Big business in South Korea exploits pandemic to carry out massive assault on jobs

Ben McGrath

The government of President Moon Jae-in in South Korea is preparing to oversee massive job cuts as a result of the global financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, while making clear that it will provide unlimited funds to prop up big business. The pandemic has exposed in country after country that no capitalist government is willing to protect the working class and the economically vulnerable.

On March 23, the Korea Enterprises Federation (KEF) submitted a plan to the National Assembly demanding the government ease regulations on firing workers. The big business lobbying group cited the COVID-19 outbreak as a pretext. The KEF also called for lowering the corporate tax rate to 22 percent and abolishing the minimum corporate income tax system.

The KEF made clear that its demands went beyond a response to the pandemic and that it views layoffs and government handouts as a necessity for doing business. “Korea’s economic growth rate stood at only 2 percent last year and the real economy is in a state of emergency due to the outbreak of the new coronavirus infection this year,” the KEF stated. Moody’s cut its 2020 economic growth outlook for South Korea to 0.1 percent on Thursday.

Workers in various industries are already feeling the brunt of corporate attacks. Unemployment numbers have grown rapidly in February and March. This month, approximately 30,000 people filed for unemployment benefits through March 19, a 32.6 percent increase over the entire month in 2019. Jeju Province saw a 91 percent increase in new applicants as tourism to the large island has dropped sharply. Daegu, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in South Korea, saw a 46 percent increase in unemployment applicants in one week.

South Korea’s airline industry currently has more than 10,000 workers on unpaid leave, a quarter of the total industry, due to the fall in travel. While they are being furloughed for 10 days at a time, this is set to rise to 15 days in April. The retail giant Lotte intends to sack 10,000 to 20,000 workers from stores across the country as well. Lotte announced these plans in February, but is using the pandemic as the rationale for mass layoffs.

In a particularly irrational expression of the capitalist system, staffs at small, for-profit hospitals that are not receiving new patients also face layoffs. Rather than mobilizing these medical professionals to help contain the COVID-19 outbreak, physicians and nurses are being forced to take unpaid leave. While nurses are eligible to apply for a paltry 1.98 million won ($US1,635) per month government subsidy, doctors are not.

In many cases, government subsidies will not even be enough to cover monthly expenses. Approximately 640,000 households in Daegu will be offered between 500,000 ($US414) and 900,000 won ($US746) in prepaid cards and gift certificates, depending on family size. The payments will not begin until April 16, with some being extended for three months. Similarly, South Jeolla Province is offering approximately 320,000 households between 300,000 to 500,000 won.

While workers are being hung out to dry, the Bank of Korea (BOK) pledged Thursday to supply the ruling elite with an endless supply of cash. “The Bank of Korea decided to provide an unlimited amount of liquidity to financial firms to help minimize the economic fallout from the spread of COVID-19 and remove uncertainties in the financial market,” the BOK stated in a press release.

BOK Deputy Governor Yun Myeon-sik added that the money would be supplied no questions asked: “It is hard to estimate how much liquidity will actually be supplied. But the plan is to supply the entire amount requested and without a limit.” Such measures are the first of their kind and exceed even those taken during the 1997–1998 and 2008 financial crises.

The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) is colluding with the government to mislead workers into believing that the Moon Jae-in administration will take measures to protect their livelihoods.

On March 25, representatives from the KCTU met with officials from the Ministry of Labor for a second round of talks, ostensibly for the purpose of discussing workplace protections. The ministry stated that it intends to operate a website from April 6 to allow workers to anonymously report workplace violations, such as being forced to take unpaid leave. Such a system will be used to sweep reports under the rug while attempting to convince workers to remain quiet.

The KCTU put its stamp of approval on the ministry’s plans by calling for “special labor supervision” at worksites that have forced workers to take unpaid leave. The KCTU’s policy director Lee Ju-ho, who took part in the meeting, stated: “In order for the government’s COVID-19 measures to operate well at work sites without any blind spots, we plan to discuss and examine them through these talks [with the Labor Ministry].” He added: “We will quickly promote areas where improvements in the law or system are needed by discussing them with the relevant authorities.”

In other words, the KCTU, which often postures as militant and anti-capitalist, is providing the Moon administration with cover as it presides over mass layoffs and unprecedented corporate bailouts.

These attacks are not simply the result of the government’s response to the pandemic. The assault on workers in the automotive and shipbuilding industries, public sector workers, and others has continued unabated since Moon took office May 2017.

During this time, the KCTU has sown illusions in the government, while defending big business. This past Wednesday, the KCTU-affiliated Korean Metal Workers Union agreed to a contract with GM Korea to deny workers any wage increases, while leaving the door open for company reprisals against workers who took part in strikes last year.

Korean workers must reject all of these attacks and join with their class brothers and sisters internationally to defend their rights to decent and safe jobs and to demand that the response to the COVID-19 pandemic is controlled democratically by the working class.

Sri Lankan doctors speak out over coronavirus dangers facing health workers

Sakuna Jayawardena

More than 100 COVID-19 cases have been reported in Sri Lanka and 255 people are under supervision in 18 hospitals.

Health workers are making a huge effort to treat patients as the number of cases rises daily. The protective gear they need, however, is severely lacking.

As the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on March 3, health workers face “real danger” due to the lack of protective equipment. The WHO statement warned that “without protecting health workers” COVID-19 “cannot be stopped.”

President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s government, however, has ignored these warnings.

A doctor working at a public hospital told the WSWS: “Personal protective equipment (PPE) like eye masks, face masks and coats required for staff members at out-patient departments, intensive care units (ICUs) and wards for treating diabetes, asthma and fever were severely inadequate even before the pandemic crisis began.”

He added that the shortage has since taken a serious turn. Some hospitals have been forced to produce PPE using substandard materials. “Staff and patients have been put in severe danger by this situation,” he said.

The doctor explained that this state of affairs was not just created by the COVID-19 pandemic. It had developed systematically due to successive governments slashing the health sector. “Now, it has become a crisis.”

“Even the director of the Angoda Infectious Disease Hospital examined patients using a polythene coat made up by doctors themselves, until recently.” If a doctor was infected due to a lack of proper security, “he or she will have to quarantine for 14 days.”

The doctor added: “If large numbers of doctors are forced to quarantine, the situation will become dangerous and other health workers will have an unbearable amount of work.”

Some health workers in the Colombo and Ragama hospitals have been quarantined for infection already.

“Standard PPE equipment must be made available to all the workers, from doctors to minor staff,” the doctor said.

Another public sector doctor told the WSWS: “The time from the 2nd patient to the 50th patient in Sri Lanka was seven days. In Italy it was 24 days. During the first week, 47 patients were reported in Sri Lanka. In Italy, it was three.”

He said the number of patients in the 3rd week in Italy passed 1,000 and all this data pointed to the dire risk of the virus spreading in Sri Lanka. To prevent that, “a proper and sufficient quarantine program is essential and mass testing must be carried out.”

This doctor said the 500 ICU beds in Sri Lankan hospitals were sufficient to treat only 3,000 patients a month. “Even during normal periods, finding an ICU bed for a patient is difficult.”

The available number of ICU beds in Sri Lanka per 100,000 people is just above 2. In Italy, there are 12.5 ICU beds per 100,000 but that has proved inadequate. If the pandemic worsens in Sri Lanka, a higher proportion of patients could die than in Italy because they won’t have access to intensive care treatment.

“Considering this situation as an emergency, the number of ICU beds in Sri Lanka should be increased at least five-fold,” the doctor warned.

Explaining the lack of facilities for testing, he said: “A person can be directed to testing only if that person suffers from the symptoms coming within government-provided guidelines.”

The WHO recommendation is to upgrade the facilities so all those suspected of being infected are tested. Following that step, Japan and South Korea was able to reduce the curve of increase of infected patients.

The lack of essential protective gear is a major issue facing nurses and other workers, according to Menaka Priyanthi, the head nursing officer at Ragama Teaching Hospital. She said: “We face such a situation where sewing machines at home have to be brought here and used to sew protective dresses.”

There is deep and growing opposition to the government’s indifference to lack of protective equipment and the severe risk now facing health workers. Seeking to deflect health workers’ anger, the trade unions have issued a series of perfunctory, half-hearted statements about the lack of PPE.

Government Nursing Officers Association president Saman Ratnapriya told a press conference on March 20 that health workers had not yet received a “guideline” outlining steps to control the disease. Two days earlier Government Medical Officers Association secretary Haritha Aluthge complained to reporters that doctors and other health employees at district hospitals were working without masks.

These unions have systematically collaborated with successive Sri Lankan governments to implement health service cuts in line with International Monetary Fund austerity dictates.

The lack of PPE is a real danger facing health workers internationally. In China and Italy, even senior medical officers have died due to COVID-19. Out of the 627 people who died in Italy on March 22, 17 were doctors. And 3,654 Italian health workers have been infected.

These disastrous statistics reveal the utter negligence and unpreparedness of capitalist governments all over the world as public health services have been slashed to transform healthcare into a profit-making enterprise.

Congressional commission recommends expanding US draft registration to women

Genevieve Leigh

A national congressionally mandated commission charged with evaluating the Selective Service System announced this week that it will recommend to Congress that women be required to register for future military drafts.

The 11-member bipartisan National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service has spent the last two years holding information sessions on the issue in 42 cities and 22 states. The commission issued its findings in a 49-point report titled “Inspired to Serve.”

U.S. Army (photo by Staff Sgt. Russell Klika/Released)

The purpose of the commission was to “consider methods to increase participation in military, national, and public service in order to address national security and other public service needs of the Nation,” according to the executive summary of the report.

The proposition that women register for possible obligatory military service was prompted after then-Defense Secretary Ashton Carter opened all positions in the armed forces to women, including combat duty. The decision was understood at the time to also potentially expose women to the requirement of registering for the draft, because a 1981 Supreme Court ruling only exempted women from registering because they did not participate in frontline combat duty.

After failing to get the provision passed in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, the late Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Jack Reed (Rhode Island) formed the commission to “study” the issue and make recommendations to Congress.

It is clear from the extent of the commission’s findings that its real purpose extended far beyond the question of mandating women to register for the draft.

The majority of its 49 recommendations are focused on marketing and recruiting into the military, especially among youth. Proposals include “cross-service marketing, recruitment, and retention,” a vast range of “military outreach” programs around the country, and an immense increase in targeting youth to get them to “explore service.”

A second important element of the commission’s findings is the emphasis put on the need to “convey to registrants their potential obligation for military service,” to “improve the readiness of the National Mobilization System,” and even to “build National Mobilization Exercises.”

The report states bluntly that “In the case of a national emergency, a successful mobilization of the Nation may ultimately rely on the moral mobilization of the American people: their support for the cause, which is based on the context of the national emergency, their trust in Government, and their perception of an equally shared obligation.”

Therefore, the commission also recommends in point 36 that “Congress amend the [Military Selective Service Act] to require the Selective Service System to develop and implement methods to convey to registrants the solemn obligation for military service in the event of a draft and to appropriate funds to accomplish this.” The report explains that “every registrant should understand the purpose and potential implication of their registration with the Selective Service System.”

In other words, the United States government is preparing for a major military conflict in which tens of thousands if not millions of workers and youth will be required to fight on behalf of Wall Street. Furthermore, they are aware of the overwhelming hostility that exists in the population toward war and militarism.

It is clear that the “National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service” was, therefore, tasked with finding ways to “prepare” the public for coming wars through a massive marketing campaign in schools across the country, and to prepare the government for a forced reinstitution of the draft under conditions of immense opposition from workers and youth.

The focus on the question of requiring women to register for the draft is part and parcel with the broader plans to prepare for another major war. The inclusion of women into the Selective Service would vastly expand the pool of potential military conscripts, who would be much needed in the event that any one of the dozens of military flashpoints around the world were to metastasize into a major military conflict, or a third world war.

U.S. Marine Corps (photo by Sgt. Michelle Reif)

The commission raises this point directly in the report, explaining that the US population growth rate is at its lowest point in more than 80 years and that seven out of ten Americans of draft age, both male and female, are unfit for military service. “Roughly doubling the pool from which the Nation might obtain conscripts,” the commission writes, “would improve military readiness by raising the quality of those who might serve, as some women would be more qualified to serve than some men.”

The expansion of US military cannon fodder in the form of conscripted soldiers has been a long-sought-after goal of the US political establishment. In a 2017 report to Congress, the Department of Defense said explicitly: “Were Congress and the President to authorize the registration of women, the current cohort of about 11 million women in the primary age range of 18-25 would need to be registered in short order. ... Annually thereafter, the inclusion of females would almost double the number of registrants.”

Senator Reed, one of the commission’s architects, made it clear in a press conference Wednesday that Congress would work hard to act on the commission’s recommendations quickly: “This is not a report that should sit on the shelf—this is a call to action.” He went on: “It focuses on ensuring that our military and public sectors can attract and retain the talent necessary to defend and support the nation.”

The mechanism by which this provision will be sold to the American people is by invocation of women’s “equality” as the underlying motivation for the change. The report states: “That women register, and perhaps be called up in the event of a draft, is a necessary prerequisite for their achieving equality as citizens, as it has been for other groups historically discriminated against in American history.” Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is quoted in the report to make the case, ostensibly on behalf of all women: “It’s insulting to suggest America’s mothers and wives and daughters couldn’t contribute, whether the need were rebuilding levees after a natural disaster or repelling an invasion from our shores. ... America’s daughters should be slotted into service as their physical and emotional suitability proves capable of, just like America’s sons.”

Debra Wada, the panel’s vice chair for military service, justified the call to broaden the draft in a conference call with reporters, declaring, “By leveraging the skills, abilities and talents of all Americans, regardless of gender, qualified men and women alike will be able to fill any and all personnel needs.”

“Women bring a whole host of different perspectives, different experiences,” said Wada, a former assistant secretary for the Army, noting that being drafted does not necessarily mean serving in combat. In a time of national crisis, the government could draft people to a variety of positions, from clerical work to cybersecurity.

“If the threat is to our very existence,” she said, “wouldn’t you want women as part of that group?”

The reinstatement of the draft has long been promoted by figures within the Democratic Party. Its leading female representatives, such as Hillary Clinton, have positioned themselves as the spokespeople for these reactionary measures on the pretense of promoting women’s equality.

Such measures so sharply expose the class divide among women. Upper-class women, who would never have to fight in a war, and whose money would certainly find a way to exempt their sons and daughters, put forward most earnestly the demand for “women’s rights” in the service of US imperialism and for the benefit of Wall Street. Simultaneously, they fight tooth and nail for the most reactionary economic and social policies, which leave millions of workers, men and women, to survive on the brink of starvation.

The promotion of such reactionary policies owes a debt of gratitude to the #MeToo movement, spearheaded by most right-wing layers of petty-bourgeois women who have sought to use the concept of “equality of women” to dull the democratic sentiments of the population in the most recent period. For this layer, women’s forced conscription into military service is surely hailed as a great triumph for “all women.”

European Union summit on coronavirus ends in acrimony

Peter Schwarz

The 27 European Union heads of government met via video conference on Thursday evening to discuss the coronavirus crisis.

With 276,000 infections and 17,300 deaths as of Thursday evening, the EU, with its 450 million inhabitants, is the epicentre of the pandemic, ahead of the United States, the country with the largest number of infections. And the numbers continue to rise dramatically. The pandemic, which respects no borders, urgently requires a Europe-wide and international response. But Thursday’s summit demonstrated the EU’s inability to provide such an answer. It concluded amid divisions and acrimony.

The conflict was triggered by the question of how the governments should finance the huge bailouts with which they sought to respond to the crisis. These measures were aimed primarily at strengthening the banks and major corporations. Of the €756 billion bailout package adopted by the German government, €600 billion will go to large corporations, €50 billion to small business and the self-employed, and smaller amounts to social services and health care, which are essential to combat the pandemic and its consequences. A similar process is taking place in other countries.

Nonetheless, the vast expenditures and economic shutdown have driven some states to the verge of bankruptcy, especially those which were bled dry by the global financial crisis in 2008 and the austerity measures subsequently imposed on them by the EU.

For example, Greece’s state debt rose from 125 percent of GDP in 2008 to 181 percent today. This was a direct product of the so-called bailout programmes of the “troika” of the EU, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund. This included loans to the Greek government, which took on additional debt in order to repay the banks with extortionate interest rates. The price was paid by the working class in the form of a decimation of pensions and social spending.

The same occurred for Portugal, Spain, Italy and other southern European countries. Italy’s state debt, for example, rose from 106 percent at the time of the financial crisis to 135 percent of GDP today, even though social spending has been drastically cut.

One result of these austerity measures is the low number of hospital beds, which is partly responsible for the high numbers of deaths from COVID-19. Italy has 3.2 hospital beds per 1,000 inhabitants, while Greece has 4.2 beds per 1,000 inhabitants. By contrast, Germany has eight and France six. The difference is even greater when it comes to intensive care beds, which determine whether acute patients live or die. Germany leads the way with 29 intensive care beds for every 100,000 inhabitants, while France has 11.6, Italy 12.5, and Greece six.

Nine countries, including France, Italy and Spain, proposed financing the additional spending on the coronavirus crisis with bonds issued by all EU member states. This would have the advantage that every country would have to pay the same, relatively low, interest rate. German state debt has a negative interest rate of -0.5 percent, meaning the German state makes money when it takes on new debt. By contrast, Italy has to pay 1.3 percent, and this figure can quickly shoot upwards if currency speculators smell blood.

But the proposal was firmly rejected by the Germans and Dutch. The video conference dragged on for six hours, and sharp divisions reportedly emerged. French President Emmanuel Macron warned that the survival of the European idea was at stake. Italian Prime Minister Conte threatened to leave the summit, and published his own statement calling on the EU to develop innovative financial measures within the next 10 days.

The Italian newspaper Fatto Quotidiano subsequently declared in the title of its article that Conte had told “a dead Europe to piss off.” The Italian daily Corriere de l la Sera warned of the end of the European project, while the financial newspaper Il Sole-24 quoted a diplomat as saying, “When you count the dead, you’re not counting the billions.”

An agreement was eventually reached to postpone a decision for two weeks. During this period, the EU finance ministers will be tasked with drafting a proposal. As the coronavirus crisis intensifies, with even government officials warning that a tsunami is about to hit, the EU is taking a two-week break.

The German government merely wants to offer the financially struggling countries loans from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), which was established in 2012 as a response to the European debt crisis and currently has capacity for €410 billion worth of lending. These loans come with innumerable strings attached. Governments that take them on must agree to sweeping cuts to public services and social spending. In other words, they would set into motion another round of austerity measures that would have a devastating impact on working people.

The dispute over so-called coronabonds is just the latest example of how Europe’s ruling class have responded to the coronavirus with a wave of nationalism.

“When the virus arrives, everyone is left to their own devices,” commented Der Spiegel already three weeks ago. With the looming crisis in Italy coming into view, Germany and France responded, at a time when Italy had 4,000 infections, and now over 9,000 deaths, by imposing a ban on the export of protective clothing and masks. The Italian government’s appeal for help to the EU to supply protective clothing and other medical aid was ignored.

This set a pattern for subsequent developments. Although the European leaders initially issued ceremonial pledges not to unilaterally close their borders, they rapidly took precisely this step. The result was queues of trucks of up to 60 kilometres, which led to the partial disruption of supply chains for important foodstuffs.

The struggle against the coronavirus crisis, the deepest crisis since the end of the Second World War, requires an international response that unconditionally prioritises human life and social need over capitalist private profit. The latest EU summit confirmed that the EU is utterly incapable of doing this.

The EU and its institutions do not embody European unity. Rather, they represent European big business and the banks, which plunder the working class and defend their profit interests. Under conditions of deep crisis, this inevitably leads to nationalist divisions and the flareup of chauvinism. That was the case during the financial crisis and it is reemerging once again in a more advanced form.

The struggle against the coronavirus pandemic is inseparable from the fight against capitalism and the European Union. It demands the confiscation and nationalisation of the incredible wealth acquired over the last decade by a tiny layer of multi-millionaires and billionaires. The European working class must unite in the struggle for the United Socialist States of Europe.

UK government buried 2016 report exposing catastrophic NHS failings during flu pandemic

Steve James

Late in 2016, the British government and health authorities held “Exercise Cygnus,” a three-day training exercise intended to determine readiness for a novel respiratory influenza pandemic.

Cygnus aimed to test coordination between hospitals, health authorities, those tasked with tracking the disease and central government. The results of the report have never been made public. At the time, however, the British government’s then chief medical officer, Professor Sally Davies, told a health conference, World Innovation in Health, that the exercise “killed a lot of people.”

She explained, starkly, “It became clear that we could not cope with the excess bodies, for instance. It becomes very worrying about the deaths, and what that will do to society as you start to get all those deaths ...”

Davies added that internal problems were compounded by “the lack of vaccines and then the global traffic and the lack of solidarity ... a severe one will stretch everyone.”

A 2017 Board Paper from Matthew Swindells, operations and information director of NHS [National Health Service] England, underscored the point that the exercise “challenged the NHS to review its response to an overwhelmed service with reduced staff availability.”

Four years later, very little can be found on Cygnus. The report has been buried for fear workers would be alerted to the immense dangers posed by a pandemic. This would have cut across the drive of the ruling class everywhere to slash social spending to enrich themselves.

COVID-19 is a novel form of coronavirus, a large family that includes previously highly dangerous forms such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV). But the exercise examining the impact of a new and virulent flu strain is of immediate relevance.

Cygnus came after years in which governments and public health authorities worldwide had already come to a broad understanding of the dangers posed to millions by a novel influenza virus, new strains of which emerge every few months.

In 2011, the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) steering group on global shocks considered a flu pandemic as among the most serious society was likely to face. It warned, “Over the past three centuries, a flu pandemic has been identified every 25 to 30 years on average.”

Factors multiplying their impact included poor health policies, poor water supply and underlying ecological and socioeconomic changes, while “the increasing number of highly populated and heavily concentrated mega-cities, where weak public health systems and unsanitary living conditions often prevail, is a trend that exacerbates vulnerability factors for pandemics.”

The US National Intelligence Council warned, “An easily transmissible novel respiratory pathogen that kills or incapacitates more than one percent of its victims is among the most disruptive events possible. Such an outbreak could result in millions of people suffering and dying in every corner of the world in less than six months.”

The failure to prepare for an event such as the COVID-19 pandemic is criminal. Publicly available documents make clear that the British government knew what was coming, if not exactly when.

In 2011, the Department of Health (DoH) published its “UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011” and circulated it to hospitals, health boards and local authorities. It acknowledged that “large swathes of the population may become infected by the new virus over a relatively short period of time,” possibly leading to “significant severe illness and mortality.”

The DoH outlined a “reasonable worst case” based on previous pandemics, warning of up to 50 percent of the population suffering symptoms over one or more pandemic waves lasting 15 weeks. Assuming no effective treatment was available, a death rate of 2.5 percent could be anticipated. This would equate to around 750,000 people, although the authors reduced this, assuming some level of care, to between 210,000 and 315,000. Half of those could be expected to occur during the three peak weeks of the pandemic.

Critical care services would, in the case of a severe illness, be overwhelmed. “Critical care services are both small and specialist so have limited capacity to expand … demand may continue to escalate causing acute pressures on all health services, particularly during the peak weeks.” Therefore, “it may be necessary to prioritise access to some services in an ethically appropriate way.”

Britain currently has less than 5,000 intensive care beds. At this moment, exhibition and conference centres are being requisitioned in the frantic hope of perhaps doubling this total in time for the imminent and likely overwhelming “surge” in critical cases.

The DoH warned that the police and the military would be impacted by the disease and “resilience plans should not therefore assume that local military units would provide support or have personnel available with either the requisite skills or equipment to perform specialist tasks.”

Public Health England’s “Pandemic Influenza Response Plan 2014” underscored the continuing importance attached to the pandemic threat. “Given the uncertainty and the potential impact of influenza pandemic, pandemic influenza has been classified by the Cabinet Office as the number one threat to the UK population,” it stated.

The 2017 Cabinet Office National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies again highlighted pandemic flu as the highest impact emergency the country was likely to face, equaled only by large-scale chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attacks. The register reiterated the figure of between 20,000 and 750,000 prospective fatalities.

For nearly a decade, probably much longer, the British government and public health authorities and their peers internationally have been preparing, on paper at least, for a flu pandemic likely to kill millions worldwide.

Yet nothing was done, as cuts of tens of billions of pounds to the NHS and other health services continued unabated. Today we see:

• Conference centres, little more than large sheds, being converted into emergency hospitals and morgues to be staffed by overstressed health workers and retired volunteers risking their own lives.

• Thousands of medical ventilators belatedly being ordered, built to competing designs by rival business consortia, none of whom will produce a meaningful number of devices by the time of the greatest “surge” of COVID-19 victims.

• Inadequate supplies of protective equipment and cleaning materials at all levels of health provision, while engineers and buyers are scrambling frantically to source components and medicines.

• Even the previous minimum levels of community testing—one of the most essential tools to confront and eradicate the virus—was abandoned, along with rigorous contact tracing.

While the ruling class’s criminal neglect of pandemic preparation is daily ever more apparent, the most sweeping anti-democratic emergency powers ever seen outside of wartime have been implemented with cross-party agreement. Untold sums are being poured into the bank accounts of big business, while workers are being forced to continue working in unsafe conditions as countless jobs and small businesses are wiped out.

Faced with the pandemic threat, a government committed to public health would:

• ensure the fullest cooperation with and integration of all global scientific and medical efforts to identify, track and warn the world’s population of emerging viral dangers; mobilise whatever resources were required to stop the infection as close to its sources as possible and instigate the most rigorous testing and contact tracing;
  
• pour billions into constant and easily scalable supplies of viral medications and vaccines, critical care beds, ventilators, protective equipment, as well as ensuring sufficient well-paid and trained staff capable of being mobilised;
  
• make rational preparation for the most efficient emergency production of any additional resources required to provide the highest quality medical support to everyone impacted directly and indirectly by the disease and its consequences.

Working people are posed with urgently taking up the struggle for such a socialist government.

Coronavirus in Europe: Overworked hospitals become death traps

Gregor Link

The coronavirus pandemic has so far claimed over 23,000 lives worldwide as of this writing. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the number of confirmed cases in Germany is now almost 44,000, exceeding the number of cases in South Korea (9,240) and Iran (29,400), and rapidly approaching the levels in Spain (over 56,000), the United States (almost 76,500) and Italy (almost 81,000), where the highly infectious virus has already killed more than 8,200 people and continues to rage despite a general curfew.

While the army in the north of Italy is still transporting coffins away because they can no longer be buried by the completely overburdened crematoria, in the last 24 hours over 700 people have again fallen victim to the virus.

The criminal inactivity of European governments in recent days has led to a murderous and vicious circle of overwork, infection and work absences in hospitals throughout the continent. The first threatening signs of this were announced by Italian research institutes on Tuesday. According to these reports, 5,760 of the cases of infection in Italy have been among health care workers.

A report in the New York Times gives an insight into the catastrophic conditions already prevailing in European hospitals. In the province of Brescia, the centre of the outbreak in Italy, 10 to 15 percent of doctors and nurses have been infected and incapacitated, according to a doctor from the region. But the problem is widespread throughout Europe. In Italy, France and Spain, more than 30 doctors and nurses have died of the coronavirus, and thousands of others have had to isolate themselves, according to the Times.

In France, 490 health workers have been isolated due to infection with the virus. In Spain, where the number of cases doubles every four days, the authorities say that as many as 5,400 doctors are infected, almost 14 percent of all those who are ill.

In the countryside, the Times says, some Spanish communities have had to send up to 30 percent of their nurses home for health reasons over the past week. In the capital, Madrid, the mass deaths have led to the temporary storage of corpses in the Olympic skating stadium before they can be buried.

In all three countries, the ranks of doctors and nurses are thinning, the newspaper concludes. At the same time, the percentage of infected people who are currently showing no symptoms remains unclear. As they are not sufficiently protected in their daily life-saving missions, and there is a lack of protective equipment at all corners and ends, “infected [health care] workers and their clinics are increasingly becoming active disease carriers.”

A spokesman for the Spanish nurses’ union SATSE told the Times that even when it was already known the virus was circulating in hospitals, they were told to limit the use of protective equipment to certain circumstances. The absence of their colleagues, in turn, has increased the pressure on the remaining hospital staff, who are already under extreme stress. Hospitals in Spain are already among the worst sources of infection in the country.

The assessments of leading epidemiologists and doctors leave no doubt that the catastrophe that has shaken Italy, Spain and France could become a bitter reality in Germany in the coming weeks if the appropriate measures are not introduced.

Last Friday, Lothar Wieler, head of the Robert Koch Institute, a public health institute in Germany, warned the press that the pandemic was of a “magnitude I could never have imagined myself.” Since then, the number of infections in Germany has almost doubled and the death toll has quadrupled to 239. Moreover, serious epidemiologists estimate that the number of unreported cases could be 10 times the official figures.

“Anyone who still thinks that the German health care system can easily cope with a situation like the one in Italy has not understood anything,” newsweekly Der Spiegel quotes Gerald Gass, President of the German Hospital Federation. Doctors and hospital directors warned the news magazine of an “impending catastrophe” and the “massive effects” of the pandemic.

Der Spiegel itself speaks of a “state of emergency” and an “imminent shortage of ventilators.” Countless hospitals and nursing staff are already at the absolute limit of their capacity. At least 17,000 nursing positions are presently unoccupied.

“Patients are simply pushed directly into the intensive care unit without anyone looking to see if they might be contagious,” one nurse told Spiegel. “By the time a diagnosis is made, we have all had contact with them—and without protective clothing.” The whole station then subsequently becomes contaminated.

“Consideration that a doctor or nurse has already been infected and could thus have become a risk for patients and colleagues is no longer taken into account in some places,” Der Spiegel ’s cover story continues. “A loss of staff cannot be compensated for, despite all efforts to recruit students and retired doctors for the crisis.”

The infection rate among medical staff is rising rapidly throughout Germany, like the situation in France, Spain and Italy. At the same time, protective clothing and disinfectants are becoming scarce in more and more German hospitals, so that some clinics have had to provisionally purchase alcohol from industrial painters and meat producers, reports Der Spiegel. The senior physician of a private clinic from Bavaria openly expressed the inhuman situation that nursing staff face under these conditions: “Everyone works until they have symptoms. Otherwise it can no longer be managed.”

Moreover, the pressure to maintain profits ensures that many clinics are dependent “on income from knee prostheses, hip operations or heart catheter examinations.” These lucrative procedures are still being performed, although experts “often consider them unnecessary.”

An open letter from nursing staff to the Federal Ministry of Health, signed by 300,000 people on the Internet within a few days, quotes from a communication of the Baden-Württemberg Hospital Association, which was apparently coordinated with the state ministries: “Efforts are being made to obtain protective material, but [...] one does not know when it will be available. If none can be organised, we should simply continue working without protection.”

In the meantime, reports are piling up in the media of sick people who find themselves in front of closed medical practices in search of COVID-19 tests and are then forced to wait in the cold for hours and fill out countless documents before being granted access to a container clinic.

Wherever infection rates are rising rapidly, Europe lacks the basic necessities to effectively counter the pandemic. For example, nurses in the Grand Est region of France are forced to wrap their shoes in plastic bags and tape because medically sealed boots are nowhere to be found.

Dr. Klaus Reinhardt, President of the German Medical Association, recently sent a confidential letter to Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn, listing some of the most important shortcomings. On Wednesday, he told former Handelsblatt publisher Gabor Steingart, “For weeks now, colleagues working in outpatient departments and their staff have been working without adequate protection. The nursing staff visit elderly people to be cared for mainly at home and thus move unprotected among the group of patients most at risk of death. General practitioners, who in their practice have daily contact with possibly infected patients without protective masks, must nevertheless guarantee the normal care of numerous nursing home patients. The case of a chain infection in a nursing home in Würzburg with nine deaths is a warning example.”

Jean-Paul Hamon, chairman of the largest French doctors’ association, also expressed “particular concern” to French television about the lack of protection for geriatric nurses and office-based doctors. The latter made up most of the physicians in France who have died of coronavirus.

In German hospitals, according to Reinhardt, the “normal” care of people with life-threatening illnesses is beginning to collapse because “strokes, heart attacks, cerebral haemorrhages and intestinal obstructions continue to occur unchanged.” Meanwhile, Reinhardt continues, general practitioners have “no protective material left” and it is “also not buyable, by anyone, because it has simply disappeared from the market.”

The 20 masks per day and per practice promised by the government would “not help” in this situation, and the masks actually available were “in no way sufficient.” As reported by Der Spiegel, in some cases clinics currently have to pay 25 times the normal price for respiratory masks.

The immediate cause of the acute shortage of respirators is that a shipment of 6 million respirators, which should have arrived in Germany on March 20, had surprisingly “disappeared without a trace.” The Federal Office for Armed Forces Equipment is responsible for the “central procurement” of coronavirus relief supplies. As reported by Der Spiegel, citing an internal report of the military department, the urgently needed masks “disappeared” under the eyes of the army authority in Kenya. The background to the incident is currently still unclear.

Meanwhile, Attilio Fontana, president of the Italian region of Lombardy, told the news magazine that they would “soon not be able to offer the sick any more treatment” because there were not enough respirators.

“There is a lack of protective equipment everywhere, improvisation is widespread,” doctor Antonio Antela told the Times from his sickbed at the university hospital in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The doctor had been admitted to intensive care with pneumonia and a positive coronavirus test. Hamon, who is also infected, concludes, “The state is completely unprepared. It owes us an explanation.”

The real explanation is that behind the apparent “chaos” and the omnipresent scarcity, there is a class policy that has been consciously pursued in Germany, Italy, France, Spain and countless other countries by successive governments since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In Germany alone, between 1990 and 2010, approximately 180,000 hospital beds (26 percent) were cut, 360 hospitals (15 percent) were closed, and the number of hospital beds for acute inpatient care was drastically reduced.

“This pandemic has been rolling towards us foreseeably for weeks,” notes the open letter from the nurses to the Ministry of Health. The letter, which also demands significant wage increases, explains: “We expect from you in concrete terms [...] an immediate organisation of the procurement of effective protective materials, including all possibilities. In case of emergency, also by nationalising manufacturers and their suppliers to protect us nurses.”

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) advocates uniting workers across Europe and beyond in the struggle against the virus and the criminal indifference of governments. The effects of the global pandemic are, in the eyes of millions of people, proof of the unscrupulousness and moral, economic and political bankruptcy of the ruling class.

The working class must counter this policy with its own programme. A statement by the ICFI published on February 28 explains that the fight against the pandemic requires globally coordinated emergency measures and the immediate provision of trillions of dollars and euros. These demands are part of an international socialist perspective and must be implemented against the resistance of all bourgeois parties and trade unions. We call on all those who agree with these demands to contact us today.

Nearly 19,000 pandemic deaths in Europe as savaged health care systems are overwhelmed

Thomas Scripps & Alice Summers

Coronavirus deaths surged in Europe yesterday, with several countries recording their highest daily totals to date.

Throughout continental Europe 34,028 new cases were reported and 2,352 deaths. The total number who have perished in the continent in just six weeks since the first death is approaching 20,000 (18,754).

Manchester Royal Infirmary

Italy saw 919 fatalities, taking the overall number to 9,134. The number of recorded infections climbed past China to 86,498. There are fears that the poorer southern regions of the country will soon be put under the same pressures suffered by the richer north.

Spain also suffered its worst 24-hour death toll of 769 deaths, bringing its total to 4,934. The number of cases increased from 56,188 to 64,059.

France saw 299 deaths, with the total now at 1,995. There are currently 32,964 cases of infection and 3,787 people are on life support, meaning nearly half of France’s ventilator beds are occupied. The government has extended a national lockdown by two weeks.

The UK recorded an additional 185 deaths, bringing the toll to 759. Recorded cases of infection increased to 14,543, but this number is kept artificially low by a lack of testing. The spread of the disease is indicated by the fact that Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Health Secretary Matt Hancock and the Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty all tested positive yesterday. Prince Charles is already infected.

The COVID-19 pandemic is preying on Europe’s 500 million-plus population whose health care services have been decimated by years of government austerity and private sector looting. Johnson tested positive for COVID-19 immediately after taking part—outside the front door of 10 Downing Street—in a national demonstration of support for beleaguered doctors, nurses and support staff in the National Health Service (NHS). Millions left their homes at 8:00 p.m. to cheer and bang pots and pans, after reports of hospitals full to overflowing and exhausted staff working without personal protective equipment and falling ill as a result—scenes already all too familiar in Italy, Spain and elsewhere in Europe.

That Johnson joined in was an act of monumental cynicism—not only because his inaction for weeks has allowed the spread of the coronavirus, but because the NHS has been slashed to the bone by his Conservative Party in government over the past decade, leaving it unable to meet the challenge it now faces.

Health care spending per head grew at a rate of just 0.6 percent per year in the period 2009-10 to 2016-17, compared to 5.4 percent between 1996-97 and 2009-10. In 2015, the NHS was told to find £22 billion of “efficiency” savings by 2020. Forty-seven percent of NHS trusts were in deficit in 2018-19 as well as 67 percent of acute hospital trusts. The overall shortfall is estimated at £5 billion.

The UK has fewer doctors and nurses per head than any developed economy bar Poland. Britain’s 2.8 doctors and 7.9 nurses per thousand population compare to an OECD average of 3.6 doctors and 10.1 nurses per thousand. There are currently 44,000 vacancies for nursing jobs (12 percent of the necessary workforce) and 10,000 for doctors. Overall, the NHS has 100,000 vacancies, roughly one in every 12 jobs.

Manchester Royal Infirmary Accident and Emergency department

The number of hospital beds has dropped dramatically—17,230 were lost in just nine years between April-June 2010 and 2019, taking the total to 127,225. In 1987, there were 299,000 beds. Since then, the population has increased by over 9 million and grown older. The number of beds per thousand population has dropped from around four in 2000 to around 2.5 today.

Huge cuts to medical resources have resulted in chronically overcrowded hospitals—with occupancy of overnight general and acute beds regularly topping 95 percent over the winter. The NHS has a maintenance backlog, half of it considered safety-critical, totalling £6 billion.

In France, the health service has likewise been gutted by at least three decades of cuts and so-called “modernisation” efforts. Between 2000 and 2015, the number of hospital beds was reduced by around 15 percent. Approximately 64,000 inpatient beds were lost in the 13 years between 2003 and 2016.

After years of budget cuts, nearly half (48 percent) of French hospitals were running a deficit in 2016, and between 2002 and 2012, the indebtedness of public health care establishments tripled.

A 2018 health bill demanded €960 million of savings, with a further €910 million demanded last year. A new health bill, passed by the French Senate in July 2019, aims to make a further €3.8 billion of “savings” by 2022.

French medical workers at over 200 facilities took strike action on multiple occasions last year in opposition to this devastating assault on the health service and against attacks on their pay and working conditions.

In Italy, the government reduced public health financing by €900 million in 2012, €1.8 billion in 2013 and another €2 billion in 2014. In 2016, 18 out of the 20 Italian regions exceeded their annual health budget within the first half of the year.

The health service in Italy has seen staff numbers drop 6.5 percent between 2009 and 2016, from 693,716 to 648,663, and hospital bed numbers fall 11 percent, from 218,264 to 192,548. Wait times to see a specialist increased by between 20 and 27 days, depending on the complaint, between 2014 and 2017.

In Spain, health care funding per capita is around 15 percent less than the European Union (EU) average. In 2012, the Popular Party government of Mariano Rajoy adopted a new health care bill which would see €7 billion in cuts over two years. Dozens of public hospitals and other health care centres were privatised or closed and nearly 20,000 nursing positions wiped out.

Hospital bed numbers fell by around 4.26 percent between 2010 and 2016, dropping from 115,426 to 110,509. Spain ranks in 73rd place in the world for the number of hospital beds, with only three beds per 1,000 people. Even prior to the pandemic, waiting times for key operations continued to grow, with patients in some parts of Spain having to wait up to 177 days before hospitals could operate.

The consequences for the European working class have been brutal. The European Commission’s “Health at a Glance” report for 2018 notes: “While life expectancy increased by at least 2 to 3 years over the decade from 2001 to 2011 in all EU countries, the gains have slowed down markedly since 2011 in many countries particularly in Western Europe, increasing by less than half a year between 2011 and 2016.”

In words that sum up the terrible human cost of the slashing of public health services by governments of all political stripes, the report states, “More than 1.2 million people in EU countries died in 2015 from diseases and injuries that could have been avoided either through stronger public health policies or more effective and timely health care.”

Especially concerning in light of the coronavirus pandemic the report suggests: “This slowdown appears to have been driven by a slowdown in the rate of reduction of deaths from circulatory diseases and periodical increases in mortality rates among elderly people due partly to bad flu seasons in some years” (emphasis added).

This trend falls most heavily on the most oppressed sections of the working class. According to the same report, “On average across the EU, 30-year-old men with a low level of education can expect to live about 8 years less than those with a university degree.” For women, the gap is four years, “These gaps largely reflect differences in exposure to risk factors, but also indicate disparities in access to care.”

The COVID-19 pandemic is throwing the consequences of these years of health care cuts into sharp relief. Austerity was justified on the grounds that there was simply no money available to address pressing social needs. Now hundreds of billions have been made available by governments to corporations across the continent, proving that what has taken place is a class policy of social devastation in service to the profits of a tiny elite. The working class must respond with their own class programme of socialist internationalism.

Coronavirus cases in United States surpass 100,000

Bryan Dyne

The number of officially confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States is now greater than 102,000, while the number of deaths caused by COVID-19 has surpassed 1,600. This includes more than 16,500 new cases yesterday, the most anywhere in the world, along with nearly 300 new deaths. The country alone now accounts for more than one-sixth of all coronavirus cases internationally.

A person is taken on a stretcher into the United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, Texas after going through testing for COVID-19 on Thursday (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

The number of cases continues to increase exponentially in the United States. It has taken only four days for the number of known cases and deaths to double, a rate currently faster than the worldwide spread of the virus. The number of cases internationally has reached nearly 600,000 and the death toll now exceeds 27,000, numbers which double every six days. Virtually every country has now reported at least one case of the disease.

Even these numbers are an underestimate of the true magnitude of the pandemic. A recent study done on the coronavirus outbreak onboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship points to the fact that between one in six and one in five cases of COVID-19 are infectious but do not present with any symptoms, meaning that a person can easily and unknowingly spread the disease.

These and other medical reports are why the World Health Organization has stressed the need to “test, test, test” for the coronavirus, as well as trace the contacts of those with a confirmed case. While aggressive measures have been taken in places like China, South Korea, Singapore and Japan, it took the Trump administration nearly two months from when the first coronavirus case was detected in the US to implement mass testing.

As a result, the caseload in the United States has spiraled out of control and the hospital systems in the most affected regions face imminent collapse. In New York City, which has more than 25,000 cases and is the national epicenter of the disease, hospitals are rapidly reaching their capacity to treat the most critical patients. Even there, the city government explicitly states that “Unless you are hospitalized and a diagnosis will impact your care, you will not be tested.” In other words, because the rate of hospitalization is still relatively low, if true testing and contact tracing was done in the city and across the country, it would likely increase the number of known cases of COVID-19 by a factor of ten.

There is also growing evidence that both the case numbers and death tolls are being manipulated. An article in Gizmodo has reported that a teenager who tested positive for the coronavirus that recently died is not being counted in the official death toll because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ruled his cause of death as septic shock. Sepsis is not a disease, but a potentially fatal overreaction by the body’s immune system to an infection, such as COVID-19. Further investigation is needed to determine how many similar cases exist in the US and internationally.

In an attempt to get some measure of control over the socially explosive situation in the country’s largest city, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has asked the federal government for 30,000 ventilators, necessary equipment to keep the most critical patients alive as the infection spreads to their lungs. Cuomo’s request comes in the wake of the increasing evidence that COVID-19, in sharp contrast to the seasonal flu, can require weeks or months of ventilator support to properly recover.

In response, President Donald Trump callously remarked, “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.” He then questioned the severity of the pandemic, stating, “You know, you’re going to major hospitals sometimes, they’ll have two ventilators. And now, all of a sudden, they’re saying, can we order 30,000 ventilators?”

Trump’s criminal and malicious comments ignore the vast experience of the virus in China, as well as the ongoing struggles of doctors in Italy, Spain and Iran, which all currently have at least five times more deaths per capita than the United States and far more deaths total. In those three countries, the most critical resource for keeping critical patients alive is ventilators. The shortage of ventilators in Italy has become so dire that doctors are now being forced to tragically decide who receives their aid and who does not. Without any new equipment, New York will soon face the same situation.

Conditions in Detroit are also rapidly approaching a point of no return. The Henry Ford Health System has warned, as a result of a surge of COVID-19 cases in the metro area, that patients “extremely sick” may be “ineligible for ICU or ventilator care.” They are also being told to inform the hospital when they are admitted whether or not they have a do not resuscitate order, and that those “who have the best of getting better are our first priority.”

The accelerating spread of the coronavirus has also forced 25 US states, 74 counties, 14 cities and one Native American territory to issue some form of stay at home order, affecting at least 228 million people nationally. All nonessential businesses in these areas have been closed and people are only permitted to leave their homes to get groceries, visit doctors and other activities deemed “necessary” by those governments. All large gatherings are banned.

This process is also occurring at the international level. Every country on the planet has some form of travel restriction in place as a result of the pandemic, and much of the European population has also been ordered to stay home. At the same time, governments are also using the opportunity to further militarize their borders, such as the plan by the US to deploy 1,000 troops to the US-Canadian border and further increase the military presence at the US-Mexican border.

These measures have been sharply criticized by the World Health Organization as both not being enough to stop the virus and being detrimental to international collaboration to halt the virus. Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned Wednesday that while isolation can “suppress and stop transmission” the virus will likely “resurge” in the aftermath if nothing else is done.