Novel Pandemonium

Nijam Gara

COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease) is novel in many ways. It has affected 155 countries till date with ever-changing case numbers (283,00 worldwide) and mortality rate pegged at 1 percent with inter-country variations. This rapid rate of spread occurred in barely 3-4 months with first case suspected to have reported in China in November 2019. The world has witnessed the extraordinary containment efforts taken up by China when the initial outbreak was limited to a geographically specified area – Wuhan city in Hubei province.

Transmission of COVID-19 is similar to the seasonal influenza virus that spreads via respiratory droplets. Thus, over time, it is bound to infect millions as being predicted by public health experts. As such predictions emerged, politicians in USA, Europe and India started adopting unprecedented measures to contain the outbreak. Some of these efforts are certainly laudable. In times such as these, a critical evaluation and assessment of such measures is lacking in the name of urgency to act. However, what if some measures hurt more than help? It is paramount to ‘do no harm’, the basic principle of medical practice.

First, it is high time to examine the efficacy of the much-touted concept of social distancing. It certainly makes sense and the oft repeated term of ‘flattening the curve’ of new cases seems to be logical as well. But, in their urge to act, have the politicians and experts ignored the fact that a disease does not exist in its own independent sphere but it has to be considered in a socio-economic context? Take, for example, in a country like India that has 1.38 billion people with an estimated 800 million people that are considered poor. Typically, that would mean multiple people living in a single room in crammed spaces and more importantly millions that live on the streets. What kind of ‘social distancing’ can these bottom two-thirds (or more) of the population practice? From a livelihood perspective, almost all poor households eke out a living dependent on their interactions with the society around them. For example, a street vendor’s lifeline is the presence of a lively street, a maid cannot practice isolation for weeks which would not only impact the maid but also the conveniently situated master in the house. Countless young kids are dependent on the school meal programs and they go hungry when the school is closed. Thus, it is not only impractical but also downright haughty to prescribe social distancing to a country with vast income inequalities where people are left to fend for themselves. While the United States is certainly considered rich, each and every city is a testament to vast social disparities. The rich and desirable neighborhoods could be the best in the world but they coexist in a city with rampant homelessness (for example, Los Angeles, Washington DC and New York, to name a few). The tales on the homeless side of the town would appear to be as sordid as from a third world country. Every night, about half a million people sleep on the streets in one of the world’s richest countries. Do the leaders that promulgated ‘stay at home’ ordinances have a plan for these hapless individuals? Can’t a virus that spreads by droplet transmission infect these individuals and thereby contribute to more cases in the society as a whole? In a country that lives and thrives on capitalism, a blanket shutdown of tourism, aviation and restaurant industries would only mean livelihood loss for millions. Is there an estimate of what that translates in to in terms of jobs lost that would only eventually mean lives lost? Is it all going to be worth the COVID-19 cases prevented by social distancing? There is certainly economic stimulus planned by the US Federal government that is being talked about. However, it would only go so far as witnessed in the 2008-09 economic crisis. There are millions that do not fall in the ‘stimulus’ umbrella. There are countless people that are undocumented but still form the basis of the working-class economy that would not qualify for such a stimulus. They, in turn, would affect the lives of others that live around them. These should have been the considerations before taking the extreme step of bringing the economy to a grinding halt. Now, it’s already too late. Also, of note, China was able to provide basic supplies to all its citizens affected by the lockdown. The government even transported medical professionals to the hospitals themselves so lockdown was universal and truly effective. Is it even remotely possible in a capitalist society such as the USA or in a broken system such as in India to do such a thing?

It is not the intention of this article to downplay the unfolding pandemic. It is important to look at what else can be done that is also extraordinary but at the same time does not hurt the working class as much. China has already shown the world the path. While the politicians in India and USA cherry picked what they can easily do in this crisis, they conveniently ignored the arduous tasks. China built a 1000-bed hospital exclusively to handle coronavirus cases in Wuhan, the epi-center of the outbreak. It is sheer grit, determination and loads of money that go in to such an exercise. The argument being made for social distancing and isolation is to reduce the number of cases that would be seriously ill and require mechanical ventilation. In such a case, what should happen on a war footing is building new hospitals and manufacturing ventilators at a break-neck speed. USA did such an exercise of mass manufacturing during the World War II years albeit on the weapons side but why can’t it be replicated now? On the contrary, if countries are shut down en masse, leave alone ventilators but even personal protective equipment (PPE) crucial for healthcare workers are in scarcity today even in USA. On the frontlines of fighting this virus, when the sickest patient gets admitted to an ICU (Intensive Care Unit) in USA (the writer is managing patients with suspected COVD-19) with a respiratory problem, confirming COVID-19 that involves a PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) test for the viral RNA (Ribonucelic acid) is taking 6 days (or more) to result as of today (varies by city and state). It can only be imagined how much longer it would take elsewhere. China, again, has led the path and is far ahead in testing for COVID-19. Yet, the world leader in Trump chose a racial epithet for the virus rather than focusing on collaborating with the Chinese in making test kits widely available.

It is also worth noting that the symptoms of COVID-19 are vague and overlap with any respiratory illness such as the garden variety cold, influenza and a host of other bacterial infections. In such scenario, responses should be measured and focused on catering to the utmost sick and needy. It is intuitive to presume that mortality rate being higher in certain countries is likely linked to late presentation to the hospitals and delays in implementing mechanical ventilation. Because, at the end of the day, COVID-19 is a respiratory illness and cause of death most often would be Respiratory failure. It circles back again to the need for more ventilators and well-equipped hospitals. Not all countries can build a 1000-bed hospital in 7 days but may be it is possible to do it in 30 days in a crisis such as this. Countries such as India and USA can aim for building at least 1 such hospital per state and divert critical cases there. Instead, what is happening today is suspension of routine medical care for other patients in existing hospitals in anticipation of a surge in COVID-19 cases.

If the crackdown-loving leaders show the same will power, they can easily obtain funds for new hospitals from their billionaire class. Cuba has also shown how to effectively train medical professionals and it is worth borrowing from them. Rather than shutting down the economy and coming up with a stimulus package, responsible leaders with conviction would focus on diverting funds towards such productive projects that will result in long-lasting infrastructure and disaster preparedness that will also benefit future generations in fighting new illnesses. COVID-19 will not be the last of these pathogens. There will be more to come as history has shown us if we look back at Small pox, Plague and H1N1 to name a few.

I ardently wish I am wrong on this but it appears that the modern-day world leaders aided and abetted by the all-assuming tech-savvy, social media-crazed global citizenry have taken this too far now and only history will tell us if the aftermath of this shutdown would take more lives than the dreaded virus itself.

Trump’s “Get back to work” demagogy aids the spread of the pandemic

Joseph Kishore

The coronavirus pandemic continues to spread throughout the world. The total death toll globally is over 22,000. On Thursday, there were more than 6,000 new cases and 712 new deaths reported in Italy; 6,600 new cases and 500 new deaths in Spain; and 6,000 new cases and 56 deaths in Germany. The virus is only beginning to spread in Indonesia, Brazil, India and other countries in Asia and Latin America.

The center of the accelerating pandemic is the United States. It has now surpassed Italy and China with the largest number of confirmed cases, at more than 85,000. The US counted 17,000 new cases yesterday, almost three times that of any other country. The death toll has surged to nearly 1,300.

Amidst this escalating crisis, the Trump administration is intensifying its efforts to promote a speedy return to work.

“We have to get back to work,” Trump declared at his Thursday press conference. “Our people want to work, they want to go back, they have to go back… This is a country that was built on getting it done, and our people want to go back to work. I am hearing it loud and clear from everybody.”

In Trump’s imaginary world, “everybody” refers, first and foremost, to himself, and then to a slew of corporate executives who want to have workers back on the job and churning out profit, regardless of the impact on the public’s health.

Trump continued, as if lost in some sort of strange reverie, “They have to go back to work. Our country has to go back. Our country is based on that. And I think it is going to happen pretty quickly…”

Earlier in the day, the administration sent a letter to state governors announcing that it will be updating its guidelines early next week on “social distancing” to press for a relaxation of measures that have shut down non-essential production in many states throughout the country.

The demands of the Trump administration contradict recommendations from all epidemiologists and health care professionals. Yonatan Grad, an assistant professor of immunology and infectious disease at Harvard University told Medscape this week that “social distancing is really the key thing that we can do right now." He continued, "A too hasty retreat from social distancing risks a threat to our health care infrastructure, which itself carries huge economic consequences.”

Larry Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, noted that it “would be utterly irresponsible to urge people to go back to work and normal social life. All the evidence suggests that if governments lift physical distancing too soon, it will cause a major resurgence of cases and deaths.”

To justify a back to work order, Trump piled one lie upon another. He claimed that “testing is going very well,” declaring that the US has tested far more people than South Korea, which the administration had previously criticized for testing too much. In fact, there have been only 500,000 tests in the United States, less than one in 650 people, a ratio far below that of South Korea. In California, a center of the outbreak, only one in 2,000 people has been tested.

Deborah Birx, head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, acknowledged at the press conference that the US is still not testing people who do not have severe symptoms, meaning the vast majority of those who have the virus are not being tested. Doctors are still reporting shortages of tests throughout the country.

Moreover, by testing aggressively, South Korea was able to control the spread of the virus at a relatively early stage. In the United States, there was virtually no testing for months, allowing the virus to spread throughout the country.

In an effort to minimize the seriousness of the pandemic, Trump declared that “the mortality rate, in my opinion is way, way down.” This is under conditions where New York City, which accounts for 30 percent of all cases in the US, is constructing makeshift morgues to deal with the spike in deaths. In New Orleans, which is now experiencing the fastest growth of new cases in the world, hospitals are running out of supplies and room. Amidst a nationwide shortage of basic equipment, hospitals are already discussing policies for determining who will live and who will die.

Then there is the lie that workers “want to go back.” In fact, production has been shut down in some industries due to wildcat strikes and sickouts of autoworkers, sanitation workers, shipbuilders, transit workers, poultry workers and Amazon workers.

In recent days, top Wall Street executives, along with the editorial page of the New York Times, affiliated with the Democratic Party, have insisted that a quick return to work is necessary, under the slogan “the cure cannot be worse than the disease.”

There is a definite class logic to these demands. On Thursday, on the same day as a report showing new unemployment claims soared to 3.3. million, nearly five times more than the previous peaks in 1982 and 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by more than 6 percent. The US financial markets are up nearly 23 percent from their lows at the beginning of the week.

In response to a question that noted the record rise in the market, Trump said on Thursday: “They think that we are doing a really good job at running this whole situation having to do with the virus. I think they feel that the administration, myself and the administration, are doing a really good job.”

The “good job” that Wall Street is celebrating is the imminent passage, on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, of the grossly misnamed “CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act.” Trump thanked Democrats and Republicans in the Senate “for unanimously passing the largest financial relief passage in American history.” Among those participating in this unanimous vote was Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said yesterday that she expects a “strong bipartisan vote” for the bill sometime today, after which it will go to the White House to be signed into law.

The most significant component of the $2 trillion bill is $425 billion from the US Treasury Department to back $4 trillion or more in asset purchases by the Federal Reserve, which is expected to more than double its current balance sheet to $10 trillion. These programs, announced over the past two weeks, include the purchase of bank assets as well as, for the first time ever, the direct buying up of corporate debt. The programs will be overseen by BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world.

In essence, Congress is giving the Federal Reserve the authority to provide unlimited sums of cash directly to the banks and giant corporations. In the final analysis, these payouts have to be paid for through the exploitation of labor and the extraction of profit. The ruling class intends to compel workers to return to work under unsafe conditions through economic blackmail and, if necessary, outright force. The police and the military stand ready to enforce labor discipline.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the deep class divisions in the United States. For the Trump administration and the ruling class, “winning the war” against the pandemic means, above all, restoring the best conditions for the intensified exploitation of the working class. But for the working class, the success of the fight to contain the spread of the coronavirus is measured in lives saved, not profits made.

This is an irreconcilable conflict. The determination of the ruling elite to deal with the pandemic without undermining the capitalist profit system leads to authoritarianism and war. The efforts of the working class to combat the pandemic lead to socialism.

East Timor records first confirmed coronavirus case amid floods

Patrick O’Connor

East Timor recorded its first confirmed COVID-19 virus case on Saturday. The south-east Asian state is among the most impoverished in the world, with only minimal healthcare facilities. If the global pandemic sweeps through the country, there could be mass casualties.

East Timor had previously been among a small group of countries without confirmed cases of coronavirus. Timor’s interim health minister, Elia dos Reis Amaral, issued a statement Saturday explaining that the patient was a foreign national who had recently arrived from overseas. The person had been isolated and reportedly has only mild symptoms.

How many others are infected is unknown. The World Health Organisation (WHO) provided East Timor with 10 testing kits, which allows only 1,000 people to be tested in a country of 1.3 million people. The tests also have to be sent to Australia in order to be “validated,” delaying the results.

Even before the confirmed case, social tensions within East Timor were high. On March 8, police fired tear gas to disperse a crowd of people in Tibar, west of the capital Dili, who were protesting against a quarantine site set up in their village for suspected coronavirus patients. One of those quarantined with coronavirus-like symptoms had reportedly recently returned from holidaying in Italy, one of the disease’s epicentres.

People washing their hands outside Lita Store

Tibar is home to a large rubbish dump. Impoverished residents rake through the daily-delivered rubbish, hoping to find metal sheeting, tin cans, clothes, or other useable items. Rubbish is burned, creating acrid smoke that has created numerous health problems in the village. One woman protesting the quarantine site declared, in a video that was widely distributed on social media, that Tibar had “become a place to put rubbish, to put [people with] HIV, tuberculosis and coronavirus.”

The Timorese government has responded to the first confirmed COVID-19 case by announcing a month-long lockdown and preparing a state of emergency. The country’s only land border, with the Indonesian province of West Timor, is closed to both goods and people. Schools have been shut down, with students told to take an “extraordinary holiday” that will last at least one week. Universities are closed until at least April 4. The Catholic Church also announced that mass services were suspended.

Prime Minister Taur Matan Ruak said his government would make a “rapid” and “emergency” response to the confirmed case. The government, however, is mired in crisis after Ruak lost his parliamentary majority and had his proposed budget voted down in January. A rival coalition of six parliamentary groupings, led by former President and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, has sought the endorsement of Fretilin President Francisco Guterres to form a new government, but the impasse continues.

Ruak’s inability to pass his budget through the parliament means that the government funding is through Timor’s “duodecimal system,” which each month allocates one-twelfth of the 2019 budget. Unless somehow circumvented, this restriction will mean the government will not be able to make large-scale investments in health and other emergency infrastructure in the event of a large-scale virus outbreak.

East Timor is among those countries with little capacity to respond to the coronavirus crisis. The former Portuguese colony was invaded by Indonesia and brutally occupied until 1999, when Australian imperialism staged a military intervention on bogus “humanitarian” grounds—which was subsequently exposed by the refusal of successive Australian governments to make available to the Timorese people basic healthcare and other social services.

In 2002 the state received formal sovereignty. In the 18 years since, the Timorese ruling elite have demonstrated the bankruptcy of their claim that they could advance the social and economic interests of the working class and rural poor through the formation of a new capitalist statelet on half of a small island.

The healthcare situation in the country is dire. According to WHO statistics, annual health spending amounts to 1.5 percent of its small gross domestic product, equivalent to just $US102 per person. Hospitals and health clinics are entirely unprepared for a coronavirus pandemic. In rural districts, health clinics often experience power failures and, according to UNICEF, up to 70 percent of village clinics have no access to running water.

Last Sunday, the operators of Bairo Pite Clinic, a non-government organisation providing free healthcare, issued an “urgent” appeal on an East Timor email group for face masks, explaining that they had run out.

Heavy machinery clearing debris built up in Maufelo River (March 20)

The government’s inability to respond to a significant crisis was demonstrated on March 13, when monsoonal rains triggered flash floods in parts of Dili. Drain systems clogged and flooding destroyed at least 190 homes and affected another 1,500 households. One person, aged 16, was killed, reportedly after he saved a woman and her baby from drowning. Inundated residents were largely left to fend for themselves.

One Dili worker, whose family home was submerged by the flood waters, told the World Socialist Web Site: “The government was not only unprepared for the flood but has done virtually nothing to respond to the emergency situation. During and after the flood, throughout the weekend, we saw not a single government official assisting us. Even though we were desperate for a dry and safe place to stay and sleep, clean water, food, clothing, access to a toilet, and healthcare, nothing was provided. We had to go to a friend’s place to do the washing. Most of my neighbours had to clean their clothing with dirty water, using the same river that caused the flooding.”

He added: “The first confirmed corona virus in Dili has got people in a panicked and worried situation. With the inadequate condition of public hospitals throughout the country I fear that the spreading of the virus will be hard to contain—it could be like a wildfire. The government has no adequate facilities to quarantine coronavirus-positive patients.”

Brazil’s Bolsonaro threatens dictatorship over COVID-19 crisis

Miguel Andrade

In a nationally televised broadcast Tuesday night, Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro stepped up the campaign of attacks on the working class unleashed by the ruling elite since the first cases of the new COVID-19 disease were recorded in the country’s largest city, São Paulo.

Just one month after the first case was detected, Brazil has 2,915 confirmed cases and 77 deaths. The Health Ministry admits that this is a gross underestimate, as only patients with serious symptoms are being tested. A London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine study found that under-reporting in Brazil is likely as high as 90 percent, bringing the total cases to 30,000.

Tuesday was the first day of decrees ordering the shutdown of retail stores in the country’s most populous state, São Paulo, and in Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city in the country, as all states have shut down schools, and several others have ordered partial shutdowns in other sectors.

Jair Bolsonaro (Wikipedia Commons)

In his address, Bolsonaro called press reports on the number of dead in Italy “panic-mongering,” saying that the pandemic would be over “soon” in Brazil and calling the partial retail shutdowns across the country a “scorched earth” policy that should be abandoned.

He dismissed medical evidence to claim that “90 percent” of the infected “would feel nothing” and that he, in particular, “with a history of athletics,” would at most feel the symptoms “of a little cold.”

The next day, Bolsonaro told reporters gathered in front of the Alvorada presidential palace that the quarantine measures would result in chaos “that would dwarf what was seen in Chile,” where millions of workers took to the streets against social inequality. He warned darkly that this “might spell a break with democratic normalcy that you [the press] defend so much.”

This threat of a coup was anticipated days before when Bolsonaro declared that “it would be easy” to decree a state of siege and suspend the constitution in the case of social unrest caused by the pandemic.

The world over, the ruling classes are using the catastrophic socioeconomic toll of the pandemic to amass huge wealth through bailouts and quantitative easing and to intensify the exploitation of workers threatened with having no money to eat.

But few rulers have spelled out this attitude in such a cruel and blunt fashion as Brazil’s Bolsonaro. Even more criminal declarations have been offered by businessmen, with the heir of one of Brazil’s largest fast food chains saying that workers should fear unemployment more than COVID-19.

With 23 members of his entourage on a visit to US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, Florida resort in early March testing positive for the coronavirus, Bolsonaro has refused to reveal documents on his own diagnosis, citing his lack of symptoms as proof of his thesis that the disease is not serious and implying that he would somehow be invulnerable to the disease.

Having founded in late 2019 his new fascist “Alliance for Brazil” party, based on “loyalty to his principles” and the belief that his presidency is a fulfillment of divine providence, Bolsonaro has sought to make the issue of his health a means of solidifying support among his far-right base.

He has repeatedly sounded this theme since his endorsement of and attendance at the March 15 fascist marches drawing thousands of his supporters to call for the Army to close down Congress and the Supreme Court in order to grant him unlimited powers. A central theme of these marches was a denial and mockery of the pandemic.

Army Commander Gen. Leal Pujol on Wednesday said that the Army High Command faces in the pandemic “the greatest challenge of its generation.” Bourgeois editorialists have chosen to paint this statement in rosy colors and claim, without a shred of evidence, that, in the words of leading pundit Maria Cristina Fernandes, “the Army has shown it will not act as Bolsonaro’s praetorian guard.” Indeed, it may rather signal that the military is once again considering whether to seize power.

For its part, after initially dismissing the pandemic as an “excuse” used by Bolsonaro for the economic stagnation that has plagued Brazil during his term, the Workers Party (PT) has now sought to exploit the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity to curry favor with dominant factions of the ruling class, especially those dissatisfied with the dead end of Bolsonaro’s unprecedented attempt to subordinate Brazil’s foreign policy to the interests of US imperialism.

The PT’s leader, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, declared on Wednesday that Bolsonaro lacks the “psychological conditions” to rule and should be impeached or resign. This was a nod to the declaration days earlier by former Bolsonaro allies that he should be evaluated by a medical board and declared unfit for office, as an impeachment would be “too painful.”

The whole of the ruling class is united on imposing upon Brazilian workers the choice of either getting sick and infecting their loved ones or starving to death. One recent report found that 10 million workers in the country’s slums have no savings whatsoever and would lack money for food after a one-week lockdown. The quarantine measures will do little for a population crammed with three generations of relatives into single-bedroom homes in the densely packed settlements.

These conditions can only lead to an explosion of class struggle. Bolsonaro’s ravings are an expression of the desperation of the Brazilian ruling class as it prepares for unprecedented acts of repression.

Horn of Africa and East Africa face coronavirus and locust swarm

Jean Shaoul

Just as the coronavirus takes hold in Africa, threatening the impoverished continent’s entire population, a serious outbreak of locusts is spreading across parts of East Africa and into the Horn of Africa. The outbreak poses an unprecedented threat to food security in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries.

Cases of the coronavirus virus have been reported in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Djibouti, with most countries closing their borders, banning international flights, imposing shelter at home orders and lockdown.

As most African countries lack the means to test suspected cases, World Health Organisation (WHO) director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned that official numbers are probably an underestimate of the scale of infection. He said, “Probably we have undetected cases or unreported cases. In other countries we have seen how the virus actually accelerates after a certain tipping point, so the best advice for Africa is to prepare for the worst and prepare today.”

Endemic poverty, the lack of adequate health infrastructure in working class areas, in the overcrowded shanty towns, slums and the countryside—as well as in the refugee camps (home to 18 million refugees, 26 percent of the world’s refugee population), where “social distancing” is an impossibility—and the prevalence of AIDS and tuberculosis together signal a humanitarian catastrophe for the region and the continent as a whole.

This crisis is now magnified by the hugely dangerous increase in locust swarm activity that broke out in January in Kenya, its worst such invasion in 70 years. After periods of exceptionally prolonged and heavy rain following a dry spell, the insects, approximately the length of a finger, fly together in millions to take advantage of the suddenly abundant food supply, devouring crops, destroying grazing plots and threatening food production and local economies. This year’s swarm was triggered by the Indian Ocean Dipole, a naturally occurring but increasingly frequent phenomenon due to climate change that has caused extreme drought in Australia and led to torrential rain in East Africa.

At least one swarm measuring 60km (37 miles) long and 40km (25 miles) wide in Kenya’s northeast—three times the size of New York City—has been reported.

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), desert locusts, the most dangerous of locust species, can, with the aid of the wind, travel up to 150km (95 miles) in a day and eat their own body weight in greenery. A swarm just one kilometre square, equal to 40-80 million insects, can eat as much food as 35,000 people in a day.

Some 80 percent of the population in the Horn, a region long synonymous with famine, conflicts and refugees, relies on agriculture for subsistence, meaning that the consequences will be devastating for the already vulnerable population. Moreover, under the right conditions, locusts can multiply 20-fold in three months. According to the science journal Nature, widespread breeding is in progress and new swarms of locusts are forming in the region with Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia facing the biggest risk, although Sudan, Djibouti, Eritrea, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda are also affected.

Nature points out that swarms have crossed the Red Sea to Yemen and Saudi Arabia and even reached Iran, Pakistan and India, threatening the food supplies of 20 million people later this year as well as the destruction of grazing for livestock.

As Keith Cressman, FAO Senior Agricultural Officer in the Plant Production and Protection Division, explained, “The new generation swarms will coincide with the planting season in the East African region, which normally starts at the end of March and early April.”

Farmers will not be able to plant or will delay planting, which will affect harvests. Cressman fears that by June the desert locusts will have increased their numbers 400-fold, with terrible impacts. It cost a massive $600 million to bring the situation under control in the last upsurge in 2003-5.

Last month, the FAO said the desert locust hopper bands were destroying tens of thousands of hectares of crops and grazing land in North East Africa, creating a dangerous situation for the region and eastern Ethiopia in particular. This prompted Somalia and Pakistan to declare a state of emergency. One swarm has even reached the eastern boundaries of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has not seen a locust invasion since 1944 and is still grappling with a civil war and Ebola and measles outbreaks.

Control of locust swarms depends upon the use of chemical pesticides and naturally occurring fungal spores, which require aerial spraying that is costly and reliant upon infrastructure and access to the areas where the locusts congregate.

The measures being taken across the region to control the coronavirus pandemic, particularly airport closures and reduction or suspension of international flights, have wreaked havoc with supply chains, hampering the fight against locusts. This has served to heighten the threat to food security as well as relief efforts at the worst possible time.

With few flights operating, airlifted cargo fell by 14 percent between January and February in Kenya alone. The cost of shipping pesticides has risen threefold and the delivery of pesticides and equipment has been delayed. According to the FAO, the delivery of eight helicopters and pesticides to East Africa will be delayed, while European and Australian experts are considering how to provide remote help to the fight, given that they cannot travel.

Cyril Ferrand, the FAO’s Eastern Africa Resilience Team Leader, said, “The fight against an already critical desert locust outbreak is getting harder.” The infestation in East Africa continues to present “an unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods, especially as the cropping season begins.”

In January, the FAO issued an appeal for $76 million to help combat the locust outbreak that elicited less than half of the required amount even as the crisis escalated. The FAO has now upped the call to $138 million. The World Food Program (WFP) estimates that without it, the cost of responding to the impact of locusts on food security alone would be at least 15 times higher.

The UN has warned that some 6.5 million people in South Sudan—more than half of the population—could be in acute food insecurity at the height of this hunger season (May-July). Cyril Piou, an expert with the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development, warned that whereas locust outbreaks typically lasted about two years, without preventive systems they will last longer, happen more frequently and spread further. He said, “We are all linked in some way, what is happening somewhere else affects us all.”

The response to such disasters must extend across national borders. As with every other social problem—including ever-widening social inequality, accelerating climate change and the heightened threat of war—the locust swarms are a global problem that requires an international solution that must not be held hostage to the non-existent largesse of the capitalist governments and the corporations and banks they represent.

Riven by national divisions and the scramble for geopolitical power, they are incapable of any systematic or planned response to the threats facing humanity, be they locust plagues, infectious disease or extreme weather events and climate change. They will only contribute if they can use “aid” to extract concessions favourable to themselves.

The science, technology and productive capacity exists to solve these great social problems and, under a rational and coordinated democratic planning of the world economy, rapidly improve the living standards and quality of life for the world’s population. But only the international working class, through the unified struggle for world socialism, can achieve this goal.

COVID-19 pandemic: Doctors sue French government for criminal negligence

Anthony Torres & Jacques Valentin

With thousands of dead and 29,155 confirmed COVID-19 cases in France, thousands of health-care professionals infected, and six doctors already dead of the disease, anger against the government among workers and medical staff is mounting. Like governments across Europe, the French government downplayed the disease and deliberately withheld critical information from the public.

In response, hundreds of health-care professionals are filing a suit charging top officials with criminal negligence.

A scandal erupted after ex-Health Minister Agnès Buzyn spoke to Le Monde, blaming Prime Minister Édouard Philippe for not calling off the March 15 first round of municipal elections, the second round of which has since been canceled, and for downplaying her warnings on the pandemic. It appears the interview was an attempt by Buzyn to shift criminal responsibility off her shoulders and onto those of Philippe and French President Emmanuel Macron.

Buzyn was following events in China, she said, and “on December 20, an English-language blog reported a strange pneumonia. I alerted the general health directorate. On January 11, I sent a message to the president. On January 30, I warned Édouard Philippe that elections could probably not be held. I was chomping at the bit.”

French soldiers discuss inside the military field hospital built in Mulhouse, eastern France, to treat coronavirus patients (AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias)

Buzyn made clear that top French officials knew and hid the fact that by not calling for a lock-down to stop COVID’s spread, they were exposing themselves and others to mortal danger. When she left the health ministry to briefly run for Paris mayor, Buzyn said, “I was crying, as I knew a tsunami was coming. I left the ministry knowing elections would not be held. From the start I was thinking of just one thing: the coronavirus. We should have stopped everything. We were playing a masquerade. The last weeks were a nightmare. Every time I went to a public meeting, I was terrified.”

After all of this, Buzyn confessed, “There will be thousands of deaths.”

Buzyn’s confession terrified the Macron government and its allies, including Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the petty-bourgeois Unsubmissive France (LFI) party. Shocked, he wrote a Facebook post asking: “Why is she saying this now, when it is too late? Does she not realize that she is raising the criminal liability of both herself and the other people she is claiming she warned?” Mélenchon proposed to drown the scandal in an “information session” of the National Assembly.

In fact, the entire ruling elite, including all factions of the capitalist political establishment in France and across Europe, are responsible for decades of austerity that devastated health systems, and for not challenging Macron’s politically criminal inaction in the initial weeks of the pandemic. As late as March, government spokespeople were comparing COVID-19 to the flu and insisting that workers should not confine themselves at home but go to work to make profits for the banks.

A growing international mobilization of the working class has transformed this situation, however. Wildcat strikes erupted across Italy and tens of thousands of industrial workers walked off the job in France and across Europe, forcing state officials to grudgingly approve confinement measures.

As the death toll has mounted among the population and health staff, growing anger and disillusionment with the Macron government has pushed health-care professionals to file suit against Philippe, Buzyn and other officials.

Several hundred doctors and health staff represented by the lawyer Fabrice di Vizio have filed a suit to the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR), which has jurisdiction to investigate high crimes by top officials.

Di Vizio said that his clients were suing based on Article 233, part 7 of the Criminal Code, which stipulates: “Anyone who voluntarily abstains from taking or launching measures that would allow, without risk for himself or third persons, for fighting a catastrophe that could threaten physical persons is punished with two years in jail and a 30,000 euro fine.”

Di Vizio pointed to the growing anger of health staff as they discovered that the government’s various assurances about protective equipment like face masks were lies. He said, “The government told them at the end of February that the masks would arrive. At the beginning of March, when they understood that the masks were not coming, they started hearing from the government that masks were not really needed… In fact, this was simply an admission of impotence and a lie. The plain truth is that the government had stocked no supplies.”

French firms are producing face masks, di Vizio added, but the British government placed its orders first. For virtually the entire month of March, as a result, French medical staff did not receive any of them. Nicolas Brillat, an executive at one of these firms, made clear the blame lay with Macron. “We had been telling the French authorities for six weeks that there would be a problem,” he said.

Di Vizio pointed to the significance of Buzyn’s interview in Le Monde: “Now a criminal inquiry is indispensable, to bring to light the extent of what was hidden from the French people and to determine the role and responsibility of each official in this health catastrophe.” The lawyer called for “the health ministry’s internet servers to be impounded and searched.”

A fight to hold government ministers accountable for their actions in the COVID-19 pandemic has wide support in the working class. Polls show that 70 percent of the French population does not believe that the Macron government is telling the truth about the pandemic. However, the task of holding them to account cannot be left to the courts, but requires the political mobilization of the working class, independently of pseudo-left supporters of Macron like Mélenchon.

Bitter historical experience shows that the CJR, which would likely take years to rule on such a case, will not by itself redress the wrongs produced by high-level state criminality.

The last time this court was invoked was over the 1980s tainted blood scandal. Under Socialist Party (PS) President François Mitterrand, the National Center for Blood Transfusion (CNTS) knowingly used blood transfusions infected with the AIDS virus, wiping out France’s hemophiliac population. Then-Prime Minister Laurent Fabius’s PS government wanted to avoid using US companies’ equipment to test for the AIDS virus. It delayed all screening of the blood until French firms could make such equipment, by which point the blood supply was hopelessly contaminated.

The General Inspectorate of the Health Administration concluded in its report that health protection was subordinated to economic considerations. Fabius, former PS Social Affairs Minister Georgina Dufoix, and former PS Health Minister Edmond Hervé all faced trial, nearly 20 years after the fact, before the CJR on charges of “involuntary manslaughter.” Thanks to the extensive rewriting of French laws that had taken place in the intervening period, however, Fabius and Dufoix were both found innocent. Hervé was found guilty on two counts but received no sentence.

Today, the crimes of the ruling class are unfolding on a far larger scale. Workers in Europe and internationally are faced with the challenge of struggling to ensure an effective fight against the disease, and to take power from a financial aristocracy that has irrefutably demonstrated its political criminality.

Europe’s COVID-19 death toll reaches over 16,000

Robert Stevens

Deaths due to COVID-19 continued to increase throughout Europe yesterday with 2,219 new fatalities across the continent. Total deaths now stand at 16,395, with 15,556 of these within the European Union’s 27 member states.

Overall COVID-19 confirmed cases are approaching 300,000 in Europe, with 34,644 new cases, for a total of 283,242.

Years of slashing health and social care budgets, together with government inaction in combating the spread of the virus, have taken a grim toll, with health workers forced to make decisions as to who lives and dies.

Italy and Spain have the most fatalities in the world. In Italy, a further 622 lives were lost as the toll leapt above 8,100. The total number of cases rose by 8.2 percent to 80,589. The number in intensive care treatment rose to 3,612 from 3,489 in 24 hours.

With the 498 deaths recorded in Spain yesterday, more than 4,000 (4,145) have died of the coronavirus. The virus is taking more lives in Spain in a faster period than it did in Italy. In just 19 days Spain went from 10 to 4,089 deaths. In Italy the same leap took 25 days. From 100 cases to 56,000 took four days in Spain compared with 28 days in Italy.

Local newspaper Eco di Bergamo features several pages of obituaries in its March 17, 2020 edition, in Mediglia, Italy (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

Madrid is the epicentre of the pandemic in Spain. Reports attest to the dreadful circumstances facing health workers. Bloomberg noted, “In the emergency room at one of Madrid’s biggest hospitals, [Dr.] Daniel Bernabeu signed the death certificate for one patient and immediately turned to help another who was choking.

“People are dying in waiting rooms before they can even be admitted as the coronavirus pandemic overpowers medical staff. With some funeral services halted in the Spanish capital and no space left in the morgues, corpses are being stored at the main ice rink.”

In France there were 3,922 new cases and 365 deaths—the largest daily increase so far. Hospitals in the Paris area and in Strasbourg, in the hard-hit Alsace region of eastern France, are overflowing and starting to turn away likely COVID-19 patients.

In the Paris Public Hospitals (AP-HP) system, 628 staff, including 40 percent of doctors, have contracted the illness but many must continue working due to staff shortages. A doctor at Bichat hospital said, “There are no more beds anywhere. … We will look for personnel everywhere and rapidly train medical students starting in the fourth year to replace the nurses we are now missing.”

Brigitte Klinkert, president of the Haut-Rhin department that includes Strasbourg, confirmed to German media that hospitals in the city are so overwhelmed that they routinely refuse to give patients over 75 or even over 70 access to respiratory care. Health staff are forced to decide which patients will live or die. A nurse in Strasbourg’s university hospital centre (CHU) said, “Personnel are exhausted, physically and morally. At the CHU, 238 staff are infected. More and more staff can’t work, and we don’t know how to handle it.”

The death toll continues to rise in Britain, with fatalities up by 115—the first time deaths have jumped to more than 100 in a single day. There are now 578 dead from 11,658 confirmed cases.

As well as killing many with underlying illnesses—a constant threat to millions given that 43 percent of the UK population has a long-term health issue—the virus is taking the lives of young people with no reported health problems.

On Thursday it was confirmed that Chloe Middleton, a 21-year-old woman from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire—and the youngest victim of the disease in the UK so far—had no underlying health problems. Even younger people are being struck. A 10-year-old girl from Plymouth was diagnosed with coronavirus. The child had a temperature of almost 107f, which caused her to start convulsing. She did not have the persistent dry cough and is one of a growing number who have contracted COVID-19 without one of the main recognised symptoms.

The Johnson Conservative government, having done nothing for weeks as it planned for the population to be infected by the tens of millions in its “herd immunity” policy—is preparing for mass deaths. It has deployed the military to help transform London’s Excel conference and events centre into a 4,000-bed hospital, including two emergency morgues. Yesterday the army delivered oxygen supplies to the centre ahead of its opening on April 4 when an initial 500 patients will be treated. Nearby London City Airport is closed to civilian flights to enable military planes to fly in and out.

According to reports, similar “field hospitals” will be created in major UK cities, including at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham and Manchester’s Convention Centre. Sky News reported that a temporary mortuary is being set up at a British military site in Belfast “to cope with an anticipated spike in coronavirus deaths.”

This week saw the deaths of the first two prisoners in Britain—an 84-year-old man at Littlehey prison in Cambridgeshire and a 66-year-old man at Strangeways, Manchester.

The callous attitude of the Tory government towards National Health Service (NHS) workers on the front line trying to save lives—many still without personal protective equipment—was made clear in the comments of chief executive of NHS Providers, Chris Hopson, that London hospitals were facing a “continuous tsunami” of coronavirus patients. He warned, “The CEOs [of the various NHS providers] are concerned that all that extra capacity is now being used up very, very quickly. We’ve got the surge capacity at the ExCel centre but this is filling up very quickly.”

Due to there being no social distancing in place for weeks, and a government policy not to test NHS staff, many are ill having possibly contracted COVID-19 and are in self-isolation at home, with up to 50 percent of staff off sick in some London trusts.

On Thursday at 8 p.m., people around the UK—replicating what has been done in other countries—clapped and cheered NHS workers from their doors, windows and balconies, with others coming into their streets to do the same as part of a “Clap For Our Carers” campaign. In a staggering show of hypocrisy, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak emerged from Number 10 and 11 Downing Street to join the applause.

Shortly after, on the BBC’s “Question Time” TV show, Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal said the situation was “a national scandal. We shouldn’t be in this position. We knew in the last week of January that this was coming. The message from China was absolutely clear that a new virus with pandemic potential was hitting cities ... and people admitted to intensive care units and dying and the mortality was growing.

“We knew that 11 weeks ago. And then we wasted February when we could have acted. Time when we could have ramped up testing, time when we could have got Personal Protective Equipment ready and disseminated. We didn’t do it.”

Speaking of Johnson and Sunak, he said, “The hypocrisy of clapping NHS workers and yet not supporting those NHS workers when they go into that front line is tragic and it was preventable.”

In Britain, employers are able to tap a pool of £350 billion for starters, with “unlimited” funds pledged by Sunak. In contrast, with more than 1 million workers already laid off, in the space of a week over 500,000 thousand people have been forced to apply for £73 a week via the Universal Credit benefits system. Many were forced to give up trying, as claims can only be made online and they were faced with a queue of 145,000 others waiting to log on to the website.

Those attempting to make contact regarding their claims failed, despite also calling by phone, in some cases, between 80 and 100 times. Even if laid off and redundant workers do succeed in making a claim, the brutal UC system means they will wait at least five weeks to get a first payment.

Bipartisan corporate bailout gives $17 billion to Boeing

Bryan Dyne

The bipartisan corporate “rescue” package awaiting approval by the House of Representatives carves out of its more than $1 trillion in taxpayer handouts to large businesses some $17 billion for airplane manufacturer Boeing. The company’s cut is part of a $75 billion bailout of the airline industry as a whole.

Though Boeing is not explicitly named in the bill, the provision of $17 billion for commercial air companies that are “important to maintaining national security” is deliberately worded to apply to the nation’s biggest airplane manufacturer and second biggest defense contractor. In a recent press conference, Trump underscored the special treatment for Boeing, saying, “Yes, I think we have to protect Boeing. We have to absolutely help Boeing.”

The company may also have the opportunity to draw from the $500 billion set aside for corporate bailouts in general.

Boeing shares rose more than 25 percent on Wednesday on the heels of the unanimous Senate passage of the bailout bill in the early morning hours. They extended their gains by an additional 15 percent on Thursday, closing at $180. The company’s shares have risen four straight days in anticipation of adoption of the gargantuan fiscal measure. Its share price had fallen from a high of $440 in March of 2019 to a 52-week low of $89 this year.

The rescue of Boeing by the federal government comes one year after the grounding of Boeing’s flagship 737 Max 8 aircraft in the wake of two crashes—Lion Air Flight 610 outside of Jakarta, Indonesia and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Both occurred shortly after takeoff as a result of a fatal design defect and the company’s rush to bring the new plane onto the market.

To date, no executive who oversaw production of the plane or regulatory official who approved it has been charged, much less prosecuted, for the development, manufacture and marketing of the deadly plane and the death of 346 passengers and crew on the two flights.

As has now been proven, the crashes were caused by a piece of software known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). It was installed by Boeing to compensate for the Max 8’s tendency to stall, a byproduct of attaching a newer, larger engine onto the half-century-old Boeing 737 chassis.

The aerospace giant used an old airframe in order to save time and money in bringing to market a new model to compete with European-based Airbus for market share and profit, particularly in the expanding Chinese market. It sold the plane to airlines with the claim that 737 pilots required little additional training, such as flight simulator training, to fly the new model.

In the aftermath of the crashes and the grounding of the Max 8—which both Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) initially opposed—a myriad of reports from aviation safety agencies internationally and leaked internal emails from Boeing employees and officials have established that the company was well aware of the dangerous flaws in the aircraft, but carried out a cover-up in order to get the plane into the air.

The 737 Max 8 disaster has caused a sharp drop in Boeing’s income and share value over the past year. The company’s airplane sales plummeted from 893 in 2018 to just 54 in 2019, and it shuttered its production of the Max 8 aircraft in January. It has also been forced to borrow $13.8 billion to cover some of the estimated $20 billion lost in the wake of the grounding. At the same time, airlines have massively reduced the amount of new planes they are buying in response to the drastically reduced demand for air travel stemming from the pandemic.

Boeing officials claim that the cash infusion from the government “will be used for payments to suppliers to maintain the health of the supply chain.” However, its actions in the wake of the 2008 bailout of Wall Street indicate that the bulk of the money will go to push up Boeing stock and the wealth of executives, hedge funds and major shareholders, which is tied to the massive inflation of share values.

From 2014 to 2019, it spent just under $60 billion on stock buybacks and dividends, all of which went into the pockets of its wealthy investors and top shareholders. This includes ex-CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who oversaw the introduction of the deadly Max 8 jet.

It is worth noting that the $60 billion figure equals what Boeing requested from the government last week. In a statement, the firm said it “supports a minimum of $60 billion… for the aerospace manufacturing industry.” Boeing would receive the lion’s share of any such bailout.

The massive sums being provided to Boeing sharply contrast with the pittance the corporate giant has provided for the 346 families that lost loved ones in the two crashes. Each received a mere $144,500 per crash victim from an account that is overseen by notorious Wall Street “fixer” Kenneth Feinburg. He is acting to defend the airplane manufacturer’s profits and refurbish its public image.

The money to the crash victims also pales in comparison to the money made by the current suite of Boeing executives who sold off a great deal of stock just before the markets began to tank at the end of February and beginning of March. These include President and CEO of Boeing Defense Space & Security Leanne Caret, who sold $5.9 million worth of stock, Executive Vice President Ted Colbert ($2.4 million), Senior Vice President B. Marc Allen ($2.3 million) and President and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes Stanley A. Deal ($2.5 million).

During this same period, these executives rewarded themselves with gifts of stock worth, at their 2019 height, $3.9 million, $2.3 million, $1.7 million and $4.0 million, respectively. At least nine other members of Boeing’s leadership received similar sums in the past month.

Boeing’s major investors also stand to make a killing off the company’s rising share prices. These include The Vanguard Group, Inc., which currently owns $11 billion in shares, Newport Trust Co., with $8.4 billion, and T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., holding $8.2 billion. If Boeing’s stock returns to its previous values, these companies stand to more than double the value of what they currently own.

New US unemployment claims hit 3.28 million as pandemic produces economic catastrophe

Shannon Jones

New weekly claims for unemployment insurance, as reported by the US Department of Labor for the week ending March 21, give a glimpse of the social catastrophe that is developing for tens of millions of workers due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

New filings for state unemployment benefits in the US surged to a record 3.28 million last week, seasonally adjusted. The total was the highest one-week number of new claims ever recorded, and more than four times the previous record of 695,000 initial claims in October 1982. The number for the previous week was just 282,000, so jobless claims increased by more than 1,000 percent from week to week.

The jump came as states imposed stay-at-home orders and cases of COVID-19 surged across the US, overwhelming hospitals. The number of coronavirus-related death total in the US is now over 1,100 and rising rapidly.

There is reason to believe that the number of new claims would have approached four million, but for the website of New York state, currently the center of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, crashing due to the crush of new applications. The state reported only 80,334 new claims, a vast underestimate. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio predicted that 500,000 city residents would lose their jobs due to the coronavirus, to say nothing of those in the suburbs and upstate.

Pennsylvania had the largest number of new unemployment claims actually recorded, 378,908, as the state closed schools and businesses due to the pandemic. According to reports, there have been a staggering 650,000 unemployment claims in the state in the last 11 days. By the end of this week that total is expected to reach 800,000. Governor Tom Wolf asked all “non-life-sustaining” businesses to close as the state’s confirmed COVID-19 cases surged past 1,600.

Pennsylvania was followed by Ohio with 187,784 claims, according to a state estimate. There were 867 reported coronavirus cases in Ohio by Thursday, with 223 people hospitalized and 91 in intensive care, with that number expected to soar. Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted said that the state’s unemployment website had recorded 1.7 million hits in the last five days.

California saw 186,809 new unemployment claims last week, up from an already elevated 57,606 claims the previous week. California now has over 3,000 reported cases coronavirus and that number is doubling every three to four days, with a mandatory stay-at-home order in place.

Michigan had 129,298 new jobless claims and Massachusetts had 147,995. Both states are under lockdown orders. Michigan had some 2,856 coronavirus cases through Thursday and its death toll has passed 60. Texas and New Jersey each had over 155,000 new jobless claims. COVID-19 numbers are surging in both states.

Washington state, another center of the pandemic, had 133,478 jobless claims. There are more than 2,500 COVID-19 cases in the state and nonessential businesses have been asked to cease operation. Boeing shut down its Seattle-based operations Wednesday for two weeks.

In Rhode Island, one in 15 workers, 6.4 percent of the workforce, sought benefits after the state banned all on-premise consumption at eating establishments and bars. In Nevada, nearly six percent of the state’s workforce filed claims as the state’s gaming industry was shut down for 30 days by order of Governor Steve Sisolak.

It should be stressed that all these numbers significantly understate the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the US population. The surge in new unemployment claims has overwhelmed state unemployment offices, for the most part already significantly understaffed and underfunded due to cuts, meaning many claimants were unable to file. In many cases, phone lines were jammed and websites overloaded. Those unable to file will show up in future numbers.

Further, according to Labor Department procedures, those unemployment offices that fail to file their reports on time, perhaps because they are overloaded, are not counted at all in the official numbers. In addition, many millions more workers in the so-called gig economy are not eligible for regular state unemployment compensation because they are classified as self-employed. Students, undocumented immigrants, those who have worked less than six months in the year and those classified as seasonal also are not eligible.

Due to reactionary changes in state unemployment regulations, the proportion of workers eligible for benefits has steadily declined over the years. These changes have included drastic shortening of the period workers may claim benefits, onerous work search requirements and high earnings thresholds. As a result, considerably fewer than half of those presently unemployed receive unemployment benefits.

This is only the initial sign of a massive shock wave hitting the US economy and disrupting the lives of masses of people. Keith Hall, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and an advisor to George W. Bush, said, “We have not seen this big of a free fall before, not even during the Depression. It’s really like an instant great recession.” He estimated that the official unemployment rate could hit the Great Depression level of 20 percent.

Another economist estimated that if one half the workers in restaurants and retail trade lost their jobs, unemployment could jump by 10 percent to 13 percent. That is well above the post-Depression high of 10.8 percent during the 1981-82 recession.

It is not known at this time how many jobs will be impacted. As a result of the 2008 economic crash, some 26 million jobs were eliminated. The present crisis could exceed that, and in a much shorter space of time.

Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, an analyst with Yale, and Aaron Sojourner with the University of Minnesota, said that initial jobless claims for the current week could reach 4.7 million. They based their assessment on an analysis of internet search data.

With the crisis still in its initial stages, the profit-driven capitalist system has been utterly unable to respond in a systematic and rational manner to the challenge posed by the pandemic. After ignoring or minimizing the danger from months, the US government, like capitalist governments all over the world, has responded in an improvised and patchwork manner aimed above all at protecting the interests of the big corporations.

The temporary shutdown of nonessential businesses, made necessary by the failure to isolate and contain the spread of the virus early, portends untold suffering and hardship for wide sections of the population already surviving at bare subsistence levels. For millions of workers, the loss of even one weekly paycheck can mean the difference between economic survival and disaster.

Low-wage workers, who predominate in the sectors such as retail and restaurants hardest hit by the virus-related shutdowns, are also the least able to cope, often lacking health benefits and just keeping their heads above water.

Economists predict a wave of bankruptcies and foreclosures to follow in the wake of the massive job cuts. Many of the businesses closed due to the pandemic will likely never reopen. A huge decline in GDP is expected on a scale again not seen since the Great Depression.

The blundering and outright criminal character of the response of the US and other capitalist governments to this catastrophe poses sharply the need for the working class to intervene independently to defend its class interests and the interests of society as a whole. A rational and humane solution can only be found through the fight for an internationalist and socialist program.