LIVING BEYOND THE WORLD'S IMAGINATION

17 Jan 2022

Volcanic eruption in Tonga triggers tsunami warnings across the Pacific

John Braddock

An undersea volcano erupted near the Pacific nation of Tonga on Saturday, sending a series of waves sweeping into the capital Nuku’alofa and triggering tsunami advisories across the southwest Pacific as well as Australia’s east coast, Hawaii, Alaska and the US Pacific coast.

This satellite image taken by Himawari-8, a Japanese weather satellite, and released by the agency, shows an undersea volcano eruption at the Pacific nation of Tonga Saturday, Jan. 15, 2022. (Japan Meteorology Agency via AP)

Japan and countries in Latin America were also impacted. Two women drowned at a beach in Lambayeque, in northern Peru, when 2-metre-high waves dragged a truck into the sea. No deaths have been reported in Tonga, but some of the archipelago’s 36 inhabited islands are still uncontactable after the disaster severed internet and phone lines.

Eruptions were heard as booms or “thumps” across the Pacific, in Fiji, Niue, Vanuatu, and in New Zealand and recorded some 2,000km away. Shock waves that traversed many thousands of kilometres were seen from space.

On Tonga, with a population of 105,000, cellphone videos posted to social media showed large waves washing ashore in coastal areas, swirling around homes, a church and other buildings. Data from the Pacific tsunami centre detected waves of 80cm (2.7ft). Satellite images showed a huge eruption, with a plume of ash, steam and gas rising above the Pacific.

Journalist Mary Fonua told TVNZ News on Saturday evening that the situation was “precarious.” Fonua said there were a series of “huge explosions” as the Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha’apai volcano, 65km from the main island, erupted at 5.30 pm. A tsunami warning for the entire country was issued, sending people rushing to higher ground.

Resident Mere Taufa told New Zealand website Stuff she and her family were preparing for dinner when they heard and felt the eruption. “It was massive. The ground shook, our house was shaking. It came in waves. My younger brother thought bombs were exploding nearby,” she said.

Witnesses described as many as 10 explosions, one after the other, with volcanic ash everywhere, and black smoke in the sky. Stuff reported people were “terrified” throughout the night, with no idea of what was happening, if the volcano would erupt again or if they faced more tsunamis.

On Sunday, ash was still falling with a huge blanket over the main island of Tongatapu. On the foreshore north of Nuku’alofa boats and large boulders were washed ashore. Besides flooding and extensive damage to property, contamination to the water catchments is a major issue. It could take weeks to fully restore phone and internet connections after a subsea communications cable to Fiji was cut.

There are growing concerns for at least 8,000 people in the Ha’apai group of islands nearest the volcano. The New Zealand Herald reported this morning that Rev ‘Ulufonua, a religious leader on Ha’apai, said there were no known casualties, but not all islands had been heard from.

The volcano has been active for most of the past week after a new volcanic vent began erupting in December. Earth imaging company Planet Labs PBC said satellite images showed the volcanic activity had re-shaped the area over the past month, with ash creating a growing island at the site of the volcano.

Authorities at home and abroad have done little to prepare the population for an emergency. According to the Matangi Tonga news site, early on Friday scientists had observed massive explosions, thunder and lightning near the volcano after it started erupting. Satellite images showed a 5km-wide plume rising into the air to about 20km.

The volcano erupted without warning on Saturday, after which tsunami evacuation sirens reportedly went off in Tongatapu. It is not clear how much time people had to move away from the beaches.

The Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai volcano is a massive caldera—a large depression formed when a volcano erupts and collapses. It is part of the string of volcanoes making up the Tonga Arc, formed by the Pacific tectonic plate subducting beneath the Indo-Australian tectonic plate.

The volcano has erupted regularly over the past few decades. In 2014-2015, a series of eruptions in the area created a small new island and disrupted international air travel for several days. According to Marco Brenna, a geologist at the University of Otago, it was not being actively monitored, either due to a lack of funding and resources in Tonga, or because earlier volcanic eruptions were relatively minor and it was not considered a priority.

The event impacted countries throughout the Pacific region. Authorities in nearby Fiji, Samoa and American Samoa issued warnings, and entire villages in parts of Fiji were flooded. In New Zealand, 120 people were evacuated in the country’s far north due to the tsunami threat coinciding with high seas from tropical cyclone Cody.

Tsunami waves more than 1 metre high flooded parts of Nuku'alofa, the Tongan capital. (Credit: Twitter user @sakakimoana)

Omicron’s surge through rural America will take a terrible toll

Benjamin Mateus

The Omicron surge continues to pummel health care systems throughout the country. COVID-19-related US adult hospitalizations are nearing 22,000 daily admissions. The total number of COVID-19 patients admitted to health care centers across the US is now almost 158,500, the highest recorded during the pandemic. Pediatric COVID-19 daily admissions have also skyrocketed to over 1,000 per day.

Registered nurse Estella Wilmarth tends to a patient in the acute care unit of Harborview Medical Center, Friday, Jan. 14, 2022, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

This trend is expected to continue for the next few weeks as Omicron spreads out of the Northeast and deeper into the Midwest and Southern states, especially in rural regions where vaccine acceptance is much lower, and health care systems are threadbare. Yet, the Biden administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are sitting on their hands and allowing the pandemic to wash over every region across America.

Last week, when metropolitan counties saw infections jump 250 percent from mid-December figures, rural counties were just beginning their experience with Omicron. Now, however, explosive infection rates are occurring everywhere. And rural regions have had an ever higher per capita death rate than metropolitan areas during the pandemic.

What drives these differences is not simply vaccination rates as in January 2021, before mass vaccination showed similar trends as did the summer surge with Delta. Poverty and lack of access to adequate medical treatment facilities, in addition to chronic disabilities, make more people in rural areas vulnerable to sickness and death once the pandemic reaches them.

After two years of repeated waves of sick and dying patients, health care workers are reaching a boiling point, asking how much longer this can continue.

Figure 1 US Map COVID-19 hotspots. Source New York Times

Jenn Landerver is an Arizona nurse who runs the Arizona Nurses COVID-19 page. In response to a query about working with COVID-19, she replied, “Imagine being a patient. Not only are you compromised, but you are also fragile. You are at the mercy of the health care system. Your medical team is already overworked, overwhelmed, underpaid, under-appreciated, and just plain burnt out. And now they are expected to come to work sick … to compromise their health, co-workers, and medically fragile patients. Hospitals always felt like a safe space for patients to get help, and those days are gone.”

An Ohio physician, who asked to remain anonymous, told this reporter about her health care system’s recent town hall. “I want to go punch a wall. There was not a single mention about airborne transmission. They are sending people back to work in five days wearing baggy blues, not N95s. I asked questions in the question-and-answer session, but they weren’t addressed and were hidden from other participants. Authoritarianism prevails! Even the hospital’s infection prevention refused to respond to my emails.”

RN Mihaela Murphy explained, “I have done everything I could this pandemic to avoid the virus. I stayed away, didn’t travel, barely saw my parents. I’m back to 14 days working straight. If the governor wants to keep this level of community transmission going by being silent, he can come and work in health care. Patients don’t deserve a sick, tired, weak nurse to come take care of them.”

Many are reporting having to work back-to-back 12-hour shifts without notice. There is hostility directed against health care workers by management if they dare to push back. Others are reaching their rope’s end and looking to quit and change professions. However, many of the posts on social media are from traveling nurse recruiters dangling higher pay and benefits to nurses.

The shortages in hospital staff are growing more dire in the South in conjunction with the rising number of COVID-19 cases. In Mississippi, cases have risen 20-fold since mid-December, reporting 9,300 new COVID-19 infections. Meanwhile, the state is reporting that the hospital capacity is reaching its limits, with the number of patients at 1,330, nearly four times the number of patients from several weeks ago.

Figure 2 Weekly Rate of Deaths per 100,000 Metro vs Rural

The state has also reported being short 3,000 nurses. About a third of the state’s hospital nurses have left for other positions. Dr. Alan Jones, chancellor of clinical affairs at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, said, “The game has changed since the Delta wave. The challenges we are facing are really around staffing. Compounding that is this is a much more infectious variant, taking more staff than we have in the workforce.” Mississippi also has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country at 49 percent.

Tennessee also reported a pandemic high in daily cases with more than 20,000 COVID-19 infections. The positivity rate in the state has reached 40 percent, and nursing homes in the state are now being infected at 10 times the rate of a month ago. The CDC reported that by January 9, the state reported 500 new infections among residents and about 1,000 new infections among the staff. More than 200 facilities across the state are reporting outbreaks.

Dr. John Dunn, a state epidemiologist, speaking with the Tennessean, explained, “Our elderly populations, including those in long-term care facilities, are still our most medically fragile folks, not only with COVID and with Omicron but with other diseases that could circulate. We are going to continue to take precautions among this group because the outcomes will be worse.”

Perhaps these were the patients that CDC Director Rochelle Walensky was referencing when she celebrated the fact that most people who succumb to COVID-19 have a significant number of comorbidities.

As cases in the state continue their rise, more and more health care workers are falling ill, leaving the health systems in extremis. Dr. Todd Rice, associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told the local media, “We have tons of employees that have Omicron COVID. They may not be that sick, but they are infected. So, they are quarantined at home and not eligible to work. One of our biggest problems is just finding employees to take care of patients because we have so many employees that are out sick.”

These scenarios were echoed in states like Louisiana and Alabama. Yet, at no point have health officials or state political leaders demanded or called for implementing restrictions or lockdowns to stem the tsunami of infections that is bringing their health care systems to the brink.

Much has been made by the Biden administration about the supposed mildness of Omicron. Yet, three US cities—New York, Boston and Chicago—after the surge in cases saw, according to the New York Times, “deaths [follow] cases at a slightly reduced scale than in previous peaks, [but] the number of COVID-19 patients who [needed] intensive care or mechanical ventilation approach levels not seen since last winter.” This has dire implications for the rest of the country as it faces the brunt of the Omicron wave.

Many Midwest state health care systems are turning internationally to recruit nurses from the Philippines, Nigeria, India and Brazil. This will have significant repercussions for health care systems across the globe.

Sanford Health, which serves parts of the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa, has seen 34,000 employees out sick with COVID-19. Additionally, many nurses have left the region, making recruiting local nurses more difficult.

Figure 3 New York City, Boston, Chicago COVID infections and Deaths. Source New York Times

On the current trajectory, there is no indication that COVID-19 will ever become “endemic,” in the sense of a manageable perennial infection, given the development of new variants and the short-lived character of immunity. “Living with COVID-19” implies repeated outbreaks of powerful, fast-moving epidemics and inundated health care systems.

Micah Pollak, associate professor of economics at Indiana University Northwest, noted, “We really don’t know what the tail of this thing looks like. … People say that we’re on the verge of the health care system collapsing and things like that, and I think we’re probably past that point.”

He added, “We’re going to come out of this with a health care system just incredibly diminished because of what it’s gone through. We have some very serious long-term consequences for our health care system that, if we don’t address them, you’re going to see more sickness, more preventable illnesses, whether it’s Covid or otherwise, showing up in the population that we just can’t deal with.”

UK income inequality worsens during pandemic

Simon Whelan

Median pay for FTSE 100 company chief executive officers (CEOs) was an enormous 86 times the median annual wage for a full-time UK worker in 2020.

But spare a thought for the suffering inflicted on CEOs during the first year of the pandemic, when forced to partially withdraw their snouts from the trough. According to research published by thinktank the High Pay Centre (HPC), CEO pay is down from the previous two years, when they earned almost 120 times the median wage. This scandal means that 2022 will be the first year in a decade when chief executives needed to work into the fourth day of the new year to earn the average yearly pay of a worker.

A health worker protests over pay in Bournemouth as part of protests around the UK in August 2020. The placard reads "We are not angels or heroes: We are professionals that deserve a professional pay" (WSWS media)

The Financial Times (FT) explained how the gap between chief executives’ pay and UK average earnings narrowed during 2020, as corporations canceled bonuses and imposed temporary pay freezes after the initial COVID-19 lockdowns. This meant average CEO remuneration fell from £3.25 million in 2019 to £2.7 million in 2020.

The fall drew obsessive media interest. However, further up the food chain, the super-rich for whom CEOs work are benefiting from falling workers’ wages, soaring property values, rising share prices and, above all, government largesse. The UK’s billionaires saw their wealth increase by 21.7 percent over the year, an overall rise of £106.5 billion.

Meanwhile, UK average earnings for full-time work fell between 2019 and 2021 and soaring inflation and utility prices are reducing wages and living standards further. The runaway cost of living means millions face crippling price rises driven by large increases in energy bills.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) calculated that some 10 million people were affected by price hikes that were not matched by fixed rate welfare benefits. British welfare payments and the state pension are inflation linked, but rates for this year were set before prices started to take off and will rise by only 3.1 percent in April, approximately half the forecast cost-of-living increase.

Households with typical energy usage also face a £600-700 rise in annual energy bills, bringing the total to approaching £2,000. The rise in the UK state pension in April amounts to an annual increase of less than £300.

The University of Bristol’s Coronavirus Financial Impact Tracker Survey for December reported that, between March 2020 and October 2021, “for every household that saw their financial situation get a little or a lot better (21% of all UK households), two households saw their financial situation get a little or a lot worse (38%).”

The FT notes how public attitudes are hardening against inequality. Research conducted by the HPC together with polling company Survation found that a majority of people believed high earnings were the result of educational and social privilege, not a reflection of harder or more valuable work.

“Some of the lowest-paying jobs have played the most important role to keep society functioning through the pandemic. With the value of the UK economy reduced, there’s also greater pressure to share what we do have more evenly,” said HPC director Luke Hildyard. “In this context, vast CEO to worker pay differences may be harder to justify.”

The crucial role played by millions of key workers during the pandemic has progressively altered public consciousness. By keeping society functioning, the workers are confirmed as being irreplaceable, as opposed to the entrepreneurial so-called “risk takers” and managerial elite. The staggering numbers of workers who contracted COVID-19 and died has aroused enormous sympathy. When the public turned out to applaud the Herculean efforts of the NHS workers, nobody was clapping the efforts of the bankers or corporate chief executives.

The narrowing of the gap between CEOs’ and workers’ incomes is only temporary. The HPC said “Most FTSE 100 firms have not yet announced CEO pay for their financial year ending in 2021, but 57% of those that have recorded an increase on 2020 levels.”

Differences in income, as large as they are, are dwarfed by wealth inequality. Recently released Office for National Statistics (ONS) data for 2018-2020 show the wealthiest 10 percent of British households, comprising the upper middle classes and super-rich, now own 43 percent of total wealth. The bottom half of the British population held a meager 9 percent. The wealth of the richest top 1 percent of households was on average more than £3.6 million, 230 times higher than the £15,400 or less for the poorest 10 percent.

Arun Advani, assistant professor at the University of Warwick, described the figures as “striking findings”, but added that the wealth gap was most likely a considerable under estimation because “the wealthiest are less likely to respond to the survey”. In addition, wealth derived from the ownership of business enterprises is not included.

Both the FT and the Guardian reported Executive Director at Tax Justice UK Robert Palmer explaining that even prior to the pandemic “it was clear that wealth inequality was entrenched”. Krishan Shah, a researcher at the Resolution Foundation noted how “with limited financial resources to protect them from economic shocks, the poorest households were undoubtedly in the worst position heading into the pandemic”.

The latest ONS figures on wealth inequality are the most comprehensive data on wealth distribution available. However, ONS data released last month shows that total UK wealth increased even further during the ongoing pandemic.

Total UK household wealth rose to a record high, as the property prices, savings and share values of the super-rich continued to climb despite the economy contracting. According to the ONS household net worth grew 8.4 percent to £11.2 trillion in 2020, achieving its highest level since records began in 1995. Compared with 3.3 percent growth in 2019, and double the average pace over the previous decade, it is clear the super-rich have had a good time during the pandemic.

Such spectacular wealth expansion, concentrated in the richest few percent, occurred as the UK economy experienced its largest contraction in more than 300 years and as waves of death and disease were caused by the government’s herd immunity policy.

Resolution Foundation economist Jack Leslie said the ONS figures illustrate how the COVID-19 crisis had “bucked” the pattern of previous crises because asset prices, like pensions and property, rose despite the shrinking economy. The increase in household wealth thus far during the pandemic compares to a 10 percent contraction in 2008 during the global economic financial crisis.

The largest contribution to household wealth came from a 7.3 percent increase in average house prices, followed by the rising value in insurance and pensions, and bank deposits. The rise in household assets amongst the top 10 percent is one expression of how their incomes have been shielded from the effect of the economic shutdowns, benefitting from generous government funding including job support furlough schemes.

Leslie warned that the greater prosperity was not shared equitably across society, and “wealth gaps that existed pre-pandemic are likely to have been exacerbated by the crisis”. “Unless addressed,” he stressed, “these wealth gaps will have profound consequences for social mobility and future income inequality,”.

Right now, the pandemic and the explosion in social inequality is already having an impact on the social consciousness of millions of workers as the unbridgeable chasm between the two main classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, becomes clear.

Thousands of airline workers out due to COVID-19 infections in the US

Claude Delphian

Three thousand workers at United Airlines, over 4 percent of its workforce, have recently tested positive for COVID-19. In recent weeks, the airline has canceled about 8 percent of its flights, or about 29,000 flights. Over the holidays, almost a third of United Airlines workers called in sick at the Newark Liberty International Airport, which is a major United hub.

The whole aviation industry is facing similar issues. Alaska Airlines has also cut about 10 percent of its January flight schedule because of an “unprecedented” number of workers who called in sick due to the Omicron variant surge of COVID-19. The airline was physically incapable of running its operations at full capacity safely with the remaining staff.

A Delta Airlines pilot walks through a terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

Airlines around the world canceled over 6,000 flights on Christmas Eve, Christmas and the day after Christmas. In the United States, over 2,800 flights were canceled during the holiday weekend as pilots, flight attendants and other airlines workers called in sick.

The airlines have had to become more flexible for travelers who might have their travel plans canceled or changed due to the pandemic. The Alaska Air Group Inc. stated, “Right now, we need to build more reliability back into our operation as we deal with the impacts of omicron and during a time when guests generally fly less. [The cancellations] will give us the flexibility and capacity needed to reset while continued flexible travel policies enable guests to adjust their plans accordingly.”

Winter weather also played a factor in airline cancellations, with Alaska cutting 120 flights on January 6, about 16 percent of its total scheduled flights, according to FlightAware.com. The United States saw 1,980 flights canceled for the whole industry on January 6 due to the combined causes of employee illness and severe winter weather. During the holidays, Alaska Airlines canceled almost 15 percent and delayed 38 percent of its scheduled flights between December 24 and January 5.

Airlines in the United States, including Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines, are attempting to get workers back on the job in spite of the risk of infection, using financial incentives to encourage workers to take on extra shifts in order to cover for quarantined workers.

United has recently required its workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19. United Airlines Chief Executive Scott Kirby said that prior to the company’s vaccination requirement, “tragically, more than one United employee on average per week was dying from COVID.” Kirby said that since the vaccination requirement was enacted, “the hospitalization rate among our employees has been 100 times lower than the general population in the U.S.”

In December, Kirby had to defend the airline’s vaccine decision against criticism from the Republican Party. “We did this for safety, we don’t compromise on safety,” Kirby said at the U.S. Senate hearing. Kirby said, “While we have about 3,000 employees who are currently positive for COVID, zero of our vaccinated employees are currently hospitalized.”

Little is being done for airline workers aside from vaccine requirements. Vaccination is an important tool against COVID-19, but vaccines alone cannot prevent the spread of the virus, especially as new variants such as Omicron develop the ability to evade immunity. It is also not a complete guarantee against serious health outcomes from infections such as COVID-19. If safety truly is the primary factor in airline decision making, all but the most necessary flights would be grounded until the pandemic is over and COVID-19 is eliminated from the human population.

Underscoring this lack of focus on safety, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cut the recommended quarantine period from 10 days to five after Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian asked the CDC on December 21 to reduce the quarantine requirements because they might “significantly impact our workforce and operations.” JetBlue Airways CEO Robin Hayes joined in this request the following Wednesday with the support of other airlines. Prior to this, the CDC had already bowed to business interests and arbitrarily shortened the recommended 14 days of isolation to 10.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky openly admitted the economic motivations behind the agency’s decision by saying, “We want to make sure there is a mechanism by which we can safely continue to keep society functioning while following the science.” “Keeping society functioning” is a euphemism for keeping the economy open and producing profits for Wall Street.

The US airline industry has received $63 billion in federal stimulus money under the Payroll Support Program (PSP) and other programs since the beginning of the pandemic. In March 2020, $25 billion came through the CARES Act, $15 billion through the December 2020 relief bill and $14 billion through the 2021 American Rescue Plan. An additional $5 billion was given to food service, maintenance and janitorial contractors. The PSP was part of Congress’s massive financial support to Wall Street and corporations packaged as part of the CARES Act and was officially intended to help corporations keep their workers employed.

In spite of this, airlines forced over 80,000 workers to take “voluntary” buyouts and early retirements. As of November, the airlines have 24,000 fewer workers than they did in 2019. For their part, the airline unions have blocked any attempt to shut down the industry in order to save the lives of their own members.

The Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) President Captain Joseph G. DePete released a statement on December 14, saying, “Over the past 20 months, the bipartisan Payroll Support Program (PSP) has averted disaster for the airline industry and its workers. Because of the $63 billion in federal relief as well as aviation workers who volunteered to retire early, our industry was ready for Thanksgiving, with many carriers marking their best on-time performance since 2017.” The only mention of the pandemic in this statement at all was to claim that “thanks to a historic government-labor-airlines partnership, forged during an unprecedented global pandemic, airline pilots are more than ready to safely get passengers to their destinations this holiday season.”

Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA and a leading member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), praised the CDC for recommendations that “recognize concerns raised by our union,” by adding the toothless caveat quarantine can be limited to five days “only if asymptomatic and with continued mask wearing for an additional five days.”

In fact, aviation workers have increasingly been forced to work when they should be in quarantine. Workers whose significant others have tested positive have been ordered to report to work despite the danger of infection. The five-day quarantine period, enacted for business reasons rather than for public health reasons, has made every workplace in the US an unsafe work environment.

A Southwest Airlines flight attendant told the World Socialist Web Site that she was told to report to work during the holidays even after being infected with COVID-19. She said, “I worked on December 21 and the 22, which I believe is when I was exposed because there were several passengers not wearing their masks correctly. All we are supposed to do now is make one announcement [about wearing masks] and that is it.”

Over the weekend, 157,272 people were in hospitals in the United States, with 25,173 in intensive care units. The daily average in hospital admissions is at 148,782, which is an 80 percent increase from just two weeks ago.

Australian childcare centres hit by COVID outbreaks

Erika Zimmer

Hundreds of childcare centres across Australia have been forced to close in recent weeks due to COVID-19 outbreaks.

In the first week of January, 303 childcare centres were listed as closed in New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, 30 in Victoria, 29 in South Australia, 22 in Queensland, three in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and one in the Northern Territory. The closures occurred despite a lot of centres having shut down for the summer break. After many reopened last week, closures increased further, with a total of 490 registered as closed yesterday. The tally is almost certain to increase in the next period, as numbers of working parents return from leave and resume placing their children in care.

A childcare center (Argonne Child Development Center/Flickr)

Childcare workers are among those confronting the highest risk of infection in their workplace. Caring for the youngest children, unmasked as well as unvaccinated, cannot occur while maintaining any kind of social distancing, while attending to various hygiene issues further heightens the risk of infection.

The exposure to COVID of thousands of young children and babies, all of whom are unvaccinated, represents another indictment of the bipartisan “let it rip” policy being implemented by every state and federal government.

The disaster in childcare provides a foretaste of what will happen within the schools, if they are permitted to reopen as scheduled in late January and early February.

“Early Learning and Care was experiencing a workforce shortage before the COVID-19 pandemic” Elizabeth Death, the chief executive of the Early Learning and Care Council of Australia, explained. “We are now in a workforce shortage crisis.”

In the early 1990s, the then federal Labor government encouraged private operators into the early learning and childcare sector, which had previously been predominantly publicly operated. Childcare provision has since functioned as a cash cow for business thanks to generous government subsidies.

Australian families are among the highest users of childcare among OECD countries. Almost 40 percent of households spend more than they can afford, according to international benchmarks that outline no more than 7 percent of disposable household income ought to be allocated.

According to a Mitchell Institute report last year, “Counting the cost to families: assessing childcare affordability in Australia,” 83 percent of families using childcare spend more on it than they do on utilities. Altogether, nearly 40 percent of families spent more than 7 percent of their household income on childcare making it unaffordable for almost 400,000 Australians.

While childcare workers are paid poverty level wages, CEOs in the sector are handed exorbitant salaries. At the same time, babies, toddlers and young children are put at risk, with government regulations widely disregarded.

A recent study found that three-quarters of the 12,000 enforcement actions taken since 2015 were against for-profit providers.

At the same time, cost-cutting and unsustainable workloads have led to high staff turnover and staff shortages. A survey undertaken by the United Workers Union (UWU) reported that between 35-48 percent of educators leave the sector each year, double the average national workforce turnover. Two-thirds of survey respondents said their centre was understaffed, with 60 percent saying they had often come to work or stayed on the job while sick due to staff shortages. Some 71 percent of centre directors report a significant increase in staff leaving the sector since the COVID-19 pandemic.

A quarter of staff said they spent 5-10 unpaid hours per month completing their programming, with another 5-10 unpaid hours worked each month setting up rooms and cleaning. Staff are regularly “invited” to “working-bees” on the weekends to try to catch up with cleaning and jobs they haven’t completed during the week.

A worker responding to the union’s survey commented, “It’s become worse in the last couple of years. We still provide care for the same number of children, but without enough staff. It’s happening every day and it’s dangerous for children and staff. Staff routinely go home crying and then have to come to work the next day even though they are well-beyond exhausted or physically unwell, for fear of making the next day worse for the rest of their colleagues, children and families.”

The disastrous state of the sector is the result of bipartisan policies implemented by Labor and Liberal governments alike. The UWU, like its predecessors, United Voice and the Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union, has refused to mobilise educators against these attacks, instead functioning as the enforcer of each new government measure. The union upholds Fair Work industrial laws, introduced by the last Labor government, which ban virtually all industrial action.

The UWU, like every other union, is playing a critical role in allowing the Morrison federal government to keep childcare centres open as an essential component of the overall drive to force people back on the job amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

With callous indifference to the health and lives of workers, Australia’s “national cabinet” last week responded to the mass closure of childcare centres by adding staff in the sector to its list of those who can be forced to remain working even if they are close contacts of a COVID infection. A close contact is now defined as someone living with an individual who has tested positive to the coronavirus, meaning childcare workers who are likely themselves infected will be compelled to go to work.

Australian COVID-19 deaths continue to climb as governments claim Omicron is about to “peak”

Martin Scott

As Australia’s state and federal governments continue to repeat the baseless assertion that COVID-19 infections will soon “peak,” New South Wales (NSW) Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant today warned that deaths are expected to climb in the coming days.

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt claimed yesterday there were “signs that NSW in particular and the ACT may be peaking.” NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet described yesterday’s official figures—34,399 new infections, 2,650 people current hospital admissions and 20 deaths—as “incredibly encouraging and pleasing.”

Staff prepare to collect samples at a drive-through COVID-19 testing clinic at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, Saturday, Jan. 8, 2022. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

The reality is, the woeful state of COVID-19 testing in Australia, along with the redefinition of “close contacts” to include only household transmission, render any scientific assessment of infection numbers impossible.

The claim that the current wave of COVID-19 has “peaked”, or soon will, is instead part of a barrage of propaganda aimed at forcing people back to work and school.

Australia’s trade unions are actively participating in this drive. Having covered up the rampant infection throughout workplaces, these thoroughly corporatised bureaucracies have, in recent days, been forced to react to mounting anger among workers and issue mealy-mouthed demands for N95 masks and rapid antigen tests.

These measures would do little to protect the health and lives of workers and are instead aimed at allowing business to continue operating, even as illness decimates the workforce. The primary concern of the unions, together with the governments, is to keep a lid on mounting opposition to the dangerous pandemic policies.

More than 73,500 new COVID-19 infections were reported across Australia today, a vast underestimate of the real figure. The number of people hospitalised for COVID-19 passed 5,000 nationally for the first time in the pandemic, while 410 people are in intensive care, 121 of them on ventilators. Thirty-one COVID-19 deaths were reported today, including seven in Queensland, six in Victoria and one in the Australian Capital Territory.

Today, NSW reported 17 deaths from COVID-19, of people aged between 60 and 100. Fourteen of the victims were fully vaccinated, while one had received only one dose and two were unvaccinated.

In the past week, 140 people have died from COVID in NSW. Ninety-eight were fully vaccinated, two had received only one dose and 40 were unvaccinated. Twenty-five of those who died were aged under 70.

While other states do not regularly report this information, the Victorian Labor government’s acting Health Minister James Merlino stated on Friday that around 40 percent of people who had died of COVID-19 in the state “recently” were fully vaccinated.

Both states have reported that around half of COVID-19 intensive care unit (ICU) admissions are fully vaccinated patients.

These figures make clear that, while vaccination against COVID-19 is critical, inoculation alone cannot stop the deadly virus. The “let it rip” policies of almost every Australian state, territory or federal government, Labor and Liberal-National alike, under which virtually all public health measures were abandoned based on arbitrary vaccination targets, have caused infections to surge out of control and have already resulted in hundreds of preventable deaths.

Western Australia, the only state or territory that has not yet acceded to the demands of big business and thrown open its borders, stands as a clear refutation of the claims, advanced by every other government, that the wave of infection was inevitable. Since December 1, the state has recorded just 176 cases. There has not been a death in Western Australia from COVID-19 since May 2020. Its Labor government, however, is preparing to open the borders in line with the Labor Party’s full support for the “live with the virus” program.

Australia’s deadliest seven-day period since the start of the pandemic—301 COVID-19 deaths were recorded in the country in the week ending yesterday—has done nothing to diminish the insistence from the political establishment that the population must continue to “ride the wave.”

Merlino declared, “We are one of the most vaccinated jurisdictions in the world, and that means we can stay open.”

Speaking at a press conference yesterday, Chant matter-of-factly stated: “As we go through 2022, we will see and report people who have died, particularly people who are older and particularly people with underlying health conditions.”

Perpetuating the unscientific claim that Omicron is “mild,” Chant claimed: “People with underlying health conditions only need to have a very mild illness to sometimes have them decompensate. They’re very vulnerable because they’re just on that edge.”

In other words, Chant and the NSW political establishment have decided that the preventable deaths of hundreds of people is acceptable, simply because they are older or have underlying health conditions.

Chant also revealed last week that 67 percent of NSW’s ICU patients had Omicron, making clear that the variant is far from “mild.” The corollary is that the remaining one third are the Delta variant, which is clearly still circulating and has not been eliminated by the new variant as was suggested would happen when governments allowed Omicron to run rampant.

The Murdoch press has enthusiastically taken up the campaign to falsely characterise COVID-19 as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Zeroing in on a single small regional hospital in Lismore, Northern NSW, an article published in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph reported that all six of the hospital’s ICU patients were unvaccinated.

The article went on to state that only 106 of the 1,248 COVID-19 patients admitted to ICU in NSW between June and December last year were fully vaccinated. No mention was made of the fact that, for much of that period, vaccines were not available to the majority of Australians. At the beginning of June 2021, just 2.3 percent of the country’s population had received two doses of the vaccine. Except in certain “hotspot” areas, those aged 16-39 were not eligible to receive their first dose until the beginning of September.

While this was put forward to suggest that vaccination is a panacea and those who suffer severe symptoms have only themselves to blame, it stands as an indictment of Australia’s shambolic vaccine rollout.

The article estimated that the state had spent $4.9 million per day on ICU care for unvaccinated patients compared to $463,000 per day for vaccinated patients. The clear insinuation is that the small minority of Australian adults who are not vaccinated are a burden on society and should be refused the basic human right of free medical care.

The fact that the vast majority of Australian adults are fully vaccinated (two doses) and are now desperately seeking out booster shots for themselves, and vaccines for their 5-11 year-old children, is a reflection of just how seriously the masses of working people take the pandemic.

On November 27, Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly said that mass infection with the supposedly “mild” Omicron variant would be his “number one Christmas present.”

NSW Liberal-National Health Minister Brad Hazzard stated in December “pretty well everybody” will get Omicron, while John Gerrard, chief health officer for the Queensland Labor government, said earlier this month, “all of us are going to be exposed.”

Australia’s Labor and Liberal-National governments have not merely accepted and promoted this fatalistic position, they are actively ensuring that it takes place. As cases have surged, public health measures have been discarded, borders opened and testing sharply reduced. In line with the demands of big business, governments have used the supply chain crisis created by widespread infection as justification to force possibly infected workers back on the job.

The claims that the current surge has peaked, or will soon peak, are just the latest stage in this propaganda campaign aimed at clearing the way for new policies that will lead to an even greater surge.

Despite the conscious efforts of governments, health authorities and the corporate media to downplay the severity of COVID-19, there is growing opposition to criminal “let it rip” policies and the forced return to work and school.

In one example, a recent survey of 3,043 families by advocacy group The Parenthood found that just one-fifth of respondents believed it was safe for school to return in Term 1, scheduled for the end of this month and the beginning of next.

15 Jan 2022

Commonwealth Split-site PhD Scholarship 2022

Application Deadline: 17th February 2022 by 17:00 (GMT)

Eligible Countries: Developing Commonwealth Countries

To be taken at (country): UK Universities

Eligible Field of Study: All subject areas are eligible, although the CSC’s selection criteria give priority to applications that demonstrate the strongest relevance to development.

About Scholarship: Commonwealth Split-site Scholarships support one year’s study at a UK university as part of a PhD being undertaken in a candidate’s home country, under the joint supervision of a home country and UK supervisor.

The 12-month period of study in the UK supported by the scholarship can be taken at any stage during your PhD study, providing this is justified in your study plan. It can be divided into two or more periods, with no more than 12 months elapsing between each award term. If you have not already started your PhD at the time of your application, you will be eligible to spend a maximum of six months in the UK in your first year of study.

These scholarships are for:

12 months study at a UK university as part of an applicant’s doctoral studies in their home country, starting in Jan 2022
Applicants who are registered (or will be registered by September 2021) for a PhD at a university in an eligible Commonwealth country
Study at a UK university with which your home university has an established institutional or departmental link
Study at a UK university which has a part funding agreement with the CSC. View a full list of UK universities with part funding agreements

Offered Since: 1959

Type: PhD study

Selection Criteria: Applications for Commonwealth Split-site will be considered according to the following selection criteria:

Academic merit of the candidate
Quality of the research proposal
Potential impact on the development of the candidate’s home country

Eligibility:

Be a citizen of or have been granted refugee status by an eligible Commonwealth country, or be a British Protected Person
Be permanently resident in an eligible Commonwealth country
Be registered for a PhD at a university in an eligible Commonwealth country by the time your scholarship is confirmed (September 2021)
Ensure that an institutional or departmental link exists between your home university and your proposed UK university. This link must be greater than simply a collaboration between individuals – see section on ‘Tenure and placement’ for further details. Both supervisors must provide a supporting statement which provides further details of the link to ensure your application is eligible.
Be available to start your academic studies in the UK by January 2022
By December 2021, hold a first degree of at least upper second class (2:1) honours standard, or a second-class degree and a relevant postgraduate qualification (usually a Master’s degree)
Be unable to afford to study in the UK without this scholarship

The CSC aims to identify talented individuals who have the potential to make change. We are committed to a policy of equal opportunity and non-discrimination and encourage applications from a diverse range of candidates. For further information on the support available to fellows with a disability, see the CSC disability support statement.

Number of Scholarships: Several

Value of Commonwealth Split-site Scholarship: Each fellowship provides:

Approved airfare from your home country to the UK and return at the end of your award (the CSC will not reimburse the cost of fares for dependants, nor the cost of journeys made before your award is confirmed)
Approved tuition fees
Stipend (living allowance) at the rate of £1,116 per month, or £1,369 per month for those at universities in the London metropolitan area (rates quoted at 2020-2021 levels)
Warm clothing allowance, where applicable
Study travel grant towards the cost of study-related travel within the UK or overseas
If you are widowed, divorced, or a single parent, child allowance of £478 per month for the first child, and £118 per month for the second and third child under the age of 16, if you are accompanied by your children and they are living with you at the same address in the UK

The CSC’s family allowances are intended to be only a contribution towards the cost of maintaining your family in the UK. The true costs are likely to be considerably higher, and you must be able to supplement these allowances to support any family members who come to the UK with you.

Duration of Scholarship: One year

How to Apply for Commonwealth Split-site Scholarship: Visit the CSC’s online application form to complete and submit your application.

It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Programme Webpage for details