Escalating COVID crisis overwhelms Papua New Guinea hospitals

John Braddock

Amid an escalating COVID-19 crisis in Papua New Guinea (PNG), the south-west Pacific’s largest and most populous island nation, the fragile health system and its hospitals are being overwhelmed by the number of cases.

Radio New Zealand reported on October 11 that since PNG’s first reported case of the Delta variant, the virus had been largely left to “fester and spread.” The capital Port Moresby is undergoing a third wave of the pandemic, while a health disaster is unfolding around the country, including in the heavily-populated Highlands region.

Medical staff of Papua New Guinea’s Defense Force receiving COVID-19 training last year (Credit: World Health Organization/PNG)

Meanwhile, less than 1 percent of the population of nearly 9 million is fully vaccinated, the lowest vaccine coverage in the Western Pacific.

The government largely kept the coronavirus at bay for all of last year, through tight border closures. The Delta strain was first detected on July 10, after the captain of a Philippines ship tested positive, and underwent isolation at the Port Moresby General Hospital. Health professionals warned that the combination of very-low testing rates, a high percentage of positive tests and an extremely slow vaccine rollout provided a “recipe for a major spread.”

Daoni Esorom, the deputy controller of PNG’s national pandemic response, said officials were so concerned that low testing rates were potentially masking a serious outbreak, that they ordered doctors at the hospital to swab all corpses of those people who had died from unknown causes, or who had respiratory illnesses, to ascertain if they had COVID-19.

However, in August, Chief of Medical Emergency Services Sam Yockapua, claimed the rate of transmission and hospital admissions had gone down sufficiently to be “focusing too much” on COVID-19. Reflecting the strategy of the government of Prime Minister James Marape to prioritise business interests above public health, Yockapua said PNG had not been able to enforce lockdowns as in New Zealand or Australia and had to “live with” the disease.

Health authorities scaled back the limited testing regime, on the pretext that it would allow them to “shift focus” to vaccinating vulnerable sections of the population. Consequently, the official statistics drastically understate the reality of what is happening.

What health data is available shows a sharp spike in cases from April through June, and another this month, with 3,935 active cases since September 28. On 14 October, 412 new cases were reported, with a seven-day average of 306 cases. The country has officially recorded a total of 24,041 cases and 266 deaths.

The health system has long suffered from shortages of drugs, lack of funding, crumbling infrastructure and a severe lack of health workers. Shortly after a sit-in during March 2020, by 600 Port Moresby nurses protesting inadequate personal protective equipment, over 4,000 nurses were ready to strike nationwide over the lack of preparation for a coronavirus outbreak. However, the PNG Nurses Association called off the stoppage at the last minute.

With the hospital system now swamped, clinicians warn that the situation is much worse than officials admit, with provinces seeing far more cases than the National Control Centre records. Port Moresby General Hospital is reporting positive COVID testing rates of 60 percent and is scaling down its services due to the surge in patients.

The hospital currently has 50 COVID in-patients with numbers expected to explode over coming weeks. The Guardian reports that surgeries are on hold indefinitely, consultation clinics are closed until further notice, and pathology services, the TB clinic, emergency and radiology departments and all other essential services will be affected.

In Lae, the second largest city, the Angau general hospital is admitting an average of five new cases a day and experienced 19 deaths in September alone. It is the city’s only public hospital, serving a population of 76,255, but has just 320 beds, and a further 150 temporary beds. Authorities have been forced to turn the town’s stadium into a makeshift hospital and morgue.

In the Eastern Highlands, deaths from the virus are being recorded at the hospital in Goroka every day, forcing a two-week lockdown in a bid to stem the surge. Dr. Kapiro Kendaura, the director of curative health services, described the situation as critical. “Our Covid centre is always at capacity,” he told the Guardian. “Our emergency department is always full with Covid patients. We are in dire need of oxygen, amongst other things,” he said.

In the Western Highlands province, the country’s most densely populated region, the Mount Hagen general hospital is on the brink of closure, due to an influx of COVID-19 cases and an acute shortage of government funding. It is the only hospital serving a population of 46,256.

Mount Hagen’s clinical head John Junior McKup told Radio NZ that they recently had over 90 positive patients arrive in a day. “Regularly the numbers have been like 50 or 60 positives in a day. But we’re sending home all the mild and moderate cases to self-isolate at home. We’re only keeping all the severe cases in the hospital,” the doctor revealed.

In one three-week period, over 800 positive cases and 22 deaths from COVID-19 were recorded in the region. According to the provincial health authority, the hospital will be forced to shut down before Christmas if government funding is further delayed.

The PNG government this month formally lodged a “request for assistance” with the Emergency Medical Teams Secretariat in the World Health Organisation. The request stated that from September 20–26, there were 600 newly confirmed cases, including 17 deaths. It admitted that new cases and deaths are significantly underreported “due to the very limited testing across the country and inconsistent reporting from several provinces.”

The government blames “misinformation” and widespread reluctance to be vaccinated for the catastrophic situation. In reality, the fault lies with the crisis-ridden Marape government, which has responded to the pandemic with a mixture of incompetence and blatant self-interest.

According to the PNG Post-Courier, in the midst of the dire healthcare situation, Marape and other government MPs recently travelled to Morobe Province to a health care event, where they were greeted by hundreds of mask-less people. The event “reeked of bad taste,” the Post-Courier observed.

Marape’s visit received widespread criticism on social media, with one person saying: “This is infuriating to see. No wonder people don’t follow niupelapasin [PNG’s official plan] if the people making the mandates about it keep hosting events like this!”

While Pandemic Controller David Manning has banned gatherings of more than 20 people, politicians with an eye towards next year’s elections are traveling around the country, attracting large crowds, indifferent to COVID protection and the risk of spreading the virus.

The abject failure of the government’s vaccine roll-out was further underscored last month when it was forced to transfer to Vietnam 30,000 doses donated by New Zealand, to avoid them being thrown out as they reached their expiry date.

PNG, one of the most impoverished countries in the world, remains largely dependent on the COVAX program. Only 2.5 percent of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine. Vaccines have not been distributed on the basis of need, let alone a global public health strategy, but are being provided to advance the economic and strategic interests of competing powers.

Volkswagen: 30,000 jobs under imminent threat

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

At a supervisory board meeting of the Volkswagen Company at the end of September, VW chairman Herbert Diess told some 20 assembled corporate and trade union representatives to prepare for a new massive round of job cuts. The results of the meeting were made public by the Handelsblatt newspaper on October 13. Diess declared that up to 30,000 jobs would become redundant at VW, i.e., one quarter of the company’s core workforce.

VW boss Herbert Diess (Photo: Alexander Migl/CC BY-SA 4.0)

The main plant in Wolfsburg, the largest factory in the world with about 60,000 employees, had to be immediately converted to the production of electric autos, Diess stressed. Currently, it mainly produces the popular VW Golf and Tiguan combustion models.

Diess had already experienced the collapse of a major factory, he declared, when he was manager for BMV autos in Birmingham, UK. Due to the failure of management to act, and the role of trade unions in blocking innovation, the plant was finally forced to close down, Diess warned.

Now the core brand VW and especially its main plant in Wolfsburg are under pressure. In the past, Diess has repeatedly referred to VW’s competitor Tesla, which is building a so-called giga-factory in Grünheide near Berlin in Brandenburg. Tesla plans to produce about 500,000 electric autos from next year based on a workforce of around 10,000. The main VW plant in Wolfsburg employs about 60,000 people, including 25,000 in production, and expects to produce less than 500,000 autos this year.

For the second year in a row, the Wolfsburg plant is threatened with a historic decline in its postwar production. Last year, Wolfsburg produced just under half a million vehicles, reported the car magazine Automobilwoche. This year even fewer autos are expected to roll off VW assembly lines. This means that Wolfsburg is far below its most recent 10-year average of just under 780,000 autos per annum.

Almost a fortnight ago, Diess prepared 120 managers for a massive attack on jobs in a video conference. An electric auto at the Tesla plant in Grünheide is scheduled to be built in 10 hours. At its Zwickau plant, VW needs three times as long for the production of its models.

The most recent auto sales figures for Germany mark the lowest level of new car registrations in September since 1991, with German auto brands suffering heavily.

Compared to the same month last year, Mercedes (-49.8 percent), Mini (-45.0 percent), Audi (-38.9 percent), VW (-23.3 percent) and BMW (-18.7 percent) recorded the most dramatic declines. Despite losses, VW retains the largest market share of 15.7 percent, but a comparison with Tesla illustrates why Diess has now decided to go on the offensive.

The best-selling car in Germany in September was once again the VW Golf, with 6,886 new registrations. But it was closely followed in second place by Tesla's Model 3, which sold 6,828 units.

Diess is now planning to accelerate VW's internal “Trinity” project. VW is developing a new production model under this name as a new premium model with VW's own software operating system and far-reaching autonomous capabilities, to be produced at the company’s main plant starting in 2026.

According to Handelsblatt, the next generation of VWs will have a completely new structure and be much more efficient to produce. Whereas the VW Golf could be produced in 10 million variants depending on customer wishes, Trinity allows less than a hundred variants.

In Wolfsburg, car bodies are still made of several steel and aluminium sheets that must be welded together. In future, a body made from a single cast and without the use of individual sheets of metal should lead to vast increases in productivity. Tesla is already planning this type of production at its new factory in Grünheide.

However, less complexity also means fewer work steps and fewer jobs, according to Handelsblatt, and Diess has already drawn up various scenarios with up to 30,000 jobs at risk in the course of restructuring. The VW management has already converted some plants, including those in Zwickau and Brussels, while the VW factories in Hanover and Emden are currently undergoing transition to e-mobility. So far, only Wolfsburg has been excluded from this process. Diess wants that to change.

Handelsblatt quotes an insider declaring that reception to Diess’ speech was “harsh.” But while the supervisory board, made up of representatives of big business, finance and senior trade union and works council officials, may have some criticisms of Diess's approach, they all agree on the end goal.

“There is no question we have to address the competitiveness of our plant in Wolfsburg in the face of new market entrants,” a VW spokeswoman said after the supervisory board meeting. In a few days’ time Diess will gather his top managers for an executive meeting where he will present his various scenarios and initiate the massive job cuts.

The chair of the VW general and company works council, Daniela Cavallo, successor to Bernd Osterloh, is backing Diess and has the job of justifying and implementing the cuts to the workforce. In light of the low-capacity utilisation at the VW plant in Wolfsburg, she has already proposed the restructuring of production.

The executive board and works council guaranteed a capacity utilisation of at least 820,000 vehicles at VW’s main plant for 2020 in the “Pact for the Future” agreed in 2016. As a result of this “Pact” 30,000 jobs have already been sacrificed. In mid-2018, they were even plans to set a target of producing 1 million vehicles a year. “Even adjusted for the current negative factors of Corona and semiconductor shortages, we are far from these jointly agreed plans,” Cavallo now says.

The much-vaunted Trinity project will not turn the tide, said the works council leader. The Wolfsburg site must find a faster path to e-mobility. But this would have to be a “volume-capable model”—such as the ID3, ID4 and the upcoming ID5 model—by as early as 2024. However, according to the board's plans so far, these all these models are to be produced in other factories.

The next four weeks will see an intensification of haggling between the works councils at individual factories. On November 12, the VW supervisory board will meet again in Wolfsburg, to agree future investment planning. It will then be finally decided at which factories the various models will be produced.

Last week, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that the works councils attach importance to the fact that there be no negative consequences for the various plants. The demand for e-cars was growing faster than many had expected, and Wolfsburg, for example, could absorb the additional demand.

However, the growing demand for e-cars does not solve the problem that fewer workers are needed for their production. The VW works councils all support job cuts in principle, but then seek to ensure the cuts take place at any other factory than their own. In this way they divide the workforce and sabotage any effective resistance. This has been the case ever since CEO Diess moved to VW from BMW in 2015 and imposed a radical course of restructuring on Germany’s biggest automaker.

The works councils and IG Metall are the main pillars for the auto companies' assault on jobs, working conditions and wages. The auto corporations and their shareholders are using the switch to e-mobility and the coronavirus pandemic to reverse all the gains made by auto workers in the course of bitter strikes since World War II, and thereby continue their orgy of self-enrichment.

VW profits and shareholders’ dividends have swelled despite the pandemic and short-time work. In 2020, the company made around €10 billion in profits before interest and taxes. In 2021, this sum was trumped in the first half of the year with a profit of €11.34 billion.

At the beginning of July, VW raised the profit targets for the entire company. For 2025, the Wolfsburg-based company now calculates a profit margin of between eight and nine percent, i.e., an increase of one percentage point. Around a 4 percent profit margin is planned for the main VW brand, while its subsidiaries Audi and Porsche plan returns of at least 11 percent for their luxury models.

At all of these automakers, it is the increased exploitation of their workforces that lies behind the increase in profits. At Audi, IG Metall already agreed to cut 9,500 jobs in 2019, with more than half of these jobs already lost.

Alongside VW, all other auto companies in Germany and worldwide are squeezing their workforces to the bone to satisfy the shareholders’ lust for ever higher profits and dividends. Workers must answer this offensive with their own, international declaration of struggle.

Quarterly earnings put major banks on path for record yearly profits

Gabriel Black

The world’s largest banks posted record third quarter earnings this past week, putting 2021 on track to be the most lucrative year in history for the financial world.

Bloomberg estimates that altogether the leading banks have taken in $170 billion over the last four quarters (starting with the fourth quarter of 2020). This is the most profitable four consecutive quarters for banks in history.

In this December 13, 2016 photo the logo for Goldman Sachs appears above a trading post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Leading the banks is JPMorgan Chase, which, during this time, made an estimated $131 million per day .

Goldman Sachs made a net third quarter profit of $5.4 billion. This surpassed estimates that it would take in $3.7 billion and was up from $3.4 billion last year. The investment bank has now recorded a profit of $17.7 billion for the first nine months of year, itself higher than any 12-month period in its history. The news sent Goldman shares 3.8 percent higher, having already gained 80 percent this year.

Profits are up at all the major American banks. Bank of America increased its profits by 64 percent, Citigroup by 48 percent, Morgan Stanley by 38 percent, and JPMorgan Chase by 24 percent.

In Europe, banks also performed well, while not as spectacularly as their US counterparts. UBS and Barclays both posted their highest quarterly profit in over a decade. Their profits over the past 12 months were $7.6 and $7.4 billion, respectfully. Deutsche Bank posted its highest profits in eight years.

The stock index for US banks has gone up 59 percent this past year, while for European banks it has risen by 56 percent.

An analyst for Oppenheimer, speaking to the Financial Times, described the quarter as “quite literally off the charts.”

The record earnings come as a historic strike wave begins in the US and global food and energy prices surge. Meanwhile, the pandemic continues to rage, with weekly global deaths of almost 50,000 people, according to Our World in Data .

The surge in bank profits is fundamentally bound up with the unprecedented pumping of money into the stock markets by all the major central banks. In particular, the US Federal Reserve is electronically “printing” $120 billion of new money every month and buying US-backed treasuries and corporate bonds from major banks—flooding these institutions with cash.

This massive loan of money, with no strings attached, allows the banks to gorge themselves on risky financial practices. By trickling down to other sections of capital, stimulating investments, the money encourages acquisitions, corporate mergers and IPOs (initial public offering—when a company goes public with its stock).

Much of the record profits that are being made by these banks comes from precisely this type of speculative activity. Specifically, banks charge large fees for handling mergers, acquisitions and IPOs. They charge fees for advising companies, finding sellers and buyers, executing the financial actions involved and raising capital during the process.

Mergers and acquisitions frequently mean job cuts, eliminating so-called “redundancies” in companies. In the most recent quarter, global merger activity rose to a record $1.52 trillion.

Last quarter, JPMorgan Chase tripled its fees to $1.23 billion, Bank of America increased its fees by 65 percent to $654 million, Morgan Stanley tripled its fees to $1.27 billion, and Goldman Sachs increased its fees by 31 percent, to $1.6 billion.

In a comment to the Financial Times, financier Chris Kotowski said, “[W]ith the Fed printing $120 billion of new money each and every month, every CEO in the world has lots of Monopoly money to play with. So M&A [Mergers and Acquisitions] and investment spending and capital raising will likely remain strong.”

Indeed, this “Monopoly money” is what is keeping capitalist financial markets afloat—markets built on top of a mountain of debt and speculation, liable to pop.

While the Federal Reserve has announced it may begin to draw back the asset purchasing program in November, it has repeatedly delayed this move for fear of sparking a sell-off on Wall Street.

As the banks make record profits, the bottom half of the US have, collectively, negative wealth. The entire bottom 90 percent of Americans, according to economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, own only 26 percent of the country’s wealth. This leaves the top 10 percent with 74 percent of the wealth—a number that does not even include offshore accounts that fly under the radar!

Few banks expect their profit feast to last.

Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman drew attention in comments last week to the effects of the Fed tapering its cash injections. He stated, “It’s good to be watchful … There’s certainly nothing that suggests there are any issues, but markets are bouncing a little bit. And over the next 18 months, we’ll see more of that as the Fed starts to move.”

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said he thought that while the cash injections, or “quantitative easing,” as it is known, may be wound down, interest rates would likely remain at record lows for another year. This means inflation “might go higher than people think.” A further surge in the cost of goods, including food and energy, could, itself, lead to significant economic, social and political explosions.

The International Monetary Fund has urged central banks to be “very, very vigilant” about workers demanding higher wages in response to inflation. An IMF report warned that an increase in core prices due to inflation and higher wages could lead to a “spiral of doubt” in the economy that would endanger growth.

A Catch-22 faces the financial oligarchy. Either let the debt bubble balloon further, driven by easy money policies, or burst it through tightening, risking a financial collapse.

Neither option poses a solution. The former risks widespread inflation and devaluation of cash, only making the next financial crisis larger. The latter bursts the bubble that has already grown larger than 2008’s pile of debt.

In either case, the outcome will be the intensification of class struggle both in the United States and globally, as these interconnected, international economic processes reach their logical conclusion.

Lucy spacecraft begins 12-year mission to study asteroids and the origins of the Solar System

Bryan Dyne

The NASA space probe Lucy began its 12-year mission after being successfully launched from Cape Canaveral aboard an Atlas V 401 rocket. The spacecraft is slated to study eight asteroids in the main asteroid belt and among Jupiter’s trojans, two groups of asteroids that share that planet’s orbit around the Sun, as part of a campaign to more closely study the origins of Earth and the other planets in the Solar System.

An artist's conception of the Lucy spacecraft flying past the binary pair Trojan asteroids the binary pair 617 Patroclus-Menoetius. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab/Adriana Gutierrez

Lucy was selected in 2017 for development and launch, alongside the Psyche mission, after more than two years of review, and winning out over 26 other proposals. Astronomers will use three instruments—L’Ralph, L’LORRI, and L’TES—to image target asteroids in visible and infrared light, measure ice, silicate and organic material on each celestial body’s surface, and study asteroid interiors and bulk properties. These instruments will be operated by teams operating out of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, the Southwest Research Institute and the Goddard Space Flight Center.

The spacecraft also has a golden plaque adorned with a sampling of current culture, including quotes from Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan, as a time capsule for future generations.

Asteroids have long been a target of astronomical study because they, like comets, are a snapshot of different parts of the Solar System’s history. The eight planets as they are now have been shaped by billions of years of geophysical process, such as weather, climate and tectonic activity (as well as human processes on Earth). In contrast, asteroids (meaning “star-like”) are suspected to be the shattered remains of objects that never became large enough to form actual planets. They thus exist mostly as they have since they were formed and stand as moments of planetary formation preserved over the eons that provide insight into the physical conditions and dynamics of the early Solar System.

Millions of these small bodies exist in the solar system and hundreds of thousands have been cataloged for more careful study. They range in size from just a few meters across to the largest, Ceres, which is 1,000 kilometers in diameter and large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet. They are made up of a combination of different metals and minerals and have even been envisioned as the subject of future space-based mining operations.

Several missions have been launched in the past few decades to study asteroids, including the sample return mission to Bennu by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, the successful landing of two rovers on 162173 Ryugu by the Japanese mission Hayabusa2, and the Dawn mission, which orbited two different asteroids, Vesta and Ceres, during a mission lasting 11 years. The New Horizons spacecraft was also directed to fly past an asteroid, now named 486958 Arrokoth, four years after the historic first close encounter with Pluto.

Lucy builds on the ambition of and knowledge gained from these previous projects and was one of the primary goals outlined for astronomical research by the most recent Planetary Science Decadal Survey. While targets of most previous missions are either near-Earth asteroids or are part of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Lucy will be studying asteroids farther out, focusing on Jupiter’s trojan asteroids.

These two groups of asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun were first predicted by Italian-born mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange in 1772. He showed that a small body like an asteroid might be trapped in an orbit of a planet, but at a point leading or trailing the planet by 60 degrees. These leading and trailing points are now denoted Lagrange points 4 and 5 (L4 and L5), and are among the five gravitationally stable points between any two astronomical bodies where one orbits the other. Jupiter’s first trojans were actually observed by German astronomer Max Wold in 1906 and more than 9,800 have been discovered since then.

By convention, all asteroids trapped in such orbits are referred to generically as trojans, including those in co-orbits with Mars, Neptune and Earth. They do not actually orbit the planet, but are held in place in specific orbits around the Sun by the planet’s far greater mass. Those trapped by Jupiter are called the “Trojans” if they are trailing behind the Solar System’s largest planet and the “Greeks” if they are in front of it, and asteroids in each group are named after figures from the Trojan War.

Lucy will be studying seven of these asteroids, 3548 Eurybates and its satellite Queta in August 2027, 15094 Polymele in September 2027, 11351 Leucus in April 2028, 21900 Orus in November 2028 and the binary pair 617 Patroclus-Menoetius in March 2033. In order to travel to so many targets, five of which are in the “Greek camp” and two of which are in the “Trojan camp,” which are separated by about 1.3 billion kilometers, Lucy will use three gravitational assists from Earth to travel between different parts of the Solar System.

Lucy will take a very complex trajectory, as shown in this image, to visit asteroid in very different parts of the Solar System. Credit: NASA

The spacecraft will also make a test run of its operational capabilities at the main belt asteroid 55246 Donald johanson in April 2025. The asteroid is named after Donald Johanson, the discoverer of the fossilized remains of the female hominin australopithecine known as “Lucy” in Ethiopia, a 3.2 million-year-old ancestor of modern humans. The Lucy mission is named after this skeleton as a tribute and in the hopes the Lucy spacecraft will provide insight into the origins of the planets similar to what the Lucy fossil provided in relation to the development of the Homo genus.

Lucy is the American space agency’s 13th Discovery-class mission, a program which is nominally designed to produce missions that have very focused objectives. In practice, the Discovery missions are bound by the philosophy championed by Clinton-appointed NASA administrator Daniel Goldin that space missions should be “faster, better, cheaper” and have very limited budgets.

The political limitations have not, however, stopped the missions that have been launched from producing some fantastic scientific results. Discovery class missions include Mars Pathfinder and its Sojourner rover, the MESSENGER mission to Mercury, and the exoplanet observatory Kepler. All of these missions have brought critical new insights about the physical world and humanity’s place in it.

Australia: Bipartisan push to wind down COVID-19 contact tracing

Margaret Rees

A concerted bipartisan effort is underway in Australia to condition public opinion to accept the demise of an important weapon in science’s anti-pandemic arsenal—an effective Test, Trace, Isolate and Quarantine (TTIQ) system.

Australia’s political establishment is making clear that the population will have to accept mass COVID-19 infection and death, with some medical authorities being used to justify the wholesale removal of restrictions to prevent the deadly virus spreading. The target for the ruling elite is not the coronavirus but contact tracing itself.

Pedestrians walk away from the central business district in Melbourne, Australia, Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2020. (AP Photo/Asanka Brendon Ratnayake)

The Labor government of Daniel Andrews in Victoria and the right-wing Coalition government led by newly-installed Dominic Perrottet in New South Wales (NSW)—the country’s most populous states—are now waging a joint assault on proven measures to identify and trace the spread of the virus.

Both governments are responding to the demands of major corporations, particularly the airlines and giant retail supermarket chains, which have insisted that their staff be exempt from isolating after their workplace has been visited by anyone infected with COVID-19.

Coles, the country’s second largest supermarket chain, has demanded the redefinition of a “close contact” and of a “Tier 1” site in order to change the current TTIQ measures.

Up to now workers at Tier 1 sites, where the risk of contracting the virus was high, were required to self-isolate for 14 days. Since mid-July, when Delta outbreaks began in Victoria, about 30,000 Coles workers have had to isolate. At the end of last month, Woolworths, Australia’s largest supermarket retailer, had 1,000 staff isolating in Victoria.

These giant retailers want the Victorian government to align its TTIQ system with measures recently enacted in NSW. In that state Woolworths demanded, and received, NSW Health approval for the redefinition of a close contact.

Previously anyone who had spent more than a minute within 1.5 metres of an infected person, even if both were wearing masks, was defined as a close contact. In NSW a close contact is now defined as a person within 1.5 metres of an infected person for more than five minutes while either was wearing their mask improperly.

One Woolworths worker explained to the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) that he was ordered to isolate by NSW Health for 14 days as a close contact of an infected co-worker, only to be phoned and texted after four days and told to return to work.

In the stampede to dispense with restrictions, Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton announced on October 4 that the state’s listing and reporting of Tier 2 sites, many of them supermarkets, would be progressively scaled back. “We have to focus our efforts on where we get most bang for our buck,” he declared, adding that it was no longer “an effective use of energy” to capture all Tier-2 sites.

The process now underway in Victoria was initiated by the NSW government which scrapped the reporting of close contact sites and then ended daily health press conferences. Currently only transmission sites outside Sydney, the state capital, and its most populous city, are reported in any detail on the NSW Health site.

Victoria’s contact tracing system had been plagued from the outset of the pandemic with inadequate resources. Justifying the roll-back of its efforts, Sutton claimed that so-called mystery cases, unlinked to any known outbreak, were just a feature of “widespread community transmission. It is just a phenomenon that happens when you have got thousands of cases per day.”

The virtual scrapping of the TTIQ system is not confined to retail but is also being implemented in state schools which the Victorian government has begun to reopen despite opposition from educators, parents and students. Already, within a week of Year 12 students returning to in-person classes, infections have skyrocketed and schools closed.

Sutton’s perspective is that this will deepen. “We certainly won’t have the entire school quarantining for a full 14-day period” after infections are detected, he said.

Every arm of the corporate press, including the state-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation, has been engaged in a non-stop propaganda campaign to promote the lie that the pandemic is over.

As part of this barrage, “7.30,” ABC-TV’s flagship current affairs show, recently broadcast a program entitled “Close Contact,” subtitled, “How contact tracing could work in the months ahead as vaccine targets are met.”

The program approvingly referred to the situation in England. It noted that when it opened up in July, the country had so many COVID-19 infections that the UK Track and Trace system that alerts one’s smartphone with a ping was so frequent that it became known as a “pingdemic.” The ping alerted the phone’s owner that they had been into contact with a positive COVID-19 person and imposed 10-day self-isolation orders.

Rather than enact measures to stop the spread of the virus, the British government changed its advice so that fully vaccinated people were told to get tested, but not to isolate at all.

This is being replicated in Australia. The “7.30” program quoted Deakin University epidemiologist Professor Catherine Bennett, who said: “We don’t need to put everyone in isolation, but identify the key individuals who are most at risk.”

In NSW, Customer Service Minister Victor Dominello, responsible for the state’s check-in application as part of contact tracing, declared: “I think the QR codes should be retired once we get to the 90 percent mark, subject to Health advice, because this goes to trust.”

Similarly, the Guardian interviewed Professor Jodie McVernon of the Doherty Institute, which provided the modelling for the Morrison government’s “roadmap” out of the pandemic. McVernon is currently working with governments to gradually de-escalate the public health responses to the pandemic, with the “necessary transition” from a pandemic to the virus “becoming endemic” in the community.

Despite the experiences of Israel, the UK and US, where high vaccination levels have not prevented mass outbreaks, McVernon justified the abandonment of all public health measures by the failure of the inadequate ones which led to the current outbreaks.

She said: “We’ve adapted and adapted and adapted and adapted—when you think about testing, tracking, isolating and quarantining, the idea that somebody who walked past you in a supermarket when you were there for half an hour would ever be called a contact—that was never in our minds.”

She asserted: “As we continue to adapt, we now have a vaccine in play that is actually lowering risks.”

Predicting future mass undetected infections, she continued: “But as we move into this new era, we will have a higher tolerance for saying, ‘OK, if we don’t test every single person who went to the supermarket, we might miss one, but if there are lots of infections in the community, that has a very different risk consequence.’”

The imperatives of the financial and corporate elite, such as the giant supermarket chains, are to be translated into the destruction of even the limited track and trace systems that have been put in place. With the opening up of the economy that they stridently demand and that the corporate media parrots faithfully, the COVID-19 pandemic will have unlimited sway, and infections and deaths will escalate accordingly.

Humanitarian disaster in Yemen as fighting for Marib intensifies

Jean Shaoul

Yemen is facing the world’s worst food crisis. This is the direct result of the criminal Saudi-led military coalition’s efforts to restore by force the discredited government of Riyadh’s proxy, President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Backed by US and British imperialism, the six-year war fought by air, land and sea, has wrecked the country’s economy.

Fighting has intensified, with 47 identifiable front lines. The war has caused at least 120,000 deaths, including tens of thousands of civilians, as well as a further 131,000 from indirect causes such as lack of food, health services and infrastructure. An outbreak of cholera, an easily treated disease, has led to more than 2.5 million cases and at least 4,000 deaths.

Human rights organisations have accused the Saudi-led coalition of bombing schools, hospitals and other civilian targets. Earlier this month, the United Nations Human Rights Council succumbed to pressure from Saudi Arabia and its extensive lobbying campaign and voted against extending its investigation into possible war crimes in Yemen committed by the Saudi-led coalition. It marked the first time in the council's 15-year history that a resolution was defeated.

In this Sunday, June 14, 2020 photo, seven-month-old Issa Ibrahim Nasser is brought to a clinic in Deir Al-Hassi, At seven months old, Issa weighs only three kilos. Like him, hundreds of children suffer from acute severe malnutrition because of poverty and grinding conflict. Yemen. (AP Photo/Issa Al-Rajhi)

Last week, the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs’s (OCHA) Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Rajasingham warned that five million people are one step away from famine and more than 20 million Yemenis, two thirds of Yemen’s 30 million population, need humanitarian assistance. But, he said, the aid agencies “are, once again, starting to run out of money,” having received $2.1 billion, just over half of its $3.85 billion requirement. Without further funding to “keep famine at bay,” he added, “in the coming weeks and months, up to four million people could see their food aid reduced,” and the number rising to five million by the end of the year.

Yemen’s population is young and the situation facing children is heartbreaking. Henrietta Fore, Executive Director of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), said, “Being a child in Yemen is the stuff of nightmares.” Having experienced or witnessed horrific scenes of violence or watched their parents fight off starvation, they will carry the physical and emotional scars for their entire lives. In 2021, 1.6 million children were internally displaced due to violence, while essential health, sanitation and education services are “incredibly fragile” and “on the brink of total collapse.”

Of the 20 million Yemenis in need of humanitarian assistance to survive, 11.3 million are children. Of these children, around 2.3 million are acutely malnourished and 400,000 under five suffer from severe acute malnutrition. Fore stressed, “In Yemen, one child dies every 10 minutes from preventable causes, including malnutrition and vaccine-preventable diseases.”

Yemen’s economy has suffered one blow after another thanks to the blockade of its ports and the closure of its international airport in Sana’a. Its currency has sunk to one sixth of its pre-war value against the dollar in Aden, making imports unaffordable. According to OCHA, commercial food imports to the key ports of Hodeida and Saleef were down eight percent compared to this time last year, while “fuel imports were an alarming 64 percent lower.”

Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world even before the war, has seen its GDP crash by 40 percent since 2015, leading to doctors, teachers and sanitation workers being paid late if at all over the last four years. Two million children are not in school and one in six schools are unusable. A further four million children are at risk of dropping out as unpaid teachers leave to find paid work.

Unemployment is running at more than 50 percent. The war has disrupted agriculture, manufacturing and the extraction of oil and natural gas, the country’s key exports. Inflation last year was more than 26 percent, with situation in relation to food, far worse. Between February 2016 and October 2020, wheat flour rose 133 percent, vegetable oil 96 percent and rice 164 percent, making it impossible for most Yemenis to put food on the table. Most now survive only because of international aid.

The Saudi-led military campaign was launched in 2015, with the US and UK providing weaponry, surveillance, intelligence, training and other backup support, to restore the Hadi government. It is part of the House of Saud’s efforts to maintain the rule of the Gulf petro-monarchs and their allies across the peninsular amid seething social tensions that came to a head in the Arab Spring of 2011. Mass protests in Bahrain, major demonstrations and unrest in Kuwait and Oman, and smaller protests in Saudi Arabia were brutally suppressed.

In Yemen, protests broke out against the 32-year-long dictatorial rule of US and Saudi-backed president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who unleashed the military. Following forced Saleh’s forced resignation, Hadi, his vice-president, took over in 2012. Two years later, protests again erupted over his failure to resolve any of the social problems, leading to Hadi’s ouster and the seizure of power by the Houthis, a Shia tribe from the north of the country, in alliance with some of Saleh’s supporters in January 2015. Hadi fled to Riyadh.

The Saudis, fielding a military coalition with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and other Arab countries, invaded their southern neighbour in 2015, denouncing the Houthi rebels as Iran’s proxies, in a bid to reimpose Hadi and prevent a similar uprising at home. The oil-rich Eastern Province that is home to Saudi Arabia’s Shi’a population who have faced decades of economic neglect is a social powder keg. But the coalition disintegrated as the war proved more difficult and costly than expected, with local or tribal militias operating in unstable and fluid alliances—some backed by Riyadh and some by Abu Dhabi, which has since withdrawn its support for the war.

The country has splintered with the Houthis controlling the northern part of the country, including the capital Sana’a and the majority of the country’s population. The south and the west, including the port city of Aden, is controlled by the UAE-backed secessionist Southern Transitional Council (STC) in the south and the Republican Guards on the western coast, led by former president Saleh’s nephew. The eastern provinces that are home to the country’s energy resources, pipelines and Indian Ocean ports, is controlled by Hadi’s dwindling forces and supporters linked to Islamists and al-Qaeda. All the major ports and cities in the south and west have seen protests in the last months denouncing the government’s failure to pay wages, ensure reliable electricity and fuel supplies and end inflation.

The Houthis are now fighting to gain control of Marib, which along with Shebwa is the site of Yemen’s oil and gas reserves. In recent weeks, they have taken control of the central province of al-Bayda, the southern approach to Marib and its oil reserves, and made gains in Shebwa and Abyan provinces, cutting off Saudi supply lines in readiness for a final push on Marib city.

The Saudis have pushed back against the Houthis, with ground forces killing at least 165 Houthi fighters and air strikes killing another 1,000 in the last week and displacing nearly 10,000 people. The city is already home to hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people. The loss of Marib would mean the near certain collapse of the mission to reimpose the Hadi government and likely see the Houthis push south to confront the secessionists in the south and west of the country, potentially causing the UAE to return to Yemen to support its clients.

The Biden administration in the United States has begun to pressure Riyadh to put an end to a war that is draining the resources of one of its key regional allies. US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan recently visited Riyadh, calling for an end to its blockade on Hodeida port and negotiations with the Houthis to enable the reopening of Sanaa International Airport. He warned Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that Congressional legislation could limit US military cooperation with Saudi Arabia.

Stellantis slashes 1,800 auto jobs at Windsor Assembly in Canada

Carl Bronski

Stellantis, the global auto giant and parent company of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Canada, announced Friday evening that it will indefinitely lay off 1,800 workers at the company’s Windsor Assembly Plant in Windsor, Ontario, just across the international border from Detroit, Michigan. The layoffs will be accompanied by the elimination of the plant’s second shift effective April 17, 2022.

Shift change at the FCA Windsor plant, March 2020. [WSWS Media]

“The global automotive industry continues to face significant headwinds such as the persisting semiconductor shortage and the extended effects of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the company stated in justifying the jobs massacre. “In response to these factors, Stellantis will adjust production operations at its Windsor Assembly Plant.”

The statement went on to declare that the company’s promised $1.3 billion to $1.5 billion investment to move production to electric vehicle models in Windsor by 2024 was unaffected by their layoff announcement.

Certainly, the global shortage of semiconductors has temporarily affected auto production. In Canada, volumes have dropped by almost 7 percent over the past year. Many of the remaining assembly plants in the country have produced only sporadically since last February. Windsor Assembly, for instance, has operated for only 3 months in 2021. Stellantis’ Brampton Assembly Plant has seen significant downtime as well. Ford, General Motors, Toyota and Honda operations have been similarly impacted. GM’s CAMI assembly plant near London, Ontario—one of the hardest hit—has only operated for three weeks in the past 9 months.

That being said, Stellantis’ attempt to sell the layoffs in Windsor as a mere response to unexpected supplier issues is a cynical fraud. The reality is that well before last January’s merger of FCA with the PSA group, which includes Peugeot, Opel, and Vauxhall, that formed Stellantis, corporate management were plotting a massive onslaught on workers’ jobs and conditions around the world.

Noting that Stellantis employed some 410,000 workers on almost every continent when it was formed, the World Socialist Web Site explained, “The merger of FCA and PSA has been driven by the ferocious struggle among the auto giants to dominate both new technologies, including electric and autonomous vehicles, and markets. The tie-up will itself push other companies to seek out further consolidation and cost savings. The major banks and investors have exerted relentless pressure on automakers in recent years to accelerate cuts and restructuring plans, with the aim of squeezing out every drop of profits possible from the working class.”

Carlos Tavares, who heads the Stellantis group, is notorious as a cost-cutting restructurer. He is responsible for the destruction of thousands of auto jobs across PSA’s European operations in France, Germany, and Britain, and he is now imposing similar attacks globally to ensure Stellantis can make bumper shareholder payouts and outcompete its rivals in the rapidly expanding EV market.

The job cuts at the Windsor plant, which builds the Chrysler Pacifica minivan, Pacifica Hybrid, Grand Caravan, and Chrysler Voyager, will reduce the workforce to around 2,200 this coming spring. The plant has for years been the largest employer in Windsor, which has been devastated by a steady reduction of auto production in the city, once called the automotive capital of Canada. As late as 2020, the plant employed almost 6,000 autoworkers over three shifts. About 1,500 workers were then axed with the elimination of the third shift.

At that time, officials from Unifor, the union which represents workers at the plant, refused to mobilize autoworkers to oppose the layoffs. Talking like a corporate executive, Unifor Local 444 President Dave Cassidy said the destruction of the third shift was “strictly a business decision based on the Pacifica.”

On Friday, Unifor National President Jerry Dias justified the layoffs in much the same way Stellantis did. “The computer chip fiasco has caused all kinds of turmoil,” he said. “It leaves all of the companies evaluating their priorities. The unfortunate reality is that pickup trucks, SUVS are where they’re hanging their hat. And it’s a disaster for us because we bargained something much different (minivans). But you can’t control where the market is at as the result of the computer chips. It’s a mess. I’m frankly so disappointed.”

This is nothing but a pathetic apologia for Unifor’s central role in blocking any opposition by autoworkers in Canada to the global restructuring plans of the major automakers. During last year’s round of collective bargaining with the Detroit Three, Dias and his teams of negotiators facilitated the massive onslaught on jobs and working conditions by campaigning for the provincial and federal governments to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to FCA, Ford, and GM to ensure Canada’s “competitiveness” as a destination for new investments. They combined this with a doubling down on their promotion of rotten Canadian nationalism, telling autoworkers in Windsor, Oakville, and Brampton that their jobs could only be secured by competing in a race to the bottom with their class brothers and sisters in the United States, Mexico, and internationally.

When bargaining concluded last fall, Dias postured as the savior of the Canadian auto industry, claiming that the Detroit Three’s commitment of around $5 billion in future investments to manufacture electric vehicles in Ontario guaranteed secure, decent-paying jobs for autoworkers. The elimination of the second shift at Windsor, coming little more than a year after the third shift was axed, puts paid to such bluster. Insofar as the auto industry in Canada is being “saved” it is at the expense of auto workers and the communities in which they work and live. The only ones to profit from this are the automakers and their super-rich shareholders along with their advisers and co-managers in the Unifor bureaucracy.

Last year’s collective agreement between FCA and Unifor, which Dias’ described as the “best deal in 25 years,” sought to fool the membership into accepting sweeping retrenchment with headline promises of large investments. Management’s promise to invest up to $1.5 billion to re-tool Windsor Assembly for electric car production projected about 2,000 jobs slowly coming back on stream over several years.

But as the WSWS warned workers, “FCA’s letter of intent to Unifor sums up the uncertainty that remains over the automaker’s plans. FCA asserted that any investments would be predicated on ‘competitive operational practices’ and ‘appropriate government financial support to build a strong viable business case for future investments.’ The letter then continued by stating that all investments ‘are subject to the two key conditions in the preceding paragraph and, as always, to market demand, consumer preferences, company business plan requirements, group executive committee approval and economic conditions.’”

The key clause to draw attention to here, as the WSWS did at the time, is the need for “group executive committee approval” for any job guarantees. Under conditions where the Stellantis group was emerging, it proves that Unifor knowingly reached an agreement that created the perfect conditions for the auto giant to launch its long-planned onslaught on jobs and conditions, all the while lulling its members to sleep with bogus propaganda about how their future employment was secure.

To oppose this corporate-union conspiracy and defend their jobs, autoworkers at the Windsor plant and across Canada must take matters into their own hands. They need to establish rank-and-file committees to oppose Unifor’s nationalist, pro-corporate agenda, and unify their struggle for decent-paying, secure jobs with their international colleagues at auto plants across the United States, Mexico, Europe, and elsewhere.

Autoworkers in Canada can draw on the powerful example set by tens of thousands of workers in the United States who are in open revolt against the corporations and the bosses’ junior partners in the unions. The brutal working conditions and rotten contract offers that are policed by the UAW and USW have been rejected in recent months by workers at Volvo Trucks, Dana auto parts, and John Deere. The rebellion by over 10,000 workers at Deere has led to the first strike at the agricultural equipment manufacturer in 35 years. It is the largest of a series of job actions by workers across the country that is developing into the biggest strike wave of the American working class in decades.

Coronavirus continues to surge in Northwestern US

Shelby Michaels

Coronavirus cases remain high across the United States, including more than 78,000 new cases a day and close to 1,300 daily deaths. Cases have, in particular, been surging in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon and Washington since August, with a corresponding rise in hospitalizations and deaths.

In this Aug. 31, 2021 photo medical professionals pronate a 39 year old unvaccinated COVID-19 patient in the Medical Intensive care unit (MICU) at St. Luke's Boise Medical Center in Boise, Idaho. (AP Photo/Kyle Green, File)

Similar to the growth in cases nationally, Northwest US has been hit by a combination of the emergence of the Delta variant of the coronavirus and the reckless policies of school and workplace reopenings by the Biden administration. There were less than 750 new cases per day in the region as a whole at the beginning of July, and now the five states collectively report more than 5,600 new cases a day, a more than seven-fold increase.

There have been more than 1,000 new cases each day reported in Idaho since September 12, a sharp rise which follows a nadir at the beginning of July when cases dropped below 70 a day. Daily deaths also stand at about 20 a day, a record exceeding the daily death tolls suffered last winter.

The state also continues to set record-high hospitalizations, with a daily average of 661 on October 14 and a peak starting in September that reached 761 the first week of October. The New York Times has reported that Idaho officials have activated “crisis standards of care,” allowing packed facilities to ration treatment. “We are being absolutely crushed by COVID,” Chris Roth, the president and chief executive of St. Luke’s Health System, a network of hospitals across Idaho. Sandee Gehrke, the chief operating officer for St. Luke’s Health System, reports, “We are out of actual hospital beds.”

With a vaccination rate of just 42 percent across the state, some of Idaho’s coronavirus vaccines are expiring because they have sat unused for so long. Idaho’s Republican Governor Brad Little has refused to set mask mandates in the state since the start of the pandemic. In addition, amidst the current crisis, Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin tried to ban local mask mandates the first week of October.

Montana has seen higher seven-day averages this month than in January of 2021. The week of October 11 had the highest number of cases reported in a single day, 2,200. Hospitals in Montana reached a new high of 510 patients with COVID-19, four more than the previous high in November 2020. Hospitals in Bozeman and Helena reached capacity multiple times over the past month.

Blaine County in Montana, with a population of just 23,000, saw a 464 percent increase of daily cases this week from the average two weeks ago, the highest since the start of the pandemic. Since the pandemic’s beginning, 1 in 6 residents have been infected in Blaine County. Located in Park County, the Livingston Public Schools board voted to hold middle and high school classes virtually starting this coming Wednesday due to a spike in cases at the schools.

Wyoming saw a similar rise, with new cases peaking at an average of more than 500 a day in September and which has dropped to just over 400 now. The surge has also claimed more than 300 lives in the state since the beginning of July. Similar to Idaho and Montana, hospitalizations have risen since September. The most recent 14-day average was at 228, the highest since winter 2020, when the 14-day average was at nearly identical rates. Despite such high rates of infections, Republican Governor Mark Gordon has also refused even basic public health measures such as mandate masks.

Oregon currently suffers more than 1,000 new cases each day, and last week saw a record 188 deaths in the state. There are also a record 72,000 active cases throughout the state, more than at any time previously in the pandemic. The sharp rise in cases has taxed the state’s health care system to its limits. As of Friday, only 8 percent of intensive care unit beds and 7 percent of non-ICU beds were available.

In Washington, where the first case of COVID-19 was detected in the US, there has also been a sharp rise in cases since the summer. After falling to less than 350 daily cases, the number of new infections rose to 3,500 in early September and has since dipped to 2,500 now. The daily death toll similar climbed, peaking at an average of 42 lost lives per day and now still at 32, still higher than last winter’s surge.

Meanwhile President Biden openly acknowledges that his administration’s plans to combat COVID-19, first and foremost, are meant to protect the economy. Referencing the “six-pronged program” Biden promises to “use every available tool to combat COVID-19 and save even “more” lives in the months ahead, while also “keeping schools open and safe, and protecting our economy from lockdowns and damage.” At the current rate of death, with an average of 1,200 people dying each day, more than 200,000 people will die in the next six months, bringing the official US death toll to about one million.

The current conditions in the US Northwest, along with other states that continue to face high numbers of cases, make it clear that the only viable method for ending the pandemic is eradication. While vaccination is an effective tool, it is not enough to end the spread of the virus. Vaccination is most effective when combined with aggressive public health measures, including the shutdown of nonessential production and schools, along with mass testing, contact tracing and isolation of infected individuals.

In order to fight for eradication, an intervention by the working class to force a change in policy is essential. The working class must be aided with science and understand the strategy for eradication. The WSWS is holding an online webinar on October 24, that will present to a global audience the scientific case for eradication. We call on all of our readers to register for the webinar today, speak to your co-workers about it, and promote the event as widely as possible on social media.

As schools across the country reopen for in-person learning, COVID-19 cases remain high. In the Pacific Northwest (PNW), Idaho, Montana and Wyoming have seen continued rising rates of cases and hospitalizations since August. Regional data is consistent with the rise in cases nationally. Although both Democratic and Republican politicians promised that vaccinations would end the pandemic, most states are seeing case rates as high as the winter months of 2021.