COVID-19 and tropical cyclone hit South Pacific Islands

John Braddock

Tropical Cyclone Harold, the most powerful storm to hit the Pacific in over two years, has left a trail of death and destruction across the region. In the Solomon Islands, 28 people went missing, feared dead, after being swept off a boat in the oncoming storm.

The passengers were travelling to the island of Malaita on April 3, following government instructions for people to return home due to COVID-19. Rescue efforts were hampered by limited resources because of the coronavirus crisis. Although the country has no confirmed cases, the sole rescue helicopter could not fly because a pilot was in quarantine.

The cyclone developed into a category 5 storm, pounding Vanuatu on April 6–7 before heading on to Fiji. With winds as high as 235km/h, the slow-moving system passed directly over Vanuatu’s main island of Santo while hundreds of people sheltered in evacuation centres.

Luganville, a town of 16,000 people, has been cut off by flooding, landslides and debris. Up to 70 percent of buildings were damaged, roofs were blown off houses, trees snapped and the council building destroyed. Radio New Zealand described a ship shoved ashore by ferocious waves and rivers spilling over banks, forcing people to flee villages and hide in caves.

Telecommunications provider Vodafone reported a network outage in the islands of Banks, Santo, Malekula and Pentecost. Save the Children’s Luke Ebbs told the media there was “immense” destruction: “In some parts of Santo Island not a single building or structure is free of damage. Homes have been flattened to the point they are unrecognisable.” Many families had lost almost everything and urgently needed humanitarian assistance.

The cyclone was particularly ill-timed for Vanuatu, with a caretaker government in charge following inconclusive elections last month. While there are no reported coronavirus cases, Vanuatu borders are sealed, and gatherings of more than a few people banned. The interim government has relaxed the state of emergency as it contends with the dual crisis, allowing people to travel to seek shelter and go to evacuation centres.

Meanwhile, intensive horse-trading is underway in an attempt to form a government. The Graon Mo Jastis Pati, led by Foreign Minister Ralph Regenvanu, won nine of 52 seats while caretaker Prime Minister Charlot Salwai’s Reunification of Movement for Change and the Vanua’aku Pati both won seven. It is unclear who will emerge as prime minister.

Cyclone Harold moved on to Fiji as a category four storm on Wednesday, with winds of up to 195km/hr. The National Disaster Management Office (NDMO) activated 250 evacuation centres.

The town of Nadi was flooded and left without power after the Ba River burst its banks. Low-lying areas in the capital Suva and Nausori were flooded while many homes suffered damage. The NDMO urged villagers on remote islands and coastal areas to move to higher ground.

With Fiji’s tally of COVID-19 cases currently at 15, the government would not lift its lockdown and curfew restrictions. Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama said people must only evacuate if flooding posed a risk and claimed that contingency plans were in place to prevent any mixing between evacuees and Fijians who were close contacts of COVID-positive patients.

Suva went into lockdown after two cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in the city. More than 300,000 people are confined to their homes, and all non-essential businesses closed for at least two weeks. “Cyclones can kill and so can coronavirus. As we combat these two life-threatening crises, it’s vital that every Fijian do exactly what they are told to do by authorities,” Bainimarama said.

The government has deployed the army to help the police enforce a “zero-tolerance” policy for COVID-19 violations. More than 500 people have been arrested for breaching restrictions. Bainimarama, a former military coup leader, said that the country was “at war” with the virus and warned any “disobedience in our ranks” would be dealt with severely. “We don’t care who you are. Rules are rules,” he declared.

Cyclone Harold had again strengthened to category 5 as it moved away from Fiji and headed towards Tonga on April 9. The capital, Nuku’alofa experienced strong winds, power outages and extensive flooding from an accompanying king tide. Tonga’s government has announced a state of emergency because of the cyclone, after a similar declaration in March aimed at preventing the emergence of COVID-19.

The twin crises underline how vulnerable the peoples of the impoverished Pacific nations are. Cyclone Harold is the most serious since Cyclone Pam, which destroyed much of Vanuatu in 2015, setting livelihoods, infrastructure and the economy back years. Cyclone Winston, which hit Fiji in 2016, left up to 45,000 people, nearly 5 percent of the country’s population, homeless or forced into temporary evacuation centres.

The legacy of colonialism, poverty and underdevelopment, including severely rundown hospitals, renders Pacific nations particularly vulnerable to such disasters. There are currently more than 220 confirmed cases of COVID-19 across the region including six deaths. The measles epidemic in Samoa last year, which killed 83 people, gives an indication of the devastation that this coronavirus could inflict.

The Asian Development Bank has warned that Pacific countries will see economic growth fall by at least 0.3 percent in 2020, but this is likely an underestimate. Fiji, Vanuatu and the Cook Islands have announced short-term fiscal bailout packages as tourism has collapsed. Samoa and Tonga rely heavily on remittances from expatriate populations, who themselves face mass unemployment.

Papua New Guinea’s Treasurer Ian Ling-Stuckey last week said the country faced its worst economic crisis since World War II and estimated that the value of its exports will plummet by at least 13 percent as the prices of resources collapse.

The humanitarian catastrophes intersect with intensifying geo-strategic tensions, stemming from the US-led military build-up throughout the Pacific. As in previous disasters, Australia and New Zealand, the two regional imperialist powers, are only interested in using the havoc to assert their interests and push back against China.

Beijing has sent medical supplies and protective equipment to several Pacific countries and has committed small sums of money to some. In response, Australia’s Morrison government announced that a $2 billion infrastructure lending facility, part of its Pacific “step-up” policy, will be used to help the region recover from the pandemic. Another $1.4 billion in aid already earmarked for the region will be allocated to combat COVID-19 outbreaks.

This expenditure, which basically directs already existing commitments, is totally inadequate to deal with the scale of the crises. New Zealand, for its part, this week deployed an Air Force Orion to Vanuatu to undertake aerial surveillance of the cyclone damage and has made available a paltry $500,000 fund for relief items. Wellington’s total support to Vanuatu, including for coronavirus support is just $US1.5 million thus far.

Australian governments prepare to push workers back into unsafe workplaces

Mike Head

Even as the COVID-19 pandemic worsens dramatically around the world, and Australia’s death toll rises, the country’s “national cabinet” is drawing up plans to get workers back on the job, regardless of unsafe conditions.

Throughout the pages of the financial press in Australia and globally, behind the backs of most of the population, calculations are being made, in explicit dollar terms, about how many lives must be sacrificed in order to restore the profit-making process.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his state and territory counterparts in the national cabinet are trying to mislead and condition public opinion to accept the premature lifting of lockdowns and other restrictions.

Morrison declared on Tuesday that support measures for businesses and workers “cannot go on forever.” He foreshadowed a scaling-down of social and health measures through “trial-type relief of restrictions.”

At the same media conference, the federal Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy said: “We have focal outbreaks. The one that worries us most of all is the community transmission in Sydney.” Reportedly, health officials are tracking evidence of locally-acquired “community transmission” of the virus, with more than 600 cases under investigation.

Nonetheless, Morrison promoted the notion of lifting restrictions. He said “no one point of data” would determine when social-isolation measures would be eased, and it would likely be a staggered exit strategy, from state to state.

Yesterday, media reports revealed the national cabinet was considering plans to use Western Australia (WA) and South Australia as “guinea pigs” for a broader easing of restrictions, by invoking the relatively low number of confirmed cases in both states to rollback lockdown measures. Testing rates in WA are the second-lowest of any state in the country, underscoring the fact that these plans are based on woefully-inadequate data.

For now, Morrison has urged people to “stay at home” over Easter. “Failure to do so this weekend would completely undo everything we have achieved so far together, and potentially worse,” he said, essentially placing the blame for any new wave of infections on ordinary people.

Morrison gave an indication of the pressure being applied by big business for a full return to work. “The states and territories and I are very conscious that the path out of this is not just avoiding the peak (in new infections) but getting back to some sense of normality,” he said.

The Australian reported on Wednesday that some New South Wales (NSW) state government ministers are “agitating for the state to recalibrate social-distancing measures” because they are “damaging the economy” and “unsustainable.”

In a meeting of NSW members of parliament, calls were made for the adoption of the disastrous “herd immunity” policy, initially adopted by Boris Johnson’s British government, which essentially means exposing the majority of the population to the virus. Thousands of people have died in the UK as a result of this doctrine.

A senior government MP put it crudely: “People have to get sick for this to pass.”

This could involve partial lifting of social-distancing restrictions for people supposedly less vulnerable to the virus, such as schoolchildren, even though young people have died from the illness in the UK and elsewhere.

A “senior health official” told the newspaper that school-aged children and young adults were “the least likely to have symptoms—it would start to increase the herd immunity for the country.”

The official said: “The issue for us in Australia is that at some point you’ve got to start weighing up the consequences. If this goes on for six to 12 months, that could do much greater destruction to our economy and lifestyle than the virus is doing to us.”

The types of capitalist calculations behind these moves were displayed in the Australian Financial Review last Monday. Sam Lovick, former chief economist for CSL, a biotech company, asserted that if restrictions were continued for six months, the economic cost would probably add up to $240 billion.

Compared to his estimates of the number of lives that would be saved, he suggested, “you can reach the somewhat alarming figure of $6 million or more per life saved.”

He urged the newspaper’s readers: “Let’s not be shy about balancing the economy against health. Governments do it all the time. The Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee rejects 69 percent of anti-cancer drugs because they are not cost-effective.”

The economist gave the example of a drug that would cost “more than $30,000–$70,000 for each (quality adjusted) year of life saved.” He explained: “Anything higher is too much; $4 million for a drug that saves a newborn for 80 happy years appears to be the yardstick.”

Lovick advocated the strict quarantining of those people mostly likely to “need intensive care and most likely to die,” combined with allowing COVID-19 to “spread through the community in a controlled fashion.” Even though this would place hospitals “under stress.”

While Lovick admitted that not enough was known about COVID-19 to make reliable predictions, his proposals “could save 90 percent of the lives saved by our current aggressive social distancing stance at much lower cost.” By implication, the other 10 percent of deaths would be an acceptable price to pay.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation business editor Ian Verrender commented that Lovick’s view reflected wider processes under capitalism. “Ultimately, the decision comes down to dollars. What monetary value do you place on a human being, on life itself?” he asked.

“Callous as they are, these decisions are being made right now, in Canberra, London, Rome, Beijing, Madrid, Washington, Jakarta, Johannesburg: everywhere that COVID-19 has invaded populations.”

Health experts are warning of the likely death toll from the “herd immunity” doctrine. Infectious disease physician and microbiologist Peter Collignon told the Australian: “[T]he trouble with the idea of building up herd immunity, which I think Sweden seems to be following, is you’ve got to get to 60 or 70 percent of the population infected. The trouble with that is that with the mortality rate of this virus, that’s an awful lot of deaths.”

James McCaw, an infectious disease modeler with the Doherty Institute, said that if social-distancing measures were relaxed, the numbers of infections would skyrocket. “We know that our population is still largely susceptible, and so if we relaxed and went back to normal we would see a rapid and explosive resurgence in epidemic activity,” he said.

These developments express two irreconcilably opposed forces. For the ruling capitalist class, workers must be put back to work as quickly as possible so that their labour power can be exploited to once again produce profits and wealth. For the working class, it is a question of saving lives and stopping all non-essential production, which means restructuring economic life along socialist lines, on the basis of social need, not private profit.

Canada: More than 5 million workers apply for government assistance amid coronavirus pandemic

Roger Jordan

More than 5 million workers—or about one in ever fourth person in Canada's workforce—has applied for government assistance since the coronavirus pandemic erupted across Canada in the second week of March.

This staggering figure is comprised of all those who applied for Employment Insurance and the newly-created Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) between March 16 and Wednesday evening. This number is continuing to swell as people whose birthdays fall in October, November, and December were only allowed to apply for the CERB beginning Thursday.

In a separate report released yesterday, Statistics Canada said that 1.1 million workers lost their jobs in March, causing the monthly national unemployment rate to leap from 5.6 to 7.8 percent. As unprecedented as these figures are, they provide only a partial indication of the social and economic crisis triggered by the pandemic.

The true number of job losses is vastly higher, as indicated in the tsunami of CERB applications. The data for the Statscan report was compiled during the week of March 15 to 21, which was the very week when government-ordered closures and other social distancing measures became widespread. Layoffs and the sudden collapse of work for many self-employed and gig economy workers during the final weeks of March will only be reflected in May’s labour market report. Even so, the 1.1 million job losses in March were more than double the figure most economists had projected, and about eight times higher than the 125,000 workers who lost their jobs in January 2009 at the height of the global financial crisis.

The Statscan report also noted that 1.3 million Canadians worked no hours in March, but still considered themselves to be employed. Another 800,000 worked half as many hours as usual.

Job cuts have come from all economic sectors. Air Canada, the country’s largest carrier, announced the elimination of 16,500 jobs last week. Mountain Equipment Co-op shuttered its 22 stores nationwide and cut 1,300 full-time and part-time positions, while Cineplex closed 165 movie theatres and laid off over 10,000 part-time staff in Canada and the United States. The Calgary Stampede, which bills itself as the largest outdoor show on earth, cut 900 staff, and Cirque du Soleil axed over 4,600 employees. Layoffs have also swept through the auto industry, with the Detroit Three and Toyota shuttering production, impacting over 30,000 workers. Manufacturing giant Bombardier has cut over 12,000 jobs.

The right-wing populist government in Alberta also seized on the pandemic as an opportunity to lay off over 25,000 education workers, including teaching assistants, cleaners, and bus drivers. Quebec City let go over 2,000 workers, while the City of Calgary cut 1,200 part-time and casual staff, and the City of Vancouver laid off 1,500 workers.

The list goes on and on.

As millions of workers across the country have been thrown out of their jobs, the Trudeau government’s principle focus has been transferring of hundreds of billions of dollars into the hands of the banks and big business, so as to protest the wealth and investments of Canada's bloated financial elite. The government, the Bank of Canada, the Canadian Mortgage Housing Corporation (CMHC) and other state agencies have funnelled more $650 billion into the banks and big business literally overnight.

Buoyed by the gargantuan infusion of state cash, the ruling elite has celebrated by driving up share prices on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Thus, even as the job and income losses for working people have swelled into an avalanche, the TSE has rallied, making up much of the ground it lost in early March.

While queuing up for major infusions of public money, companies are laying off their employees in droves to avoid paying social insurance, other payroll taxes, and benefits. Even the pledge by the government to cover 75 percent of workers’ wages for three months if companies agree not to lay them off has failed to prevent an unprecedented jobs massacre.

In contrast to the vast sums being made available to the banks and big business, workers, many of whom have little to no savings, have had to wait until this week to apply for the CERB. It will pay those who have lost their job or cannot work because they are sick or looking after someone who is sick a monthly stipend of $2000, or less than the average monthly rent on a 1-bedroom apartment in Toronto, for four months at most.

Hundreds of thousands of workers will not even receive this inadequate support. Self-employed workers who have not lost all of their income, workers who did not earn a minimum of $5,000 last year, those who were unemployed prior to the crisis, and students seeking summer jobs are currently ineligible for CERB benefits. A report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, based on the assumption that 2.6 million Canadians would require financial aid, calculated that around 860,000 or one third would not receive anything from the CERB..

The government’s unlimited bailout for the banks and corporations while workers are placed on rations or worse is having devastating social and health care consequences.

According to a survey by credit union TransUnion, two thirds of Canadians have either experienced a loss of income due to the coronavirus or expect to do so. The figure was even higher among those born after 1980, with 72 percent saying they have been impacted. Seventy percent of those affected, including 78 percent of millennials, said they were worried about being able to pay their bills. More than half of those expressing concern said they would not be able to pay bills or loans within four weeks.

On March 18, Food Banks Canada issued an appeal for $150 million in donations to cope with the demand for its services nationwide.

In Toronto, Canada’s largest city, authorities have transformed nine public library locations into food banks to serve thousands of people who can no longer afford to purchase food. Almost 40 percent of privately-operated and charity food bank services have closed down since the onset of the crisis. As a result, further food bank outlets will be established in community centres and community housing buildings.

Food banks in Mississauga and Brampton report that they are struggling to keep up with increased demand. Bob Tremblay, president of Knights Table Brampton, said that his food bank has seen an increase in customers of between 16 and 18 percent. “This is unprecedented in the food bank’s history,” commented Megan Nichols, manager of a Mississauga food bank. “This is more drastic than the 2008-09 recession.”

In addition to providing a pittance for workers, a mere $3 billion is being spent to bolster the overstretched health system. This follows on from decades of vicious austerity measures that have seen social services and health care cut to the bone by all levels of government.

The fact that these policies and the politicians who implemented them are responsible for thousands of deaths was underscored by yesterday’s announcement by federal health officials that they project between 11,000 and 22,000 Canadians will die from COVID-19 in a best-case scenario. If the country’s dilapidated hospitals are overwhelmed, or if social distancing measures are relaxed, the death toll could rise into the hundreds of thousands.

The disastrous social and health crisis triggered by the pandemic underscores the urgency of the working class advancing its own independent solution, one that prioritizes life and human needs over capitalist profit.

Workers must fight for decisive measures to combat the pandemic, including: the shutting down of all non-essential workplaces; systematic universal testing; and the pouring of tens of billions of dollars into the health care system to acquire ventilators and other vital equipment and hire and train new medical personnel. They must also ensure that medical staff and other essential workers receive the necessary protective equipment to perform their work safely. Every worker who has been thrown out of work must receive full compensation for their wages from the state and big business until the pandemic is contained and overcome.

These immediate demands must be tied to a fight for a socialist program. The NDP and trade unions, which for decades have systematically sabotaged opposition to capitalist austerity and the big business assault on workers' social rights, have responded to the crisis by strengthening their alliance with the Trudeau Liberal government. The Canadian Labour Congress even helped draft the regulations for the CERB. In opposition to these nationalist, pro-capitalist organizations, working people must adopt a socialist and internationalist perspective to guide the struggle for a workers’ government that will place social needs and human life before private profit.

Brazilian ruling class backs growing military control as COVID-19 pandemic grips country

Miguel Andrade

The Brazilian political establishment, from business circles to bourgeois editorial boards and the whole spectrum of political parties, is treating as an accomplished fact that President Jair Bolsonaro’s Chief of Staff Gen. Walter Braga Netto has been designated by the military brass to rein in the government’s criminally negligent response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic is rapidly gripping the entire country, with authorities projecting as an “optimistic” scenario of 100,000 deaths in the state of São Paulo alone and admitting to having lost control of even how many tests have been carried out throughout Brazil.

The gross negligence and incompetence of the Bolsonaro administration has called into question the legitimacy of the entire bourgeois setup in Brazil.

With the coronavirus death toll approaching 1,000, the fascistic Brazilian president delivered a prime time speech to the nation in which he again condemned state shutdowns of business to promote social distancing, declaring that “the cure cannot be more bitter than the disease,” while sadistically warning that “unemployment also leads to poverty, hunger, misery and finally death itself.” He also used the address to promote, like US President Donald Trump, the treatment of COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine, even though there is no data proving the efficacy of the drug.

Under these conditions, the increasing military intervention has as its primary goal not aiding the fight against the coronavirus, but rather preventing a social explosion and, if necessary, repressing it.

The decisive turn came with the near firing of Bolsonaro’s health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, on Monday, because of his refusal to endorse the president’s thesis of “vertical” isolation, i.e., sending every adult below the age of 60 back to work.

Major newspapers reported that Bolsonaro had decided to replace Mandetta and was dissuaded chiefly by General Braga Netto and others who feared that his dismissal would strengthen the president’s former right-wing allies and now opponents, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro Governors João Doria and Wilson Witzel. The decisive support for the military was summed up in the Tuesday editorial of O Estado de S. Paulo, which stated, “The role of the military in the cabinet, such as Gen. Braga Netto, has been to protect the president from himself.”

Later, Braga Netto was also praised by Vice President Gen. Hamilton Mourão, who declared he was “doing what we (the military) know, putting the house in order.” Mourão’s statement comes less than a week after he celebrated the 1964 US-backed military coup that inaugurated a 21-year dictatorship by tweeting, “56 years ago, the Armed Forces intervened to face the disorder, subversion and corruption that ravaged institutions and scared the population.”

Similarly, Army Commander Gen. Edson Leal Pujol issued a March 24 statement regarding the military and the coronavirus crisis, in which he said, “The Strong Arm will act if necessary, and the Friendly Hand will be more extended than ever to our Brazilian brothers,” while concluding, “WE WILL FIGHT WITHOUT FEAR!”

There have been reports from within Brazilian far-right circles, no doubt expressing the president’s own nervousness over the situation, that Braga Netto has staged a “glolpe branco,” or soft coup, and kept Bolsonaro on only as a frontman.

The feverish mood within the ruling circles is fed by daily reports of the catastrophic spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country, which is rapidly eroding the legitimacy of the government, with its cruel "back-to-work" campaign and transparent loss of control over the disease in recent weeks.

While authorities have recorded 941 deaths and more than 17,857 total cases as of Thursday, these figures have no credibility. States have no uniform testing methods, and virtually every one of them tests only hospitalized cases, leading the former president of the national medicine oversight organization Anvisa, Claudio Maierovitch, to claim that the real number of cases is up to 15 times higher than the official count. Even considering official numbers, Brazilian deaths were rising a week ago at six times the pace of those in Wuhan, China during the same phase of the outbreak.

Press reports have provided glimpses of the grim reality. Last week, a Washington Post front-page photograph portrayed the Vila Formosa cemetery in the working class eastern sector of São Paulo with dozens of freshly dug graves awaiting incoming corpses that have not even been autopsied. The cemetery has recorded a 50 percent jump in burials.

The country’s largest and richest state, São Paulo, is now preparing its own “back-to-work” order, using statistical manipulations to claim it has “flattened the curve.” This has been accomplished by ceasing to report less severe cases and counting only those resulting in hospitalization. Even with extremely limited testing, São Paulo has 5,682 confirmed cases, 371 deaths and 17,000 unprocessed exams, including those for hundreds of dead patients. The local government now claims it has “succeeded” in lowering the expected deaths to 100,000 over six months for a population of 45 million—that is 10 times more deaths per capita than those recorded in Spain.

In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s capital and second largest city, until 1960, Federal University researchers have found that up to 25 percent of healthcare workers in hospitals treating COVID-19 patients are already infected due to lack of personal protective equipment. This compares to 15 percent in Italy, despite official figures stating that the whole of Rio de Janeiro state has only 1,500 cases and 75 deaths.

Cases and deaths have also been reported in the favelas, the shantytowns of Rio and Sao Paulo, where residents lack secure access to water and sanitation, as well as among the Yanomami people, an Amazon indigenous people known for its remoteness and lack of immune defenses to foreign diseases.

The turn to the blood-soaked and discredited Brazilian military in the midst of this catastrophe is the act of a ruling class that will let no amount of corpses stand in the way of its profits. The near universal criticism of Bolsonaro in Congress and the press is solely due to his unsettling bluntness in stating the goals of big business, which his political adversaries fear will stir anger in the working class.

Mired in an almost six-year economic slump, which led to a seven percent drop in the GDP after the end of the commodity boom and caught in the crossfire of the US trade war against China, the Brazilian ruling class is desperate to return to profitability. After the Brazilian Central Bank announced it would inject the equivalent of 17 percent of the Brazilian GDP into the financial markets, Congress approved another 700 billion reais (US$ 140 billion) corporate bailout package, designating only 93 billion reais to pay little more than US$100 a month to 50 million "informal" and “autonomous" workers, left without income by the statewide retail shutdowns. Last Friday, the Brazilian House passed by 504-2 a constitutional amendment allowing the Central Bank for the first time to directly buy junk bonds from companies, the so-called "war budget" amendment, freeing the government from its fiscal targets.

Among the most vocal defenders of such policies—and of the military as the “adults in the room” and natural caretakers of the Bolsonaro government—has been the so-called political opposition led by the Workers Party and seconded by the pseudoleft Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) and the Maoist Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB).

All of them voted with the government in the almost unanimous “war budget” amendment, while mouthing “left” rhetoric to defend themselves from the torrent of criticism over the massive handout to the banks. Both PCdoB leader Orlando Silva and PT leader Rogério Correia declared that the approval of the measure was necessary “in order not to give Bolsonaro excuses” for not paying the minimal US$100 benefits. For its part, the PSOL called the amendment “very important” for “breaking the parameters of neoliberalism." The hypocrisy was even more staggering with PT analysts themselves calling the buyout of junk bonds by the Central Bank “the greatest transfer of public funds” in the country’s history.

The opposition’s unshakable dedication to the interests of the ruling elite was summed up by the joint calls by São Paulo’s finance secretary under ultraright Governor João Doria and former PT President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for the government to “print money” during the crisis, using the Trump administration’s massive quantitative easing as a model.

In the name of such unity, the opposition is calling for Bolsonaro’s resignation. It spelled out its policy in a manifesto entitled, “Brazil can’t be destroyed by Bolsonaro,” signed by PT, PCdoB and PSOL leaders. It affirmed that Bolsonaro “is the greatest obstacle to the urgent decision-making needed to reduce the contagion,” that his resignation would be “the least costly gesture to allow a democratic way out” and that he “must be urgently contained.”

This amounts to nothing but an effort to legitimize Bolsonaro’s military allies and right-wing politicians in their preparation for containing social opposition.

Russia’s workers sent back to factories as coronavirus continues to spread

Andrea Peters

Workers in industries across Russia are being sent back to their factories, even as the country reports record increases in the number of coronavirus infections, the total number of which now exceed 10,000, distributed across 50 different regions.

With the support of the federal government, local officials have already allowed dozens of enterprises to reopen this week, with more expected to come back online starting April 13. Some plants that produce non-essential products were never shuttered, despite the fact that President Vladimir Putin declared the entire month of April to be a paid national holiday and ordered the shutdown of businesses.

In Moscow oblast, the region encompassing the capital city, which has the majority of COVID-19 infections and saw a jump of 859 in just one day, enterprises run by international giants Mars, Campina, Kimberly-Clark, Wilo, and PepsiCo, to name a few, never closed their doors. Luxury carmaker Mercedes will restart operations on April 13 at its facility in the area, where more than 1,000 employees work.

Seven hundred miles to the south, in Rostov oblast, Guardian, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Mars, Tekhnonikol, a producer of industrial and consumer building materials, and the Segezha Group, an international holding company that makes packaging materials, have continued their operations uninterrupted. They are running at full capacity. PepsiCo, for instance, is producing 230 tons of product every 24 hours.

After concerns erupted at the Rostov-area NEVZ plant, a factory that produces transportation and rolling-stock materials, over the violation of social distancing measures because crowds formed at checkpoints to enter the facility, production is now back online. According to the company, this week 1,500 workers have been recalled to their jobs, with another 1,500 to 3,000 expected to join them shortly.

Auto plants in Kaliningrad and Ulyanovsk oblasts will restart beginning Monday of next week. In the region of Novosibirsk, an area in southern Siberia with a population of 1.5 million where there are dozens of COVID-19 cases and thousands of people are under medical observation, the governor authorized all enterprises associated with manufacturing, mineral extraction, construction and education to start work again. In Pskov oblast, a western region that borders Latvia, the government announced that salons and hairdressers can reopen.

In every case, local officials insist that the conditions inside Russia’s factories are safe for workers and that necessary precautions are being taken to protect employees. In Yaroslavl oblast, for instance, where there are a dozen known cases and hundreds of people under isolation orders, officials report that four enterprises are being closely monitored for compliance with workplace safety laws. One government representative told the media that even in the case of “a single infection,” monitoring is so tight that they would “discover and localize the spread” immediately.

However, according to a 2010 article published in the Journal of International Circumpolar Health, “The occupational safety system in Russia has severely deteriorated in the last 2 decades, with legislators tending to promote the interests of industry and business, resulting in the neglect of occupational safety and violation of workers’ rights. The majority of workers are employed in conditions that do not meet rules of safety and hygiene. More than 60 percent of [occupational accidents] can be attributed to management practices—violation of safety regulations, poor organization of work, deficiency of certified occupational safety specialists and inadequate personnel training.”

In the country’s far eastern Primorskiy region, two workers at a factory that produces military helicopters have fallen ill with COVID-19. One person has died, and another two are under observation for the infection at a hospital in Vladivostok. Despite testing negative for coronavirus, imaging of the patients’ lungs indicates they have contracted the disease.

According to official Russian estimates, fully 30 percent of COVID-19 tests produce false negatives, such that hospitals in Moscow are now treating known coronavirus patients and those simply diagnosed with pneumonia on the same ward, based on the assumption that the latter are really unrecorded COVID-19 victims.

Dependent on their paychecks for survival, Russian workers are under immense pressure to continue in or return to their jobs, regardless of the dangers posed by the coronavirus and the questionable assurances of management and state officials.

In Moscow, the wealthiest city in the country, officials have announced additional unemployment benefits of up to 7370 rubles (US$100). When combined with the maximum amount granted by the federal government, this could bring the total amount a laid-off worker receives to 19,500 rubles ($264), which is barely above the subsistence minimum set by the federal government itself.

Prices for food and medicine are skyrocketing around the country. According to Rosstat, the official statistical agency, the cost of tomatoes, onions, garlic, lemons and buckwheat increased between 6 and 14 percent in March alone. This week, the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) reported being deluged with complaints by consumers of price gouging for fruit, vegetables, buckwheat and sugar. Experts estimate that prices could rise by a further 20 percent in the coming weeks.

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin proposed on Thursday a price freeze that would limit increases in the cost of medicine, food and other basic necessities to 10 percent. Even if implemented, this would still leave Russian families in dire straits. With the value of the country’s currency having fallen to 74 rubles to the US dollar, down from about 60 before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, households are confronting a substantial drop in real income, as layoffs grip the country.

The Kremlin continues to announce various social measures to offset the impact of the health crisis, including one-time payments to families with children and medical personnel involved in combating coronavirus. These range from 5,000 ($100) to 50,000 ($1,000) rubles. However, the main promise of the government—that workers will continue to receive their April wages during the “national holiday” mandated by the government—is false, as businesses have been left to their own devices to determine how to fund those payments. In addition, thousands in Russia work “off the books” and therefore have no formal employer, should the government provide some means to finance April’s supposedly paid time off.

Deaths from COVID-19 mount in German elderly care homes

Markus Salzmann

Recent days and weeks have witnessed a spike in COVID-19 deaths in Germany’s elderly care homes. Elderly residents of these facilities, who often suffer from pre-existing health conditions, are more likely to experience a serious illness as a result of a COVID-19 infection. The large number of deaths stems from the failure to implement timely countermeasures or follow them, a shortage of staff, overworked personnel and the absence of personal protective equipment (PPE).

The outbreaks of COVID-19 in care homes have risen dramatically. Virologist Christian Drosten referred to the development as “a new phase in the Coronavirus pandemic.” At just one care home in Wolfsburg, where the first cases were identified on March 18, 29 residents have died. After five residents died at a Karlsruhe care home, all 200 residents and 160 staff members were tested. One hundred and four tests came back positive, with the other results still pending.

In a care home in Wurzburg, 16 residents have died. Many more residents and care workers have tested positive for COVID-19. Sixteen residents and four staff members tested positive at a care home in Neuköln in Berlin, and 45 people at a home in Hamburg. The list goes on.

Due to the lack of testing in Germany, there is also undoubtedly a large number of unreported cases. Across the country, some 800,000 people live in elderly care homes. However, there is no official statistic for the number of COVID-19 cases in these facilities.

The irresponsible and criminal indifference of the government and big business is to blame for the horrific conditions in care homes and hospitals.

In an interview with Der Spiegel, patient ombudsman Eugen Brysch responded in the affirmative to the question as to whether care homes are being transformed into centres of death. Brysch acknowledged that the totally inadequate number of tests for the virus is having especially lethal consequences in the care sector, stating, “The strategy of not testing care home residents as a general rule was wrong.”

The lack of PPE is having an even more dramatic impact on care homes than on hospitals. Brysch justifiably referred to this as a “scandal.” Despite existing plans for a pandemic, there were “no stockpiles in retirement and care homes. Prices on the market have increased 100-fold, and no institution can afford them.”

A poll by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR, and WDR revealed that thousands of doctors and health care workers are already infected with COVID-19, and that institutions have been forced to close due to staff shortages resulting from sickness, or a lack of PPE. The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany’s federal agency for infectious diseases, estimates that across the country, “2,300 medical staff in hospitals are infected with SARS-CoV-2.” Unreported cases are also undoubtedly much higher, and this figure does not include workers in doctors’ practices, care homes, and care services.

According to figures from the Registered Doctors’ Association in Bavaria, 244 practices in this federal state alone are closed—141 due to quarantine, 82 due to a lack of PPE, and 21 due to a lack of clinic staff.

The situation is being exacerbated by the emergence of some clinics as “COVID-19 hot spots.” This process is exemplified by the Ernst von Bergmann clinic in Potsdam. The hospital stopped accepting patients on March 28 because too many had already been infected by the coronavirus. By Wednesday, April 1, nine people at the hospital had died due to COVID-19. After one in five patients and 63 staff members had been infected, the RKI sent a crisis team to the state capital of Brandenburg.

The reality is that for too long, nothing was done in the care sector to prepare for the pandemic. Even when the first infections in Germany were reported and it became clear that the capacity of the health care system was far too low, no measures were taken to protect the vulnerable people in the elderly care system or care workers.

Instead, politicians sought to pass the buck. Lower Saxony’s Social Affairs Minister, Carola Reimann (Social Democrats, SPD), blamed “irresponsible relatives” for bringing the virus into the Wolfsburg care home, according to the daily TAZ. Only two weeks after the first infections in Lower Saxony did the state government issue an order banning the acceptance of new residents in elderly care homes. In Bavaria and several other states, this straightforward but effective measure was only adopted after dozens of people had died.

In the case of Wolfsburg, the government did not utter a word about the irresponsibility of the care home operator. Workers who had tested positive at this facility and many others were forced to continue working, putting their own health and that of residents in grave danger. “On the infection ward, people who have tested positive but have shown no symptoms are still working. With the authorization of the local health authority, quarantine can be suspended in such cases,” the TAZ wrote with respect to the Wolfsburg case.

The state prosecutor is now investigating a charge of involuntary manslaughter in the case of the Hans Lilje care home in Wolfsburg. A spokesman for the state prosecutor said that the trigger was a complaint that made serious accusations about the standard of care. Employees of the Diakonie, the operator of the care home, reportedly spoke of “catastrophic hygienic conditions” that encouraged the spread of the virus. The lawyer who filed the suit noted that a ban on visits was imposed far too late.

A question to the Federal Ministry of health from the Paritätische Gesamtverband, which represents a number of care home operators, underscored how widespread the disastrous conditions are. On the one hand, the submission declared, they are obliged to equip staff with masks and personal protective equipment. But on the other, it is virtually impossible to obtain PPE on the market. This leads to the question of whether one can be permitted, or ought to continue caring for residents or patients, and whether the care home is liable if it compels staff to work without providing them adequate protection. An answer from the Health Ministry has yet to be received, according to a report in the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Cuts and privatizations have created the disastrous conditions presently experienced in the care sector. The huge shortage of staff in the current crisis is linked to the miserable working conditions and low wages in the sector. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported, 17,000 employees in the care sector depend on state welfare benefits to get by, including 10 percent of this figure who work full time. More than 1,600 full-time workers in the health care and paramedic services do not earn enough to cover the costs of rent and basic necessities of life for their families.

At the same time, the number of privately-owned for-profit operators in the care sector has increased dramatically. The turnover of Alloheim SE, one of Germany’s largest care home operators, rose from €110 million in 2014 to €631 million in 2017.

Lack of ventilators in UK means patients left to die

Margot Miller

A new narrative has emerged in Britain’s capitalist media, with several articles questioning the efficacy of ventilator treatment for severe cases of COVID-19. These aim to cover over the Johnson government’s criminal inaction and failure to mobilise all the resources necessary to tackle the outbreak—including the necessary stockpiling of ventilators before the pandemic broke out.

The Sun headlined an article April 6, “Coronavirus doctor reveals he has yet to get a patient off a ventilator alive.” Once the seriously ill are put onto a ventilator, they may well be too ill to recover. But there can be no doubt that if many are not surviving being ventilated, then it is because they are receiving treatment too late. This is not the fault of National Health Service (NHS) workers but a result of the government allowing the pandemic to tear through the population for weeks as part of its “herd immunity” policy.

On April 4, the Spectator magazine ran a piece headlined: “Ventilators aren’t a panacea for the coronavirus pandemic.” The Spectator is a right-wing Conservative-supporting publication. Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is currently in intensive care undergoing oxygen treatment for COVID-19—and is near a ventilator should the need arise—is a former editor of the magazine.

The Spectator cites Matt Strauss, a former medical director of the critical care unit at Guelph General Hospital, Canada, and now assistant professor of medicine at Queen’s University. He states, “[A]t least two-thirds of attempts to stave off death with their [ventilator] use will fail in the short term. Of the remaining third, we do not know how many will be successful in the medium or long term. This doesn’t quite seem like a convincing rationale to shut down the British economy, [and] redirect previous manufacturing output towards ventilators …”

On average, around 50 percent of ventilated patients survive. If treated early, the outcome improves, yet those with coronavirus symptoms are being encouraged to remain at home in self-isolation and only report to hospital once they have become very ill.

The WSWS spoke to an NHS haematology doctor from Wales, who challenged this acceptance of death over life and the playing down of the necessity for ventilators in tackling the pandemic.

The doctor explained that in his own hospital in Wales, “We have 10 COVID patients. One man on a ventilator, aged between 60 and 70 with COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), survived. Around 60 to 80 percent of patients on ventilators can be saved if proper ITU (intensive therapy unit) care is given. But these things cannot be done if the hospital is overwhelmed. Then only 30 percent survive.”

The doctor exposed the dire hospital conditions facing colleagues and patients as the number of COVID-19 cases rises exponentially.

His friend, an Accident and Emergency (A&E) consultant at a hospital in the north of England, “has seen lots of COVID-19 admissions. He told me the hospital is partially overwhelmed, so they had to open a new A&E department because they can’t cope with the flood of admissions.”

Hospitals are implementing rationing because of the lack of ventilators for those with the most severe form of the disease. Speaking on the BBC’s “Andrew Marr Show,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock said there are 8,000–10,000 ventilators in the NHS, and the government target was to secure 18,000—far short of the original target of 30,000. Hancock evaded answering when these additional ventilators would materialize, despite the government’s own prediction that the pandemic will peak around Easter, in a few days’ time.

Doctors are being placed in the terrible predicament of denying elderly patients’ medical intervention.

The doctor in Wales commented, “Doctors have to explain to patients over 70, with no underlying health issues, that the doctor has to make a decision to sign a DNR [do-not-resuscitate] order, because there are no ventilators.”

The lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) is putting staff and patients in danger—three National Health Service nurses and two doctors have died recently.

“They only have surgical gowns and masks at the hospital,” explained the doctor, “Instead of the proper PPE. My friend got a fever and tested positive and is now self-isolating at home, at the time his service is essential to the hospital.

“Another dreadful story—one of my haematology colleagues at a Hospital in Birmingham said her hospital became overwhelmed a couple of weeks ago. The hospital has been turned into a mainly COVID hospital. Doctors in all departments, like my colleague, are asked to deal with COVID patients.

“Birmingham is at the epicentre of COVID outside of London. My friend is looking after patients who are recovering from COVID, who have been removed from ventilators. Up until last Friday, they only had a surgical mask and apron, used for other hospital procedures. Since then, intubation is done with some protective equipment, but not the full kit.

“Policy is changing day by day. No doctors can wear face masks when moving around the hospital, even on the medical ward for stroke and heart patients. A group of nurses wearing face masks while walking on the corridors were asked to remove them by a manager and a matron, saying you must follow hospital guidelines.”

“I could not believe this,” said the doctor, “No reason has been given.”

“Medical staff are still not being tested for COVID-19, even if they present with symptoms and are putting the staff and patients at risk. This will possibly make the available system collapse due to lack of trained staff.

“My friend got a sore throat and felt feverish. She asked the hospital administration what she should do, and could she have the test. They said we are not allowed to test you. If staff are not tested, they will give the virus to patients and other staff. It is criminal.”

As in the north of England hospital, doctors are forced to leave patients, who may have a life expectancy of another 10 or 20 years, without lifesaving treatment.

“At Birmingham hospital, patients who are 70 and older, even without underlying health problems, will not be put on a ventilator and the doctor signs a DNR, because the hospital cannot cope with the tsunami of COVID patients admitted without the necessary number of ventilators.

“There’s a new Nightingale hospital planned in Birmingham with more than 1,000 beds. The plan is not to put ventilators in because there are no ventilators. To form a new hospital you need staff too, not just new instruments. It will be used for non-COVID stable patients, to free up space.”

The doctor compared the high fatalities in the UK with countries which have implemented rigorous testing for COVID-19 alongside contact tracing. “The Czech Republic followed the method taken by South Korea, and the number of patients is very low. It is well managed in New Zealand. They started testing a lot, and also because of early school closure and lockdown measures.”

A letter from a GP’s (General Practice) surgery in Maesteg, Wales telling patients with underlying health problems they would be denied treatment has gone viral. Dated March 27, it began: “This is a very difficult letter for the practice to write to you … people with significant life-threatening illnesses, such as incurable cancer, neurological conditions such as motor neurone disease, and untreatable heart and lung conditions such as pulmonary fibrosis or severe heart failure … are unlikely to be offered hospital admission if they become unwell and certainly will not be offered a ventilator bed … We would like to complete a DNR form for you … The emergency services will not be called and resuscitation attempts to restart your heart will not be attempted.” The letter ends with the cruelly ironic words, “We will not abandon you.”

One can only imagine the fear and bewilderment of the frail and elderly, promised care under the post-war welfare state “from the cradle to the grave,” seeing the fatalities increase daily at an exponential rate, now being abandoned to their fate.

The practice and health trust have since apologised for the letter due to the widespread disgust it elicited.

UK government ignored scientific advice and treated COVID-19 as a public order issue

Robert Stevens

Boris Johnson’s Conservative government disregarded scientific advice about the danger to life posed by the coronavirus almost from the moment when the first deaths were reported in China.

Instead, the government was mainly concerned with developing its response from the standpoint of combating “public disorder” and social unrest. This was the backdrop to its passing of the Coronavirus Bill on March 25 handing authoritarian powers to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his ministers.

Put on the statute book without a parliamentary vote, the 351-page Coronavirus Act 2020 allows the government to restrict or prohibit events and gatherings in England and Wales during the pandemic in any place, vehicle, train, vessel or aircraft, any movable structure and any offshore installation. Ministers have the powers to close premises. Powers were also granted allowing the forced detention and isolation of anyone, including children, and for any amount of time. The Act rubber-stamped postponing this year’s local authority and mayoral elections, with provisions to postpone any other electoral events over the next year.

As the bill was being rushed through both Houses of Parliament, the government announced that 20,000 military personnel had been placed on standby—10,000 military personnel regularly assigned to operations among civilians, such as in floods, plus a further 10,000 troops. As the WSWS noted, “The mobilisation of the armed forces has also been in advanced preparation and was a central component of the Tories’ post-Brexit planning strategy known as ‘Operation Yellowhammer.’ Yellowhammer predicted a ‘rise in public disorder and community tensions.’”

According to a government web page, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) exists to provide “scientific and technical advice to support government decision makers during emergencies.” SAGE’s advice “is made available to decision makers to support UK cross-government decisions in the Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBR) [also known as COBRA].”

SAGE is co-chaired by Sir Patrick Vallance (government Chief Science Advisor) and Professor Chris Whitty (Chief Medical Officer). Both played a central role in the adoption by the Johnson government of the “herd immunity,” policy, i.e., the attempt—in the absence of a vaccine—to mass infect most of the population [up to 70 percent] with coronavirus. This was advocated in the face of all international experience from China and other countries that the mass testing of the population, allied with quarantining, social distancing and lockdowns as necessary, was the only way to prevent the spread of the virus and save lives. Had there not been widespread opposition to “herd immunity,” including from top scientists, the government’s policy would have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

As the COVID-19 pandemic began, the government enlisted the advice of three SAGE groups: the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG); the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M) (Department for Health and Social Care) and the Independent Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B).

Behavioural scientists played an extraordinary and unwarranted part in determining policy, compared with the input of medical professionals.

In a March 14 SAGE document, “The role of behavioural science in the coronavirus outbreak,” the section “What is “SPI-B?” notes: “To date, there have been three meetings of SPI-B to discuss specific topics of advice requested by SAGE. The topics discussed relate to the risk of public disorder; the use of behavioural and social interventions; and how to give guidance to people who are asked to self-isolate.”

The SPI-B was “asked to consider several possible behavioural and social interventions”—including “stopping large events (‘mass gatherings’), school closures, isolation of people with symptoms and also their households, general social distancing, and lengthy social distancing for people in at-risk groups.”

The criteria used was not what was scientifically necessary but rather “public attitudes and support; likely adherence; and any barriers, facilitators or communication issues that should be considered.”

A key passage reads “in order to limit the risk of public disorder even further, the Government should: provide clear and transparent reasons for the different strategies that might be taken; set clear expectations on how the national response would develop; and promote collective action throughout the country.”

After 10 years of brutal austerity, the government was acutely aware it was sitting on a social volcano and that the pandemic could mean social anger erupting to the surface.

The National Health Service (NHS) had been eviscerated over the last decade due to billions of pounds cut in “efficiency savings” and the privatisation agenda. The government was advised in a SAGE paper February 26, “In the event of a pandemic, without action, the NHS will be unable to meet all demands placed on it. Demand on beds is likely to overtake supply well before the peak is reached.”

Rather than demand additional resources, the government focused on dealing with the public’s reaction to the NHS failing to cope. As far back as February 25, (Cobra) commissioned advice from SPI-B “on the risk of public disorder in the Covid-19 RWCS [reasonable worst case scenario].”

SAGE and the Home Office, working with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) “considered the risk of public disorder, with a focus on scenarios where there are significant workplace absences, e.g. in the police, and pressures on healthcare facilities…

“SPI-B defined public disorder to include actions from opportunistic crime, community tension and rioting.”

SPI-B were clear under what conditions social unrest could arise: “Where public disorder occurs, it is usually triggered by perceptions about the Government’s response, rather than the nature of the epidemic per se. For example, a perception that the Government response strategies are not effective in looking after the public may lead to an increase in tensions.”

It noted that the risk of public disorder could occur where there are “staff absences in police forces, pressures on healthcare facilities, perceptions that there is limited resource, e.g. limited face masks or hand sanitiser, perceptions of inadequate government response to contain the outbreak.”

SPI-B warned that public unrest could develop in “Specific scenarios where police actions are experienced as excessive and which prevent the public from accessing services they believe they have a right to access (e.g. food, healthcare) may lead to increased tensions.”

Under conditions in which virtually no testing had been done among the population for COVID-19—in contrast to China, South Korea and other countries—SPI-B stated that the “public need to understand the purpose of the Government’s policy, why the UK approach differs to other countries and how resources are being allocated.”

It was necessary for the government to “Promote a sense of collectivism: All messaging should reinforce a sense of community, that ‘we are all in this together”—i.e., promote the lie that the super-rich and the mass of working people were equally affected by the coronavirus pandemic and shared a common purpose in fighting it.

Knowing this to be a lie, just one month after the February paper was written, the government passed into law the Coronavirus Bill in readiness to confront workers opposed to policies that have caused the deaths of thousands.

The SAGE documents went almost without comment in the media, with just one article, in the Daily Mail, noting its warnings of “flashpoints over stretched healthcare facilities or goods shortages.”

One of the most critical voices raised in opposition to the government’s strategy was Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal. On the SAGE papers, he stated, “There is evidence on modelling and on behavioural science, but I don’t see the evidence from the public health community or from the clinical community.

“We [i.e., the Johnson government] thought we could have a controlled epidemic. We thought we could manage that epidemic over the course of March and April, push the curve to the right, build up herd immunity and that way we could protect people.

“The reason why that strategy was wrong is it didn’t recognise that 20 percent of people infected would end up with severe critical illness. The evidence was there at the end of January.”

Further damning evidence of how the government refused to act and enforce the most rudimentary policies to protect the population was made public this week in a Reuters special report.

In it, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care claimed the government was delivering “a science-led action plan” to fight coronavirus: “As the public would expect, we regularly test our pandemic plans and what we learned from previous exercises has helped us to rapidly respond to COVID-19.”

This is a lie. As noted by the WSWS, in 2016 the government knew from Exercise Cygnus, intended to determine readiness for a novel respiratory influenza pandemic, that there would be catastrophic National Health Service failings during a flu pandemic that would kill “a lot of people.” The government responded by continuing to cut the human and material resources available to the NHS.

Reuters published comments from John Edmunds, a professor of infectious disease modelling at Imperial College, of the flu pandemic modelling committee (SPI-M). Edmunds said that around seven weeks before the first confirmed death of COVID-19 in the UK, “from about mid January onwards, it was absolutely obvious that this was serious, very serious.”

Graham Medley, a professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and chairman of SPI-M, told Reuters, it was “clear that this was going to be big from the first meeting.” By the end of January, SPI-M went into “wartime” mode.

Despite this, on January 30 the government only raised the official threat level posed by COVID-19 from “low” to “moderate.” It was kept at moderate as deaths began to mount in other countries, including in mainland Europe, even after a February 21 meeting of NERVTAG, the group which advises the government on the threat posed by new and emerging respiratory viruses.

Reuters notes, “Edmunds, who had technical difficulties and couldn’t be heard on the call, emailed afterwards to ask the warning to be elevated to ‘high,’ the minutes revealed. But the warning level remained lower. It’s unclear why.” Edmunds recalls, “I just thought, are we still thinking that it’s mild or something? It definitely isn’t, you know.”

These warnings were ignored because Downing Street had set on its “herd immunity” policy. According to a report in the Times, during a private event held at the end of February, Johnson’s key adviser advisor Dominic Cummings argued against strict measures to contain coronavirus. Those present summarised his position as “herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.” A senior Conservative source described his view as “let old people die.”

By February 28, the virus had already led to fatalities in Iran, South Korea, and Italy. It was too late to stop the spread of the virus, with Reuters noting that on March 2 the “pandemic modelling committee SPI-M produced its ‘consensus report’ that warned the coronavirus was now transmitting freely in the UK.”

The first coronavirus death in the UK was announced on March 5. But in contrast to Italy—which had recorded 827 deaths by March 11 and ordered a national lockdown—the Johnson government continued to play down the impact the virus would have as it ripped through the population. On March 12, it officially announced its “herd immunity” policy. Government Chief Science Advisor Sir Patrick Vallance, stood alongside Johnson and Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty in Downing Street and said of the deadly virus: “It’s not possible to stop everyone getting it and it’s also not desirable because you want some immunity in the population to protect ourselves in the future.”