVID patients.

In Kentucky, at least 70 percent of hospitals are facing critical staffing shortages, with health and political officials issuing dire warnings of an imminent collapse of several facilities. Staffing shortages have been reported in 66 of the state’s 96 hospitals, the highest level yet throughout the pandemic. Governor Andy Beshear along with Kentucky’s public health commissioner Dr. Steven Stack admitted last week that the latest surge in COVID-19 is straining the entire health care system.

“Our hospitals are at the brink of collapse in many communities,” Stack noted. According to health experts, the highly contagious Delta variant has exacerbated the crisis. Dr. Ryan Stanton, an emergency room physician in Lexington, Kentucky said he’s seen the virus spread to whole families, especially if older members are unvaccinated. “Now in Kentucky, one-third of new cases are under age 18,” Stanton said in a recent Newsweek interview.

Contrary to the lying claims made by the Biden White House and entire political establishment that the reopening of K-12 schools can be done safely, one of the main facilitators for transmission are now children, with small children and youth participating in in-person learning and other face-to-face activities spreading the virus to the rest of their families. Stanton pointed to the reopening of schools and classroom learning, a reckless and homicidal policy that’s been pursued by every governor nationwide and the Biden administration, as directly responsible for the catastrophe. “Between daycare and schools and school activities, and friends getting together, there are just so many exposures.”

Perhaps the greatest indicator of distress from the Delta-fueled upsurge are intolerable conditions that health care workers in Kentucky and nationwide have been forced to endure. More than 400 members of the Kentucky National Guard, as well as strike teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s emergency medical services, have now been deployed to help struggling hospitals across the state.

In an interview with ABC News, Kerri Eklund, a nurse working in Elizabethtown at Baptist Health Hardin Hospital, relayed the tragic burdens facing nurses. “I would honestly say it’s at least three times worse than what it was the first time. We’re seeing a lot of people getting really sick. There are patients that will come in and they’ll be doing okay for a few days and then, in the blink of an eye, they go downhill.”

Many health care workers have described the current wave as unexpected after brief relief in the spring and early summer, with infections and deaths slowed to their lowest numbers during the pandemic. Central blame for the resurgence, however, lies with both corporate-controlled parties and institutions such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which in May dropped all national health mandates, above all social distancing and masking, in order to greenlight in-person learning in schools, as demanded by Biden, and ensure no restrictions remained on profit making.

With the pandemic escalating at break-neck speed, frontline health care workers are seeing the consequences of the deadly policies pursued by the ruling class in intolerable working conditions. Medical professionals from nurses and physician assistants to respiratory therapists have reported feeling stretched so thin that many are experiencing exhaustion and burnout.

In Kentucky, which has become an epicenter for the new surge, health practitioners have reported seeing highly experienced and exceptional colleagues walk away from their profession in droves because of the stress and anxiety they are having to deal with. Many front-line workers are fearful of yet another surge as the current fall season stretches into the winter months without any serious effort to suppress the pandemic and eliminate COVID-19. In the same interview with Newsweek, Eklund said, “I’m really worried that it’s just going to keep getting worse...because we all know that winter is the worst time for health issues all together.”

Mass infections threatened as students return to UK campuses

Henry Lee

Over the next weeks, one million students and tens of thousands of staff will return to university campuses under conditions in which the COVID-19 pandemic is raging out of control. Casting aside even the dishonest promises of a “safe return” from 2020, the ruling elite intends to expose students and higher education workers to the unrestricted spread of the virus.

Despite the insistence in the media that young people are safe from COVID-19, its long-term impacts are only beginning to be understood. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimated at the start of September that around 110,000 people under the age of 25 were suffering from Long COVID. Of these, 26,000 reported that they had symptoms at least 12 months after initial infection. The ONS found that most young Long COVID sufferers reported that their symptoms limit their activity. An estimated 46,000 young people described the impact as limiting their activity “a little”, and 13,000 “a lot”.

Public Health England’s “Weekly national Influenza and COVID-19 surveillance report” for the week to September 12 estimates that only 65 percent of young people aged 18 to 25 have received at least one vaccine dose, and only 48.9 percent are fully vaccinated, leaving large numbers extremely vulnerable to infection.

A sign reading "COVID ROOMS" at the Courtrooms halls of residence at Bristol university last term (WSWS Media)

The reopening of campuses with no restrictions on the spread of the virus is not only a reckless experiment with the health of students, but increases the risk of dangerous new strains emerging. When the government announced the lifting of all COVID safety restrictions in July, the Co-Director of the Centre for Genomic Research at the University of Liverpool, Steve Paterson, warned, “Letting a virus rip through a partially vaccinated population is exactly the experiment I’d do to evolve a virus able to evade immunity”.

Last week, there were reports of 19 UK cases of the more transmissible Delta variant with an E484K mutation associated with greater resistance to vaccines.

Even before most students have arrived on campus, outbreaks are already being reported at multiple universities. University College London announced that in the week beginning September 6, 10 students and four staff tested positive. Even earlier, in the week beginning August 30, 10 staff and four students at the University of Manchester tested positive.

While students have suffered in the under-resourced and largely unplanned move to online teaching, the demand from the government that face-to-face teaching must resume with no restrictions has nothing to do with defending education. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s only concern is to advance the murderous programme of herd immunity by mass infection, in service to the profits of the corporations.

The same claims to be defending a normal university experience and standard of education were made last year, with the government and universities promising “COVID-secure” campuses. In reality, students were herded into crowded dorms to keep tuition and accommodation fees flowing. Once the inevitable outbreaks took place, they were scapegoated and subjected to brutal policing, forcibly quarantined in their dorms in appalling conditions—in at least one case with a fire door sealed shut.

This year, universities have even more explicitly treated students as “cash cows”. Desperate not to lose the tens of thousands of pounds in tuition fees paid by each international student, more than 50 institutions arranged charter flights to bring 1,200 young people from China to the UK. They are planning to arrange more according to the Sunday Times.

The government’s claims to be concerned for student’s education are belied by its plans to slash arts and humanities funding in half and overseeing the closure of courses and whole departments. University managers have meanwhile carried out a wave of job losses, with figures obtained by education platform Edvoy showing over 3,000 redundancies were made between March and September 2020 alone.

Students and university staff are in this position thanks to the treachery of the education unions. The University and College Union (UCU) has worked to suppress all opposition among academics and support staff opposed to working on unsafe campuses.

At Cardiff, members of the union branch voted in an indicative ballot in January to take industrial action, including a strike, if they were forced to work on campus. This was never organised by the union, with the local UCU website now declaring it is waiting for an “act of good-will empowering workers with a choice about face-to-face work”. Indicating the worthlessness of its “indicative” ballots, it adds, “if necessary, we will run a [strike] ballot in the Autumn to protect members who do not feel safe returning to face-to-face working on campus.”

The UCU and other campus unions have played a similar role in demobilising their members in every university. During the first lockdown in 2020, the UCU, UNISON, Unite, EIS and GMB put out a joint press statement with the Universities & Colleges Employers Association, committing the universities only to “consult” the unions and “use government guidance … as the basis for their response to the Covid-19 pandemic.” The document agreed that the unions would enforce a reopening as long as this inadequate guidance was followed.

The National Union of Students (NUS) has said nothing about fighting for COVID safety on the campuses and takes no position on the return of students. The last press release issued by the NUS mentioning COVID-19 was in April. Endorsing fraudulent claims that lectures can be made “safe” with a few mitigations, the NUS says, “We believe that students should be back on campus when it is safe to do so and would like this to be grounded in scientific advice.”

The unions are holding back a tide of opposition. In a global survey by Times Higher Education issued this month, only 28 percent of respondents said they felt safe returning to in-person teaching or on-campus working this term, and 53 percent responded “no”. Underscoring the total lack of faith in the “safety measures” worked out between universities and the unions, 78 percent said that they were concerned the return of in-person teaching will lead to a spike in coronavirus cases in their area.

Showing how workers are seeing through the anti-scientific propaganda which insists young people are safe from infection, the survey reported that it was younger workers, in the 18-34 age group, who were the most dissatisfied with their employers’ preparations to stop the spread of COVID-19 on campuses. THE reports that many respondents were nervous because of a lack of transparency, after having spent the last year and a half being lied to about the risks and spread of the pandemic.

A majority of respondents to the survey were from the UK, but the international response indicates that workers everywhere face and oppose the same dangerous conditions.

US Border Patrol agents whip and corral Haitian migrants

Patrick Martin

Video footage and photographic images of US Border Patrol agents herding Haitian migrants as though they were cattle triggered widespread revulsion across the United States and internationally Monday.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection mounted officers attempt to contain migrants as they cross the Rio Grande from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, into Del Rio, Texas, Sunday, Sept. 19, 2021. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez)

The footage, taken by photographers for the Associated Press, Reuters and AFP, showed the crackdown ordered by the Biden administration against more than 10,000 Haitian migrants who have gathered under a freeway underpass on the outskirts of Del Rio, Texas, a border town 145 miles west of San Antonio.

Several reporters described the actions of Border Patrol agents mounted on horseback as using the reins of their horses to threaten migrants who had waded across the Rio Grande—which is exceptionally low at this point. The El Paso Times reported Monday that an agent ”swung his whip menacingly, charging his horse toward the men in the river.”

The refugees assembled in a makeshift camp under the freeway bridge on the US side of the river have been crossing back into Mexico to get food and other supplies, rather than risk crossing through lines set up on the US side of the camp by the Border Patrol and Texas state police, who would arrest them and ship them off for immediate deportation.

Border Patrol agents began riding on horseback along the river in order to cut off those, mostly men, who have gone back to Mexico for supplies, and prevent them from rejoining their families. In some cases, desperate migrants dropped the food and water they were carrying on their heads into the river, in order to make a dash for the US side.

The Border Patrol began mass deportations of the Haitians on Sunday, taking 3,300 migrants into custody and sending more than 400 back to Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. The remainder of this group were divided between El Paso and San Antonio, to await imminent deportation with flights set to continue from both cities to Haiti.

Acting Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz said all the Haitians remaining in Del Rio would be removed by the end of the week. “Over the next 6 to 7 days our goal is to process the 12,662 migrants that we have underneath that bridge as quickly as we possibly can,” he said. “What we want to make sure is that we deter the migrants from coming into the region so we can manage the folks that are under the bridge at this point.”

Flights to Haiti will be ramped up to a total of seven a day, four to Port-au-Prince and three to Cap-Haïtien, the largest city in the north of Haiti, giving the airlift a capacity of about a thousand people a day. Other refugees are to be deported to Mexico and Central America.

The images of border agents herding Haitian migrants were only the most overt expression of a US government policy that is savage in every aspect. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, whose agency controls the Border Patrol, arrived in Del Rio Monday to oversee the mass repression, accompanied by a small army of 600 additional agents.

In a press briefing in the border city, he reiterated the Biden administration’s position that the migrants would not be allowed to file for asylum, which is their right under international law. Instead, they would be rounded up and immediately deported under Title 42, a legal provision that allows the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to declare a public health exception—the coronavirus pandemic—to justify emergency action.

Title 42 was initially invoked by the Trump administration as part of its all-sided war of repression against migrants attempting to cross the US–Mexico border. Biden made a pretense of criticizing this savage policy during the presidential election campaign, but has embarked on a policy that is no less brutal and anti-democratic.

After a federal judge issued an order September 16 barring the use of Title 42, the administration immediately announced it would appeal. In the meantime, given a 14-day stay of the order by the judge himself, the Biden administration is moving rapidly to deport all the Haitian migrants during that two-week window.

Most of the thousands of Haitians at Del Rio are not recent immigrants from Haiti. They fled in 2010 after the massive earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people and left much of the country in ruins, migrating to Brazil, Chile and other parts of South America in search of economic and physical survival.

As a result, many, perhaps a majority of those being shipped back to Haiti, have little knowledge of the “home” country to which they are being forcibly returned. Most of the children were born or grew up in South America, and are more fluent in Spanish or Portuguese than in Haitian Creole or French.

The older migrants have not been back to the country of their birth since 2010. But they know Haiti remains the poorest country in the western hemisphere, ravaged by recent hurricanes and a second major earthquake, as well as rampant political violence culminating in the recent assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. The economic downturn and coronavirus pandemic have led them to seek to enter the United States, where many have family members or hope to find work and safety.

The Biden administration regards the brutality on the border as a public relations problem to be managed by its spin doctors. Thus, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that the images of the Border Patrol agent herding migrants through the river were “horrible to watch. I don’t think anyone seeing that footage would think it was acceptable or appropriate.”

The violence is, however, in pursuit of the policies decreed by the White House. The US government closed the border at Del Rio on Sunday, and the Border Patrol agents were acting to enforce that closure.

For all the phony handwringing in front of the national media, there will be no change in policy toward the migrants, or any diminution in the everyday violence by the Border Patrol thugs, who only a few months ago gave their full-throated support to Trump, who appeared regularly at Border Patrol functions to applaud their most ruthless actions, and was endorsed for reelection by their union.

The conditions within the Del Rio camp are appalling. Several pregnant women are trapped there, and at least one gave birth at the site, was taken to a hospital in Del Rio and then returned with her newborn infant to the camp. Reporters saw one woman collapse within sight of National Guard troops—deployed at Del Rio to reinforce the Border Patrol—and troops “slowly approached and carried her away.”

The temperature in Del Rio hit 105 degrees Fahrenheit Monday, falling only to 100 degrees by nightfall, with a low temperature of only 80 overnight, putting many of those trapped there in danger of heat stroke.

Meanwhile, the Mexican government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Sunday it would join the United States in the immediate deportation of Haitians. A government officials said there would be deportation flights from the Mexican side of the US border and from along the Mexican border with Guatemala, where another large group of Haitians remains.

Russian elections overshadowed by COVID-19 surge

Clara Weiss

Russia’s elections to the State Duma (parliament) this weekend were overshadowed by the rapid resurgence of COVID-19 and a deepening social crisis. Because of the pandemic, the election was held over the course of three days, from Friday through Sunday, and it was possible to cast ballots online.

Russian President Vladimir Putin during his annual live call-in show in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, June 30, 2021. (Sergei Savostyanov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

The ruling United Russia party, which is closely associated with President Vladimir Putin, won with close to 50 percent (down from 54 percent in 2016) of the vote. This will give the party a two-thirds majority in the parliament. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) was able to capitalize to some extent on growing social and political discontent and received about a fifth of the vote.

There were widespread reports of ballot rigging, and employees of state-owned enterprises, including many industrial workers, were forced to vote. Despite these measures, however, voter turnout stood at just 52 percent, a sign of growing popular hostility toward all the established political parties.

The KPRF has already declared that it will not recognize the result of the online vote. Online ballots were only counted on Monday, and they tipped the vote significantly in favor of United Russia.

In the run-up to the election, the Kremlin cracked down heavily on the liberal opposition gathered around the imprisoned Alexei Navalny. Navalny, who is backed by US and German imperialism, was arrested early this year and sentenced to over two years in prison.

Two weeks before the election, Russia summoned the US ambassador over alleged “election interference.” The Kremlin indicated it had “undeniable proof” of US-based tech companies violating Russian laws in the lead-up to the elections, without specifying the allegations or the evidence.

Navalny and his staff, based on the so-called “smart vote” strategy, called upon people to cast their ballots for any candidate that was the most likely to defeat a rival from United Russia.

In many places, this meant that the Navalny team recommended candidates of the Stalinist KPRF. The KPRF is notorious for its anti-immigrant and Great Russian chauvinism and, to this day, staunchly defends and praises the worst crimes of Joseph Stalin. Following the line of Navalny, the Pabloites of the Russian Socialist Movement also backed KPRF candidates.

Apart from United Russia and the KPRF, three other parties will also be represented in parliament. The far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), headed by the anti-Semite and chauvinist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Just Russia Party both received about 7.5 percent of the vote. The Novye Liudi (New People) party, which was only recently established by Alexei Nechaev, the CEO of a cosmetics company, got a little over 5 percent. The LDPR, as well as Just Russia and the KPRF, have functioned for over two decades as a “loyal opposition” to the Putin regime, working to channel social and political discontent in a right-wing direction.

Russia’s stock market reached a record high on Friday as the elections began, even as cases and deaths surged and the economy remains mired in crisis.

The election was marked by an almost complete black-out of the burning social issues affecting the working class, above all, the COVID-19 pandemic. Several parties, including United Russia, signed an agreement with the Kremlin, obliging their candidates to not make any statements on the pandemic.

Cases skyrocketed again over election weekend, reaching daily numbers of over 20,000 on both Saturday and Sunday. In Moscow, which has the highest levels of vaccination in the country, numbers also rose once more to above 2,000 per day. The resurgence of the pandemic comes as a fourth wave that brutally hit the country’s population in the summer has barely concluded. At least 790 people have died each day for weeks now, with a daily record of 820 deaths in late August. In July alone, so far the deadliest month in the pandemic for Russia, over 50,000 people officially died from COVID-19.

Amid widespread vaccine hesitancy, only 27 percent of the population of 140 million are fully vaccinated, and just 30 percent have received at least one dose. Almost all restrictions have been lifted on the federal level. The Kremlin has left it to regions to implement limited measures on a local and ad hoc basis.

The principal driver behind the new rise in infections is the reopening of schools and colleges on September 1. Since then, hundreds of classes and schools have been closed across the country because of outbreaks among students and staff.

Last week, 80 classes in 58 schools were closed in the region of Novosibirsk alone. According to the deputy health minister of the region, Yelena Aksenova, cases rose by 46.2 percent with close to 60 percent of them among children. Even before the schools had reopened, Russian officials acknowledged that half a million children had contracted the virus in the previous year and a half.

Russian officials have also indicated that the Mu variant of the virus, also known as B.1.621, has now been detected in the country, without providing figures as to how widespread it is. The WHO recently designated the Mu variant as a “variant of interest,” which could be more resistant to vaccines.

Russia has now recorded a total of over 7.214 million cases, and 195,835 deaths. The real number of deaths, however, is believed to be far higher, by up to a factor of five. This would bring the true death toll close to 1 million people. A major reason for the high death toll, apart from the total lack of adequate public health measures and low vaccination rates, is the catastrophic state of Russia’s health care system. Thirty years after the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism, the country’s hospitals are completely dilapidated, underequipped and understaffed.

Social inequality, which has been rising, and deteriorating living standards were issues of primary concern for Russians leading up to the election, according to polls. Real wages in Russia have declined for years, with the first quarter of 2021 reporting the largest quarterly decline in real wages (5 percent) since 2009. While the pandemic and economic crisis have resulted in income losses for the vast majority of Russians, the number of Russian billionaires swelled from 99 to 117 in 2020, and their collective net worth rose dramatically, from $385 billion to $584 billion, according to Forbes .

The parties that competed in the elections are virtually all run by this very class of multibillionaires and millionaires. Andrei Gorokhov, a leading candidate for United Russia, reportedly has an income of $256.8 million, Andrey Kovalev, a prominent member of Just Russia, has an income of $91.6 million, and Alexei Nechaev, the founder and leader of the New People party, has a reported income of $60.1 million. By contrast, the monthly average salary in Russia is just $802, with millions earning significantly less.

In an indication of the enormous social crisis in the country, on Monday, a mentally ill student at Perm University killed at least six people and injured another 28. The shooter was injured by the police and is reportedly now hospitalized in critical condition. Just earlier this year, in May, a 19 year old gunned down nine people in his old school in Kazan, among them seven children.

Black and Asian American Workers Falling Behind in Getting Back Jobs

Julie Yixia Cai & Dean Baker

In the first half of 2021, the economy added more than 4.2 million jobs, a rise of almost 3.0 percent, as it rapidly added back jobs lost during the pandemic-related recession.

In a recent report in July 2021, Jason Furman and William Powell documented that the recent job transition rate from unemployment to employment was somewhat lower than expected given the job opening rate. The job opening rate averaged 5.6 percent in the first six months of 2021. It had previously never been higher than 4.8 percent — a peak hit in 2018 — and usually is well under 4.0 percent. Given this backdrop, this article investigates how demographic groups are transitioning from unemployment into employment and how that compares to their historical relationship between job openings and transitions.

Effects by Race and Ethnicity

Using the Current Population Survey, we investigate the month-to-month work transition rate of unemployed US workers since 2001 and report the annual aggregated employment transition by racial group. Figure 1 shows the predicted rate of transitions from unemployment to employment for whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian American workers, based on the average job opening rate for the year. As can be seen, Black and Asian American workers have considerably lower transition rates than white and Hispanic workers.

Although the picture of job flows may not seem as bad as during the Great Recession, Black and Asian American job transition rates over the past few months were still not as high as the rates for whites and Hispanics in the recovery following the Great Recession.

In the first six months of 2021, 18 percent of Black and 20 percent of Asian American unemployed workers gained a job, which is around 5 percentage points lower than the rate of re-employment for white and Hispanic unemployed workers. Although unemployment among Hispanic workers usually is higher than that of white workers, their rate of moving into jobs does not look worse than that of their white counterparts, typically outperforming transition rates among unemployed whites, often by wide margins.

Figure 2

To show how racial and ethnic groups transitioned into jobs in the first half of 2021 compared to their past patterns, Figure 2 compares the transition rate for the first six months of the year with the predicted rate (which is illustrated in the trend line) for each group, given the rate of job openings.

In the first quarter of 2021, white and Hispanic unemployed workers were mostly on the predicted path for regaining jobs based on the rate of job openings, although this pace slowed down in May and June. This summer, Black and Asian American unemployed workers were further off track to meeting the expected employment transition based on the job opening rate. For example, about 20 percent of Black, and 25 percent of Asian American unemployed workers gained jobs in June, far below the predicted rate of 30 percent given the job opening rate. This led to a gap between the predicted rate of re-employment and the actual rate of reemployment for the first six months of 2021 of 8.5 percentage points for Black unemployed workers and 6.4 percentage points for Asian American unemployed workers. This compares to a gap between predicted and actual rates of reemployment of roughly 3 percentage points for white and Hispanic unemployed workers (Table 1).

Effects by Gender and Age

We also examined how job transition rates behaved relative to the overall market by workers’ gender and age. Transition rates do not appear to differ significantly between men and women. Women experienced a relative slower exit from unemployment compared to men: 7.3 percentage points below the predicted value given the job opening rate, compared to 6.8 percentage points for men. Somewhat surprisingly, among all unemployed workers, 16 to 19-year-olds were the only group that outperformed with respect to month-to-month employment transition in the first six months of 2021. This mirrors the unusually low unemployment rate for teenagers that we have seen thus far this year.

We might expect to see a slower pace for 16 to 19-year-olds in the coming months, but their job prospects seem to be quite good at the moment. This could be due in part to the current state of the labor market, in which certain sectors, like the service sectors or hospitality, lost workers during the pandemic and now find it difficult to hire workers. Given their lack of work experience in jobs in other sectors, young unemployed workers may find it relatively easy to refill those vacancies. It is likely also the case that young people have fewer fears of the pandemic and are less likely to have family responsibilities that might keep them from working.

By contrast, unemployed workers in their later prime age appear to have a slightly lower rate of gaining jobs. With years of work experience, some of them might want to switch to better jobs or change industries and may be confident that they will find one, given the unusually high number of job openings.

Why This Matters

The pandemic has created an extraordinary labor market situation. During the shutdown last spring, we saw unemployment rates unequaled since the Great Depression. As the economy reopened, we saw extraordinary job growth and rapid declines in unemployment. Looking at standard measures like unemployment and employment rates, the labor market would look reasonably healthy in August of 2021, although “healthy” still implies large amounts of discrimination.

However, we know that in many ways the labor market is very far from normal. In many sectors, workers are still finding it difficult to get reemployed. We also know that there appears to be far more turnover than we would ordinarily see in the labor market.

This analysis provides insight into the extent to which different groups are or are not transitioning from unemployment to employment. While we cannot directly determine the reason for gaps in transition rates from these data, it can be suggestive. For example, the rapid transition rates for teens likely indicates less fear of the pandemic and workers who are less picky about their jobs.

The unusually low transition rates among older workers could stem from a combination of difficulty finding jobs, fears about the pandemic, and workers being more selective about their job choices. The unusually low rates of transitions among Blacks and Asian Americans could reflect similar issues, as well as discrimination in the labor market.

Clearly this is a labor market in which many workers are facing considerable hardship, while others are seeing unusual possibilities. Over 60 percent of current jobholders looked for new jobs in late summer, seeking expanded benefits and more workplace flexibility, besides better pay. More than half the workforce anticipates looking for new jobs in the next 12 months. As the economy moves back towards full employment and the pandemic is hopefully controlled, we may end up with a labor market that looks very different from the one that existed before the pandemic.

Rocky Road Ahead for New, Left-leaning Peruvian Government

W.T. Whitney Jr.

Peruvian president Pedro Castillo took office July 28 following a narrow electoral victory on June 6 and official certification of voting results on July 19. Then and since, right-wing opposition forces have viciously attacked Castillo and his Perú Libre (Free Peru) party. Defamatory media blasts from virtually all Peruvian news sources have been constant. Unfounded accusations of electoral fraud persisted for weeks, along with rumors of a military coup. The opposition recently has concentrated on trying to remove newly-appointed cabinet ministers.

Pedro Castillo taught and served as principal in an elementary school in rural Chotaprovince. He was a leader of the regional teachers’ union. Perú Libre invited him to run for president. That socialist party, founded in 2012 by Cuba- trained neurosurgeon Vladimir Cerrón, claims José Mariátegui, founder of Peruvian Communist Party, as its ideological forebearer.

Political novice Castillo was unknown except in his rural province. His rise owes directly to a rural and/or mostly mestizo population, marginalized and very poor, taking a stand against urban power centers regarded as corrupt, exploitative, and culturally removed.  Lima’s middle class makes up around 35% of the city’s population. One third of all Peruvians live in Lima.

Castillo’s government, with little space allowed for fashioning a program, has had to accommodate its enemies. Perú Libre commands only 37 of 130 seats in Peru’s unicameral parliament. The Poplar Force Party of defeated presidential candidate KeikoFujimori accounts for 24 delegates; eight other parties control the remaining seats.  Two center-left parties, New Peru, headed by Veronica Mendoza, and Together for Peru, are backing Castillo’s government.

Opposition congressional members forced newly appointed foreign minister Héctor Béjar to resign. That former guerrilla insurgent, political prisoner, and academician succumbed to past allegations of terrorist activities. Béjar had already removed Peru from the anti-Venezuela Lima group of OAS nations and outlined an independent foreign policy aiming at reduced U.S. influence.

Populist prime minister Guido Bellido and other cabinet members so far have survived demands for their resignations. The radicalism of Bellido’s past politics and his supposed failure to sufficiently renounce terrorism provoked right-wing furor. Aggressive labor activism on the part of labor minister Íber Maraví was almost his undoing. Other ministers dealt with adverse police reports dredged up by the opposition. Right-wing congresspersons are now studying maneuvers directed at removing President Castillo.

For months, and especially now, opposition attacks have centered on Vladimir Cerrón, Perú Libre’s leader. Formerly governor of Junín province, Cerrón and alleged accomplices face multiple charges of corruption, which by and large seem trivial, especially in comparison with Peru’s steady diet of major scandals.  For example, Cerrón is assigned responsibility for four Patria Libre activists who are charged with securing drivers’ licenses through bribes.

State officials ostensibly looking for documents recently trashed Cerrón’s house, his brother’s house, and the main Perú Libre office in Junín. He has already served jail time. Now, he would be imprisoned for almost three years, if he is convicted.

Castillo’s political vulnerability stems mostly from his enemies’ presumption that he is unqualified to serve as president because of political inexperience and that his teacher is the Marxist Cerrón.

As presidential candidate, Castillo called for a constituent assembly, partial nationalization of large corporations, and increased taxation of businesses.  Yet Prime Minister Bellido’s message to Peru’s Congress said nothing about the Constitution, a constituent assembly, or about renegotiating petroleum-company contracts.

Despite objections from Perú Libre congressional representatives, replacement foreign minister Oscar Maúrtua still cooperates with USAID, a U.S. entity widely accused of interventionist activities.  The new government still enables joint U.S. – Peruvian military exercises and Peru’s police are being taught by U.S. instructors.

Nevertheless, Bellido and economics and finance minister Pedro Francke introduced budgetary legislation “prioritizing health and the health emergency created by Covid-19 and prioritizing education, agriculture, poverty relief, social security, economic reactivation, and promotion of employment and productivity,”

As befits a change-oriented government at work, vice president Dina Boluarte announced on September 15 that, “We are working on collecting signatures for that referendum on the question of a constituent assembly.”

According to an opinion survey released September 13, 42% of respondents approved of Castillo’s performance, up from 38% in mid-August. He registered 29% approval in Lima

One analyst points out that “the main subject is not the government of Castillo, but rather population groups at the bottom, above all in the provinces, and a Peruvian reality that is atrocious. …[R]eaction by all these sectors to the brutal fact of the country’s decomposing political life is central.”

Ultimately, decisions taken in regard to the exploitation of underground resources will bear on Peru’s political feature. “President Pedro Castillo has been quick to extend a friendly hand to China,” Reuters reports. China is Peru’s largest trading partner and a top foreign investor.  China is currently the largest source of foreign investment in Peru’s mining industry.  Peru, second to Chile among copper-producing nations, provides 27% of the copper and 9% of the zinc consumed in China.

COVID-19 vaccine inequality: 75 percent of doses administered in just 10 countries

Jean Shaoul

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues its upward trend across the globe, vaccine inequality grows ever more grotesque.

Of the world’s 195 countries, just 10 rich countries account for most of the 5.86 billion vaccine doses administered so far. To put this in perspective, this is enough to fully vaccinate 2.8 billion of the world’s 7.8 billion population or 50 percent of those over 15 years of age. Instead, only 31.5 percent of the world’s population have been fully vaccinated against the disease.

Wealthy countries have fully vaccinated around 60 percent of their population, with the richest G7 nations having doubled jabbed 58 percent—in a bid to get everyone back to work and boost their own corporations’ profits. This contrasts with less than 2 percent of people that Our World in Data says have been fully vaccinated in low-income countries.

Of the wealthier nations, the United Arab Emirate and Qatar have fully vaccinated 80 percent of their populations, the UK 66 percent of its population, Israel 62 percent, the European Union (EU) 60 percent, China 56 percent, the US 54 percent and Japan 52 percent. Of the middle-income countries, Russia has fully vaccinated 27 percent and Morocco 46 percent. Of the lower middle-income countries, India has fully vaccinated 14 percent, Pakistan 10 percent, Algeria 10 percent and Nigeria less than 1 percent, while some of the poorest countries—Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Vanuatu and Yemen—have vaccinated virtually none.

Vaccination rates are by far the lowest in Africa, where around 39 million or 3 percent of the continent’s 1.3 billion population have been fully vaccinated. Africa has officially reported more than 8 million cases, along with 205,000 deaths, widely assumed to be a vast underestimate given the shocking lack of testing facilities and universal systems for registering deaths, as well as impoverished health systems that struggle to provide oxygen and other care. There were 248,000 new confirmed cases last week as at least 28 African countries saw a surge in infections driven by the Delta variant.

A Kenyan man receives a dose of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine donated by Britain, at the Makongeni Estate in Nairobi, Kenya Saturday, Aug. 14, 2021. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga)

Only 12 of Africa’s 54 countries, mostly middle-income countries that have been able to procure vaccines directly from manufacturers at the market price, have hit their target of vaccinating 10 percent of their citizens this month. But not a single vaccine has been administered in Burundi, while fewer than 1 percent of the people in Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Tanzania have been vaccinated. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has admitted it will be unable to achieve its target of fully vaccinating 10 percent of Africans by the end of September.

This shocking situation flows inexorably from the operation of the capitalist mode of production and distribution that is based on profit maximisation and backed up the world’s most powerful governments that are at the beck and call of the major corporations and their financiers.

While the imperialist powers have monopolised vaccine supplies, having pre-ordered quantities far above their needs, the anarchy of the capitalist market, protected by patents and other restrictions, and the financial oligarchy’s criminal indifference to the lives of billions of people, have ensured that the vaccine rollout has been bedeviled by shortages, disruptions to production and half-measures. Such nationalist policies are not only having a terrible impact on the lives and social conditions of those living in unvaccinated countries. They are creating the conditions for the development and spread of new strains of the virus in these countries that will prolong and intensify the pandemic world-wide.

The handful of giant drug companies that own the patents on vaccines, whose development was largely publicly funded, have fought tooth and nail to ensure that the World Trade Organisation rejects calls from India and South Africa—backed by more than 100 countries, 100 Nobel laureates and prominent human rights groups, including Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam—to waive intellectual property rights and allow them to manufacture or import generic and thus cheaper versions.

Last May, US President Joe Biden publicly backed the call to waive patent rights. But this was just words, with Washington doing nothing to address the technicalities involved or confront the pharmaceutical companies. At last week’s meeting of the WTO, the US, along with the European Union, the UK and Switzerland—all of which are home to major pharmaceutical companies—refused to support the waiver proposal.

While the WHO and its partners set up a hub in South Africa for the transfer of the technology to produce the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, the companies have so far refused to share their vaccine recipes.

COVAX, the UN-backed public-private initiative designed to share vaccines globally at lower cost, has missed nearly all its targets and has begged rich countries to share their vaccines. Dr Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the vaccines alliance, said COVAX had been banking on supplies from India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, but had received no doses since March when India banned exports.

Other problems have included difficulties in scaling up production, especially of the lower-cost AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines and delays in obtaining regulatory approval for other vaccines. This is even as millions of the single-shot Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccines (“filled and finished” but not manufactured in a South African factory) were shipped to Europe.

While the cost of vaccines and the limitations of supply have been major problems, low-income countries face the additional, far higher and often insurmountable costs of vaccine distribution and administration, lacking the infrastructure and healthcare personnel to do so.

According to the WHO, African countries have received 158 million vaccine doses, of which COVAX has supplied about 37 percent, with most acquired through bilateral deals and donations. While donors have pledged funding for more than 68 million doses to African states and to the African Union, including donations via COVAX, fewer than 45 million have been delivered.

COVAX is now expected to supply 1.4 billion doses by the end of 2021, far fewer than its original goal of 2 billion. The WHO and its partners acknowledge they are unable to supply Africa with 30 percent of the COVID-19 vaccines needed before February—just half the 60 percent vaccination coverage target African leaders had set for this year. It will take years before vaccination rates in Africa reach the levels of those in the advanced countries.

Instead of prioritising COVAX, the UN-backed initiative designed to share vaccines globally, Big Pharma, including Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, have their eyes firmly set on signing secret bilateral agreements with each country and lobbying rich countries and their regulators to authorise booster shots.

In the face of the global catastrophe that the Economist magazine estimated has already caused 15 million deaths, the response of WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was to focus on the efforts of some of the advanced countries to roll out booster jabs for their most vulnerable residents. Tedros said he was “appalled” that wealthy nations, including the US, the UK, Israel, France and Germany, had started or were planning to administer booster shots to those already fully vaccinated while billions around the world had still not received even a single dose of the vaccine. He called for “a moratorium on the use of boosters in healthy populations until the end of the year.”

This is a diversion from the fundamental issues posed. Such a moratorium would serve only to render less effective the doses already given as their efficacy wanes with time, while doing nothing to resolve the global inequality expressed in the problems of ownership rights, cost, production, and distribution. Such that even if provided with these additional vaccine shots, most undeveloped countries would be unable to distribute them.

All global initiatives based on appeals to the ruling elites and Big Pharma to reduce disparities in vaccination rates, including the COVAX programme, have failed. A global vaccine rollout requires the seizure of the assets of the pharmaceutical and other major corporations and their financiers to pay for the necessary measures that include: the abolition of the intellectual property rights held by the giant pharmaceutical companies, global collaboration in vaccine production and distribution by all those countries that have the facilities to do so, and the provision of mass funding for every country to implement a comprehensive vaccination programme in concert with public health officials and health systems to ensure their safe and effective distribution and administration.