How China Broke the Chain of Infection

Vijay Prashad, Du Xiaojun & Weiyan Zhu

On March 31, 2020, a group of scientists from around the world—from Oxford University to Beijing Normal University—published an important paper in Science. This paper—“An Investigation of Transmission Control Measures During the First 50 Days of the COVID-19 Epidemic in China”—proposes that if the Chinese government had not initiated the lockdown of Wuhan and the national emergency response, then there would have been 744,000 additional confirmed COVID-19 cases outside Wuhan. “Control measures taken in China,” the authors argue, “potentially hold lesso[n]s for other countries around the world.”

In the World Health Organization’s February report after a visit to China, the team members wrote, “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history.”

In this report, we detail the measures taken by the different levels of the Chinese government and by social organizations to stem the spread of the virus and the disease at a time when scientists had just begun to accumulate knowledge about them and when they worked in the absence of a vaccine and a specific drug treatment for COVID-19.

The Emergence of a Plan

In the early days of January 2020, the National Health Commission (NHC) and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began to establish protocols to deal with the diagnosis, treatment, and laboratory testing of what was then considered a “viral pneumonia of unknown cause.” A treatment manual was produced by the NHC and health departments in Hubei Province and sent to all medical institutions in Wuhan City on January 4; city-wide training was conducted that same day. By January 7, China CDC isolated the first novel coronavirus strain, and three days later, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Chinese Academy of Sciences) and others developed testing kits.

By the second week of January, more was known about the nature of the virus, and so a plan began to take shape to contain it. On January 13, the NHC instructed Wuhan City authorities to begin temperature checks at ports and stations and to reduce public gathering. The next day, the NHC held a national teleconference that alerted all of China to the virulent novel coronavirus strain and to prepare for a public health emergency. On January 17, the NHC sent seven inspection teams to China’s provinces to train public health officials about the virus, and on January 19 the NHC distributed nucleic acid reagents for test kits to China’s many health departments. Zhong Nanshan—former president of the Chinese Medical Association—led a high-level team to Wuhan City to carry out inspections on January 18 and 19.

Over the next few days, the NHC began to understand how the virus was transmitted and how this transmission could be halted. Between January 15 and March 3, the NHC published seven editions of its guidelines. A look at them shows a precise development of its knowledge about the virus and its plans for mitigation; these included new methods for treatment, including the use of ribavirin and a combination of Chinese and allopathic medicine. The National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine would eventually report that 90 percent of patients received a traditional medicine, which was found to be effective in 90 percent of them.

By January 22, it had become clear that transport in and out of Wuhan had to be restricted. That day, the State Council Information Office urged people not to go to Wuhan, and the next day the city was essentially shut down. The grim reality of the virus had by now become clear to everyone.

The Government Acts

On January 25, the Communist Party of China (CPC) formed a Central Committee Leading Group for COVID-19 Prevention and Control with two leaders—Li Keqiang and Wang Huning—in charge. China’s President Xi Jinping tasked the group to use the best scientific thinking as they formulated their policies to contain the virus, and to use every resource to put people’s health before economic considerations. By January 27, Vice Premier of the State Council Sun Chunlan led a Central Guiding Team to Wuhan City to shape the new aggressive response to virus control. Over time, the government and the Communist Party developed an agenda to tackle the virus, which can be summarized in four points:

1. To prevent the diffusion of the virus by maintaining not only a lockdown on the province, but by minimizing traffic within the province. This was complicated by the Chinese New Year break, which had already begun; families would visit one another and visit markets (this is the largest short-term human migration, when almost all of China’s 1.4 billion people gather in each other’s homes). All this had to be prevented. Local authorities had already begun to use the most advanced epidemiological thinking to track and study the source of the infections and trace the route of transmission. This was essential to shut down the spread of the virus.

2. To deploy resources for medical workers, including protective equipment for the workers, hospital beds for patients, and equipment as well as medicines to treat the patients. This included the building of temporary treatment centers—including later two full hospitals(Huoshenshan Hospital and Leishenshan Hospital). Increased screening required more test kits, which had to be developed and manufactured.

3. To ensure that during the lockdown of the province, food and fuel were made available to the residents.

4. To ensure the release of information to the public that is based on scientific fact and not rumor. To this end, the team investigated any and all irresponsible actions taken by the local authorities from the reports of the first cases to the end of January.

These four points defined the approach taken by the Chinese government and the local authorities through February and March. A joint prevention and control mechanism was established under the leadership of the NHC, with wide-ranging authority to coordinate the fight to break the chain of infection. Wuhan City and Hubei Province remained under virtual lockdown for 76 days until early April.

On February 23, President Xi Jinping spoke to 170,000 county and Communist Party cadres and military officials from every part of China; “this is a crisis and also a major test,” said Xi. All of China’s emphasis would be on fighting the epidemic and putting people first, and at the same time China would ensure that its long-term economic agenda would not be damaged.

Neighborhood Committees

A key—and underreported—part of the response to the virus was in the public action that defines Chinese society. In the 1950s, urban civil organizations—or juweihui—developed as way for residents in neighborhoods to organize their mutual safety and mutual aid. In Wuhan, as the lockdown developed, it was members of the neighborhood committees who went door-to-door to check temperatures, to deliver food (particularly to the elderly) and to deliver medical supplies. In other parts of China, the neighborhood committees set up temperature checkpoints at the entrance of the neighborhoods to monitor people who went in and out; this was basic public health in a decentralized fashion. As of March 9, 53 people working in these committees lost their lives, 49 of them were members of the Communist Party.

The Communist Party’s 90 million members and the 4.6 million grass-roots party organizations helped shape the public action across the country at the frontlines of China’s 650,000 urban and rural communities. Medical workers who were party members traveled to Wuhan to be part of the frontline medical response. Other party members worked in their neighborhood committees or developed new platforms to respond to the virus.

Decentralization defined the creative responses. In Tianxinqiao Village, Tiaoma Town, Yuhua District, Changsha, Hunan Province, Yang Zhiqiang—a village announcer—used the “loud voice” of 26 loudspeakers to urge villagers not to pay New Year visits to each other and not to eat dinner together. In Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the police used drones to play the sound of trumpets as a reminder not to violate the lockdown order.

In Chengdu, Sichuan Province, 440,000 citizens formed teams to do a range of public actions to stem the transmission of the virus: they publicized the health regulations, they checked temperatures, they delivered food and medicines, and they found ways to entertain the otherwise traumatized public. The Communist Party cadre led the way here, drawing together businesses, social groups, and volunteers into a local self-management structure. In Beijing, residents developed an app that sends registered users warnings about the virus and creates a database that can be used to help track the movement of the virus in the city.

Medical Intervention

Li Lanjuan was one of the early medical doctors to enter Wuhan; she recalled that when she got there, medical tests “were difficult to get” and the situation with supplies was “pretty bad.” Within a few days, she said, more than 40,000 medical workers arrived in the city, and patients with mild symptoms were treated in temporary treatment centers, while those who had been seriously impacted were taken to the hospitals. Protective equipment, tests, ventilators, and other supplies rushed in. “The mortality rate was greatly reduced,” said Dr. Li Lanjuan. “In just two months, the epidemic situation in Wuhan was basically under control.”

From across China came 1,800 epidemiological teams—with five people in each team—to do surveys of the population. Wang Bo, a leader of one of the teams from Jilin Province, said that his team conducted “demanding and dangerous” door-to-door epidemiological surveys. Yao Laishun, a member of one of the Jilin teams, said that within weeks their team had carried out epidemiological surveys of 374 people and traced and monitored 1,383 close contacts; this was essential work in locating who was infected and treated as well as who needed to be isolated if they had not yet presented symptoms or if they tested negative. Up to February 9, the health authorities inspected 4.2 million households (10.59 million people) in Wuhan; that means that they inspected 99 percent of the population, a gargantuan exercise.

The speed of the production of medical equipment, particularly protective equipment for the medical workers, was breathtaking. On January 28, China made fewer than 10,000 sets of personal protective equipment (PPE) a day, and by February 24, its production capacity exceeded 200,000 per day. On February 1, the government produced 773,000 test kits a day; by February 25, it was producing 1.7 million kits per day; by March 31, 4.26 million test kits were produced per day. Direction from the authorities moved industrial plants to churn out protective gear, ambulances, ventilators, electrocardiograph monitors, respiratory humidification therapy machines, blood gas analyzers, air disinfectant machines, and hemodialysis machines. The government focused attention on making sure that there was no shortage of any medical equipment.

Chen Wei, one of China’s leading virologists who had worked on the 2003 SARS epidemic and had gone to Sierra Leone in 2015 to develop the world’s first Ebola vaccine, rushed to Wuhan with her team. They set up a portable testing laboratory by January 30; by March 16, her team produced the first novel coronavirus vaccine that went into clinical trials, with Chen being one of the first to be vaccinated as part of the trial.

Relief

To shut down a province with 60 million inhabitants for more than two months and to substantially shut down a country of 1.4 billion inhabitants is not easy. The social and economic impact was always going to be very great. But, the Chinese government—in its early directives—said that the economic hit to the country was not going to define the response; the well-being of the people had to be dominant in the formulation of any policy.

On January 22, before the Leading Group was formed, the government issued a circular that said medical treatment for COVID-19 patients was guaranteed and it would be free of cost. A medical insurance reimbursement policy was then formulated, which said that expenses from medicines and medical services needed for treating the COVID-19 would be completely covered by the insurance fund; no patient would have to pay any money.

During the lockdown, the government created a mechanism to ensure the steady supply of food and fuel at normal prices. State-owned enterprises such as China Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation, China Grain Reserves Group, and China National Salt Industry Group increased their supply of rice, flour, oil, meat and salt. All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives helped enterprises to get direct connection with farmers’ cooperatives; other organizations like China Agriculture Industry Chamber of Commerce pledged to maintain supply and price stability. The Ministry of Public Security met on February 3 to crack down on price gouging and hoarding; up to April 8, the prosecutorial organizations in China investigated 3,158 cases of epidemic-related criminal offenses. The state offered financial support for small and medium-sized enterprises; in return, businesses revamped their practices to ensure a safe working environment (Guangzhou Lingnan Cable Company, for instance, staggered lunch breaks, tested the temperature of workers, disinfected the working area periodically, ensured that ventilators worked, and provided staff with protective equipment such as masks, goggles, hand lotion, and alcohol-based sanitizers).

Lockdown

A study in The Lancet by four epidemiologists from Hong Kong show that the lockdown of Wuhan in late January prevented the spread of infection outside Hubei Province; the major cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Wenzhou, they write, saw a collapse in numbers of infections within two weeks of the partial lockdown. However, the scholars write, as a consequence of the virulence of COVID-19 and the absence of herd immunity, the virus might have a second wave. This is something that worries the Chinese government, which continues to be vigilant about this novel coronavirus.

Nonetheless, the lights of celebration flashed across Wuhan as the lockdown was lifted. Medical personnel and volunteers breathed a sigh of relief. China had been able to use its considerable resources—its socialist culture and institutions—to swiftly break the chain.

Garment workers protest in Bangladesh as COVID-19 spreads

Wimal Perera

Thousands of clothing workers demonstrated on Monday in Dhaka, the national capital, and in industrial zones across Bangladesh to demand outstanding wages and protest against terminations and layoffs. An estimated 20,000 garment workers also demonstrated the day before, following protests the previous week.

The Awami League-led government of Prime Minister Sheik Hasina had previously imposed a national lockdown—from March 26 to April 4. Confronted by widespread action by workers demanding hand sanitisers, face masks, gloves and proper social-distancing practices, it then extended the lockdown until April 25.

Employers have responded to the lockdown, and a drastic fall in international orders, by shuttering the plants, sacking thousands of temporary workers and refusing to pay outstanding wages.

When the lockdown began, thousands of mainly female garment workers, whose monthly wage is only about 8,000 takas ($US95), were forced to return to their remote villages without any pay. According to media reports, less than 300 garment factories have paid salaries, with an estimated 200 factories still operating.

Facing destitution and expecting the plants to be reopened on April 4, workers returned to the industrial zones, where they were confronted by an unprecedented situation. Scores of factories had closure notices on their gates. Thousands of workers had been laid off. Factory managers in some plants attempted to make workers sign resignation letters.

Public transport services were not operating, so workers’ journeys were perilous. They travelled by ferries, vans, auto-rickshaws, trucks and motorcycles. Others walked long distances—some for up to 30 hours—to reach Dhaka and other industrial zones.

Bangladesh is the world’s second-biggest garment maker after China. Its more than 4,500 officially registered plants account for some 84 percent of the country’s $40 billion annual export earnings. Hasina’s government and the garment industry bosses, like their counterparts in Europe and the US, are urging a reopening of the plants.

Mehedi Hassan, a garment worker who had returned from Netrokona village, 150 km from Dhaka, told the Dhaka Tribune: “We are just pawns in this risky game [of the factory owners].” It had cost him over 1,000 takas, a large amount for a low-paid worker, to return to his plant.

Another worker, from TSS-Fashion at Mowchak in Gazipur, told the New Age: “I risked my life on my way to Gazipur to join my factory tomorrow. It is my livelihood. I don’t understand the policy of the government since they’ve kept everything else closed, except garment factories.”

Garment worker Sajedul Islam, 21, told the AFP: “We are afraid of the coronavirus. We heard a lot of people are dying of this disease but we don’t have any choice. We’re starving. If we stay at home, we may save ourselves from the virus but who will save us from starvation?”

Speaking with New Age, Iqbal Arsalan, a Bangabadu Medical University professor, warned: “We are increasing the risk factors by allowing them to come to Dhaka and begin work in factories where physical distancing cannot be maintained.”

Last week, hundreds of garment workers protested in Mymensingh district over the closure of the Crown Wears plant and non-payment of wages. They were violently attacked by police and more than 20 were injured. Two protesting workers were killed when a truck ran over them.

APS Holdings workers in Gazipur also protested against the management seizure of their identity cards and attempts to force them to sign blank sheets of paper that could be later used to terminate them.

About 150 Risingtex Fashion workers in Savar were confronted with the same demands. According to media reports, over 3,000 workers were laid off from 20 factories in the Gazipur, Ashulia, Savar and Chattogram areas.

Confronted with this rising working-class anger, the government ordered the closure of all garment factories, apart from those producing personal protective equipment. Following discussion with garment industry owners, it announced that shut downs would be extended until April 25.

This meant those workers who had travelled from their villages confronted an impossible situation, unable to return home, while facing police restrictions to prevent them from entering or leaving Dhaka.

Hundreds of thousands of poor people across the country have lost their earnings and are starving because no government food aid is reaching them. This has led to suicides and protests. Among the suicides was Wahidul Islam, 30, a van-puller and father of four children from Dalbhanga village in Maheshpur sub-district.

Last week Narayanganj residents marched toward a district administrative office on Wednesday, demanding aid and defying bans on public gatherings and official social-distancing measures.

The government’s claims of providing generous aid were exposed by a survey conducted by BRAC, an NGO. It found that only 4 percent of the population had received any emergency relief support as of April 5 and that at least 14 percent of low-income people had no food at home. It also revealed that the average household income of 14,599 taka before the lockdown had fallen drastically by 75 percent to 3,742 taka this month.

Currently about 30 districts out of 64 in Bangladesh, including areas of Dhaka, are in lockdown. For the majority of people “social distancing” is virtually impossible, particularly in Dhaka’s slums, where 4.8 million people—nearly one-third of the city’s population—live.

On April 13, Health Minister Zahid Maleque for the first time admitted community transmission is taking place widely. About 1,012 persons had tested positive for COVID-19 with 46 deaths by April 14. On April 14, 209 people tested positive, the highest single-day count so far.

These low figures are mainly due to the lack of mass testing, as recommended by the World Health Organisation. As of April 10, only 7,359 people—in a population of 160 million—had been tested. Jahidur Rahman, a virologist and assistant professor at Shahid Suhrawardy Medical College, has called for at least 10,000 tests daily.

An April 12 comment in the Daily Star said the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak “had been plagued by inappropriate decisions, delayed actions and muddled thinking—right from the beginning.”

Even as health authorities warned that COVID-19 could become practically uncontrollable if it spread, Prime Minister Hasina initially downplayed the pandemic, saying it was “not that deadly.”

Her government announced a massive bailout package of $US8.56 billion for the garment industry, almost three times the $3.02 billion losses from cancelled export orders. The amount that the government recommended for workers’ wages is about 7 percent of that handed over to the employers.

Bolivia’s coup regime extends COVID-19 quarantine amid repression

Cesar Uco & Don Knowland

Bolivia’s self-proclaimed “interim president,” Jeanine Añez, announced Tuesday that the quarantine imposed in response to the coronavirus will be extended until April 30.

As of April 14, the number of people reported to have been infected with COVID-19 in Bolivia was 354, with 28 deaths. These low official numbers for infected and deceased coronavirus victims obscure the alarming threat to South America’s poorest country. An indication of the potential rapid spread of the disease came on Tuesday with a report from Oruro, the traditional mining center of Bolivia, that the number of cases had doubled in 24 hours from 14 to 27, while another 111 suspicious cases were reported and 37 more were still waiting for test results.

Añez, who was installed by a US-backed military coup and fascist violence that overthrew the government of President Evo Morales and his Movement toward Socialism (MAS) government last November, has exploited the pandemic to militarize the country and postpone elections that had been set for May.

In her televised address Tuesday, Añez offered another pittance to Peru’s impoverished workers and peasants, a “universal bonus” of 500 bolivianos (less than $73). This meager benefit will be offered only to those who did not receive similar paltry handouts offered earlier, including a “family bonus,” also worth 500 bolivianos for families with young children, and a “family basket” of just 400 bolivianos for older adults surviving on state pensions, low income mothers and people with disabilities.

How much of this thoroughly inadequate aid will actually get into the hands of Bolivians is in serious question.

Añez also said that within one week she would announce a decision on whether to ease the quarantine in different regions of the country. She is responding to the demands and profit interests of Bolivian and international capital, which supported the coup that brought her to power.

Newspaper coverage indicates that Bolivia is presently at risk of widespread hunger, due to failing food supply chains, especially in working class cities such as El Alto.

According to the newspaper El Alteño, “Two weeks after the [March 22] quarantine was put into place, neighbors from different areas and El Alto began to worry about the lack of resources from the lockdown imposed upon them and the lack of food ... neighbors are aware that they cannot take to the streets to carry out their activities normally, they claim that ‘money is already finished.’”

One woman interviewed by El Alteño said: “Since the quarantine has been issued, we no longer go out to sell with my husband, everything we have earned before quarantine is gone; on the street there’s everything, gas, vegetables, fruit, but there’s no money.”

For its part, the main union confederation, the Bolivian Workers’ Central (COB), which has collaborated with the coup regime, has proposed that it distribute half of the minimum wage of 2,122 Bolivianos ($320 per month) to the population, a half-hearted measure which has also been rejected.

As for the country’s health infrastructure, it is woefully inadequate to address the onslaught of the pandemic.

Doctors at the largest public hospital in La Paz issued a statement Monday warning that they lack even the basic supplies needed to deal with COVID-19 patients. “We do not have the minimum supplies such as caps, chinstraps, boots, glasses, gowns, and even less high-end supplies such as intensive care medicines. They send us to war without weapons, condemning us to fight under unfavorable conditions,” they said.

Bolivia is sorely lacking in such critical equipment as ventilators, and cannot compete with wealthier nations on the world market to purchase them.

The coronavirus threat is particularly worrisome in the country’s overcrowded jails. Inmates at the San Pedro prison in Oruro rioted last Saturday. “We have come to serve a sentence, not to lose our lives,” said one of the inmates interviewed by La Patria newspaper.

Under the national quarantine first imposed on March 22, many public and private activities have been suspended or severely curtailed, and only one person per family is allowed to make minimum and indispensable trips in the vicinity of the family residence during the hours of 7:00 a.m. and 12:00 for the purpose of acquiring food and other necessary supplies.

As of March17, all borders were ordered closed and international flights were suspended. Interdepartmental and interprovincial land transport was also suspended, allowing only for the transport of merchandise.

More than 480 Bolivians who managed to reenter Bolivian territory, mostly workers returning from Chile where they had lost their jobs as a result of the COVID-19 shutdown there, originally were concentrated in camp “Tata Santiago,” in the town of Pisiga, and subjected to various health protocols. Lack of food and overcrowding was reported, including insufficient bathrooms.

Tents of 3 x 3 meters were used to house 15 people per unit, each granted a single blanket in the midst of bitter cold. Without electricity, they were effectively held incommunicado since they could not charge their cell phones.

Those who complained of mistreatment by the Bolivian military were reportedly threatened with being thrown back across the border into Chile and having their national identity cards taken.

At least another 800 Bolivians remained trapped on Chile’s northern border with Bolivia, blocked by Bolivian troops from returning to their country.

Desperate after being left there for two weeks, several hundred of them attempted to force their way back into Bolivia last week, only to be repulsed with beatings and tear gas.

The Bolivian coup regime has attempted to blame the incident on the former chief minister in the Morales government, Juan Ramón Quintana, who is trapped in the Mexican Embassy in La Paz, denied safe passage out of the country. The government held a press conference Monday claiming—without presenting a shred of evidence—that Quintana had orchestrated the rebellion of the desperate migrant workers on the Chilean border from behind the embassy’s walls.

Within Bolivia, the regime has enforced the quarantine with brutal police-military repression. On March 25, the Ministry of Justice and Institutional Transparency issued a statement warning that people who failed to comply fully with the quarantine would be punished with “one to 10 years in prison for committing crimes against public health.”

La Razon quoted the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Gen. Carlos Orellana, as reporting that, as of April 11, “Military troops arrested 9,917 people who violated the restrictions of the total quarantine in the country.”

Añez concluded a recent speech by threatening brutal repression against anyone who violates the quarantine, which would bring down the “active participation of the Armed Forces and the National Police.”

Añez’s March 25 decree that extended the nationwide lockdown until April 15 included the threat that “individuals who incite non-compliance with this decree or misinform or cause uncertainty to the population will be subject to criminal charges for crimes against public health,” punishable by between one and 10 years imprisonment.

The language allows for the intensification of the crackdown waged by the regime since it seized power last November, launching a “pacification program” that bloodily suppressed workers’ protests and arresting journalists on charges of “sedition” for reports criticizing the government, calling them “communication terrorists.”

Añez, who initially claimed that she would serve only as a transitional head of state until elections were held, has since announced that she will run for the presidency. She has urged voters not to allow “the savages” to return to power, a transparent reference to the indigenous heritage of Morales and many of his supporters. Polls, however, have shown the MAS presidential candidate, Luis Arce, as the favorite in the now-postponed elections.

While the MAS, a bourgeois nationalist party, has sought to accommodate itself to the coup regime, recognizing its legitimacy and agreeing to bar Morales from running for re-election, the military-backed government, backed by Washington, has responded only with increased repression.

Coronavirus exposes Chilean two-tiered health system as deathtrap

Mauricio Saavedra

The COVID-19 pandemic is exposing how successive governments have ravaged Chile’s national health care systems. Chile began spreading the gospel of the free-market in health care under the fascist-military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, as early as the 1970s. It is this policy of sustained socio-economic shock therapy that lay the groundwork for incalculable loss of life today.

As of this writing more than 125,000 have died of coronavirus, predominantly in the imperialist centres, while the death toll is quickly ascending internationally, including in Latin America.

Chile’s Health Ministry’s most recent figures—7,917 infected and 92 deaths since March 21— are, as elsewhere, a severe underestimation of the pandemic’s real toll. While cases of bodies in the streets—as in Ecuador—have yet to be reported, given the criminal response of the Chilean state to this epidemic, this may prove the next stage. There are many factors keeping the tally of infections artificially low.

Last year's police crackdown in Chile amid mass protests against the Piñera government. (AP Photo/Luis Hidalgo)

The health ministry updates give a percentage and not numbers for communes with infections of less than four. This may appear negligible, but an epidemiological study on the Valaparaiso region, reported by Interferencia on April 3, revealed that the ministry provided imprecise information on 12 communes which account for over 499,605 people, or 25.5 percent of the region’s population.

The same epidemiological study pointed to an anomaly in the progression updates beginning March 26, with the daily tally remaining constant for almost two weeks. “First we noticed it as an anomaly in the trend of curves, something that could give us hope,” University of Valparaiso academics Aníbal Vivaceta, Sebastián Espinoza and Nicolás Schiappacasse wrote.

“Normally in an epidemic we have an exponential progression … Nothing in the measures [the government adopted] would allow us to predict such a favorable situation, in which we would only receive an equal number of new cases every day.”

The reason is not a mystery. Nurses reported from almost the beginning of the outbreak that they were directed to exclusively test those requiring hospitalisation and ventilation. A reason for this directive was that public hospital staff across the country did not have sufficient COVID-19 tests. But that is not the end of it. The Chilean public health system is short of every form of personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, ICU beds and most importantly, staff. The system is chronically underfunded, with a deficit of $1.15 billion in 2018. Spending on public health as a share of GDP has not surpassed four percent in decades.

With only 2.5 doctors, 2.7 nurses and 2.0 beds per 1,000 inhabitant, thousands of people on waiting lists of the National Health Fund (FONASA) were dying long before COVID-19 came around. A 2018 report by the health ministry found that “15,600 patients on the waiting list died,” in 2016, while at least 6,700 other cases could be linked to “death and pending care.”

The public health system has only 1,058 ICU beds and just 640 with ventilators, but this includes machines that are already in use. The “concierge” private health system, however, whose facilities look more like hotels than hospitals and attend to a mere 17 percent of the population under normal circumstances, has 1,597 ICU beds. Another 1,577 ventilators have been ordered but are expected to arrive only by the end of May.

Meanwhile, nurses are sewing masks, making makeshift eye shields and donning plastic bags for PPE. As a result, by April 5, 140 primary care workers had tested positive for COVID-19, another 176 are waiting for the results of their respective tests, and more than 1,400 are in quarantine.

Staff and equipment shortages result not from a lack of foresight, but are rather the product of conscious state policy. In a circular from the Ministry of Finance to public offices, Minister Ignacio Briones Rojas outlined austerity measures “for the duration of the health emergency caused by the COVID-19 virus,” in which the hiring of new staff, the filling of vacancies and wage increases are suspended or curtailed.

In late March, the presidents of 15 Chilean scientific societies and the Academy of Sciences addressed an open letter to the president signed by more than 1,500 researchers including internationally renowned astronomer José Maza and biochemist Ramón Latorre, among others. Their main demands were 1) that a preventive national quarantine and social isolation measures in the urban centres be implemented immediately, and 2) for the transparency of data. The proposed measures they explained “seek to anticipate an eventual collapse of the health system in Chile … We cannot put at risk the system, nor health professionals, nor other patients suffering from other pathologies that also require hospitalization, critical beds and mechanical ventilators.”

“Likewise, as soon as possible, 100% transparency is needed … We, the signatories, are committed to Chile and request that the best decisions to protect the health of the population be evaluated, substantiated and made, understanding that these decisions are dynamic based on the best available information, scientific evidence and in a transparent manner for the citizens. Life comes first!” they concluded.

To this day, quarantining measures have been selectively implemented in certain municipalities of only the most severely hit regions, which are then routinely flouted by the upper end of society. Videos have surfaced on social media showing the rich on helicopters heading off to their summer retreats. Meanwhile, in the overcrowded poblaciones and shantytowns, which in some instances lack running water and sewerage, the virus is spreading quickly. No quarantine measures have been called for Puente Alto, a working class suburb in the Metropolitan Region, even though it has recently reported an alarming growth in cases.

In fact, everything that the Chilean state has done related to this health emergency has magnified the crisis to such a point that many unnecessary and avoidable deaths have become foreseeable.

For example, COVID-19-positive Katia Guzmán, the regional health secretary of La Araucanía region, knowingly, if not maliciously, incapacitated not only the regional authorities, including the mayor, the head of the National Defense in the area, the police chief and the regional education, justice, transport and sports authorities, but almost the entire local media. An infected official who arrived from Brazil earlier in March did not go into preventive quarantine as per protocol, but rather, with the regional health authority’s blessing, continued to work in public activities and meetings including a press gathering in which Guzman herself greeted everyone with a kiss. She is now under investigation.

It would be wrong to see this extraordinarily egregious act of negligence as the conduct of one individual. Also in late March, more than 700 doctors from public and private health institutions in La Araucanía attached their names to a letter asking for the immediate closure of the region and a period of strict quarantine.

“We feel that there is an under-diagnosis with respect to citizens who have coronavirus,” Dr. Javiera Brierly said in introducing the letter’s demands. By that point, the entire region had received only 100 diagnostic kits. “Our letter is also a call to have sufficient supplies, confirmatory tests, protective equipment for the population and for health professionals. We believe that there is a lack of resources and clear guidelines from the institutions.”

But the Health Ministry implements quarantining measures only after an outbreak occurs and then uses the Carabinero police and the military as a blunt instrument when people are forced by circumstance to go to work or find food or to fetch water. Of the 347 municipalities in Chile, 238 suffer shortages of water, and of these 194 have a “multidimensional poverty index”, that is, they are poor and lack water. 383,204 homes in Chile do not have drinking water. Such is the contempt for the people by the Chilean state, which is a government of, for and by the rich, and the rest of the population be damned.

“There is a lot of informal and precarious employment; people subsist on a daily basis so it has become impossible to maintain the total quarantine, since they must earn their daily sustenance,” explained a local official from La Araucanía region. “The state gives recommendations on how to protect themselves from infection, but does not support the social problems.”

La Araucanía, 680 kms south of Santiago, while the site of some multi-million-dollar estates, is also home to the impoverished indigenous Mapuche communities. The region has the most people infected with COVID-19 after Santiago, but its population of some 950,000 is one sixth that of the country’s capital. Of the ten poorest communes in the country, La Araucanía has seven, and Temuco, the regional capital, is also the poorest city in the country.

Temuco, with Chile’s highest coronavirus death rate, “is plagued by high pollution levels, contributing to respiratory sickness in locals,” reported the Guardian on April 10.

Dr. Carolina Chahin, an infectious disease specialist at Hospital Hernan Henriquez Aravena, “predicted the upcoming winter months would hit Chile’s colder, southern regions hard,” the report continued. The hospital, “the only one in the region with equipment to care for critical COVID-19 cases (had) last week, all of its ventilators (at) capacity. The health ministry immediately shipped six new machines to the hospital but Chahin said they did not have the staff to operate them.”

Mapuche families of victims have recounted how they saw the sick being turned away from emergency rooms because staff could not cope with the inundation of patients. Pablo Huaquilao, whose parents both contracted COVID-19, told local media “They started to prioritize who they were treating, many old people went back to their homes and that wouldn’t be accounted for in the official figures.”

“Technically, Chile has universal health care, with everyone covered under the public National Health Fund,” the British medical journal the Lancet reported in November of last year in a piece titled “Violent protests in Chile linked to health-care inequities”. “However,” it continued, “the country has a two-tier system, in which the public system covers about 78% of the population and private insurers cover about 17%.”

Modi extends India’s coronavirus lockdown till May 3

Wasantha Rupasinghe & Keith Jones

In an “address to the nation” yesterday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that his government’s hasty, ill-conceived 21-day countrywide anti-coronavirus lockdown will be extended till May 3.

Speaking on the day the lockdown was originally supposed to end, Modi offered only demagogy, in remarks that were laced with right-wing nationalist and Hindu communalist appeals.

He offered no serious plan to deal either with the health emergency—which given India’s mass poverty and ramshackle public health system threatens to result in a catastrophic loss of life—or the socio-economic calamity triggered by the sudden, unplanned lockdown.

As the result of the lockdown, hundreds of millions of workers and toilers, who had little to no savings, have been left jobless and without any income. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), in the first week of April, just three in every 10 Indians of working age were employed.

Yet, even as India’s prime minister extended the lockdown for a further 19 days, he provided not a single rupee in additional aid for working people!

The 1.7 lakh crore rupee (US $22.5 billion) relief package that the far-right, Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government announced on the lockdown’s second day, March 26, amounts in per capita terms to less than 1,250 rupees (US$ 16.45). In other words, India’s already impoverished masses have been placed on famine rations.

Moreover, much of this “aid” will only be available weeks and even months hence, and many of the most vulnerable, including most migrant workers, will not be able to access it. This is because they are not enrolled in the existing poverty alleviation programs through which the state relief is being distributed.

While Modi, with consummate cynicism, claimed in yesterday’s speech to be concerned and moved by the plight of India’s workers and toilers, all he would do for them was make a hollow appeal for others to provide them with charity. Adopting the tones of a Hindu priest, this servant of India’s rapacious capitalist elite beseeched, “Take as much care of poor families as you can. Especially try to fulfill their food requirements.”

What Modi had to say about addressing the health emergency was equally hollow.

He one again lectured the populace on the need to practice social distancing, but failed to say how this could be done in the teeming slums of India’s major cities, where people often live five and more to a room. Nor did he explain how the urban and rural poor can regularly wash their hands, when hundreds of millions don’t have running water in their homes, and more than one in 10 Indians, according to a 2018 Water Aid India study, “lack access to clean water near their home” (emphasis added).

Modi began his address by baldly asserting India’s fight against the COVID-19 pandemic is “moving ahead with great strength and steadfastness.”

He went on to boast that due to his government’s “holistic approach and quick decisions” India “is in a well-managed position” in combating the pandemic, “better” than “many developed nations.”

This is all lies. Apart from imposing travel restrictions, the Modi government did essentially nothing to halt the spread of COVID-19 for the first two months after the outbreak in China had been identified as a potential major threat. Yet Indian and international epidemiologists and other scientists have long recognised that India would be especially at risk in any global pandemic.

In its 2020-2021 budget, presented at the beginning of February, the Modi government allotted a derisory 69 crore rupees (US $9) billion to providing health care for India’s 1.37 billion people, or less than $7 per person.

Not until March 24—that is the very day Modi was compelled to abruptly shift from claiming India was a model to the region, even the world, in containing the coronavirus to imposing an unprecedented India-wide lockdown—did the government announce emergency funding to fight the pandemic.

Even then, the promised amounts are a pittance given the shortages of trained medical personnel, personal protective equipment (PPE), and ventilators, and the ruinous state of India’s public health infrastructure, which runs the gamut from dilapidated (in the major urban centers) to non-existent (across rural India.) The promised 15 thousand crore rupees ($1.97 billion) is on a per capita basis less than 110 rupees ($1.45)—this when a single COVID-19 test reportedly costs more than 5,000 rupees (about $67).

As for Modi’s claims about India being in a “well-managed” position, these are belied by:

• the hunger, distress and suffering inflicted on working people across India by the lockdown;
  
• the makeshift internal refugee camps to which millions of migrant workers who sought to return to their villagers because the government’s ill-prepared shutdown left them jobless, and in many case homeless, have been confined;
  
• the many medical facilities that have had to be temporarily shut because so many staff became infected with the virus because they lacked proper PPE, including even face masks;
  
• and, last but not least, by the surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths.

On the day the lockdown was announced, India had 564 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 10 deaths attributable to the virus. By yesterday, the number of confirmed cases had increased more than 20-fold to 11,393, and the death toll had reached 393.

Prioritising money over human life, Indian authorities have administered less than 250,000 COVID-19 tests, one of the lowest per capita test rates in the world. Even now, people who present with COVID-19-type symptoms are only being tested if they can be directly tied to a cluster of previous confirmed cases or, since revised testing criteria were announced late last week, live in a small number of previously identified “hotspots.”

Based on the skewed results produced by its test-rationing, New Delhi, despite worried warnings from health experts that the true number of infections is likely many times higher, continues to insist that there is no “community transmission” in India.

In reality, everything indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to explode across the world’s second most populous country in the coming weeks.

Nevertheless, even as it extends the lockdown, the BJP government is conspiring with big business to reopen at least 15 economic sectors, including the auto, steel, rubber, telecom equipment, agro-chemical, and construction industries.

Modi announced yesterday that the lockdown would be intensified for the better part of the next week, especially in “hotspots,” but that after April 20 there will be “graded relaxations.”

Modi invoked the desperate plight of India’s workers and toilers in trying to justify what—under conditions of the absence of systematic mass testing, contact-tracking, and an entirely revamped health care system—can only be a premature and precipitous return to work that will amplify the pandemic and the consequent loss of life many times over.

“Provision of this limited exemption” in the areas that are to be identified by the 20th will be done, asserted Modi, “keeping in mind the livelihood of our poor brothers and sisters. Those who earn daily, make ends meet with daily income, they are my family. One of my top-most priorities is to reduce the difficulties in their lives.”

Migrant workers lost little time in giving their answer to the claim of Modi, who was propelled to power by big business to dramatically intensify the exploitation of the working class, to be their “brother.”

In Mumbai more than a thousand jobless migrant workers were attacked yesterday afternoon by lathi-wielding police after they had congregated at the Bandra Railway Station to demand that they be transported home. Later in the day, textile workers in Surat, Gujarat, staged their third protest in recent days to likewise demand that they be allowed to return to their villages, rather than being forced to survive on thin gruel rations.

Surat Muncipal Commisioner Banchhanidhi Pani told the Economic Times that NGOs and the municipality are currently “feeding around six lakh three thousand (603,000) people per day,” in Gujarat’s second largest city.

Ugandan government touts malarial drug chloroquine as a COVID-19 cure

Stephan McCoy

Michael Yao, the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Africa programme manager for emergency response, has warned of a rapid increase in coronavirus cases on the continent. Noting that, “During the last four days, we can see that the numbers have already doubled,” he added, “If the trend continues, and also learning from what happened in China and in Europe, some countries may face a huge peak very soon.”

Far more so than in Europe and China, Africa’s health systems are woefully underfunded, understaffed and under-resourced. There is a vital need for a vaccine, but chances of obtaining one in less than 18 months are slim to nil. Under these conditions, Uganda’s government has taken a leaf from US President Donald Trump’s playbook in touting untested remedies, chiefly the anti-malarial drugs chloroquine (CQ) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), as a potential lifesaver.

According to PML Daily, “Director of Health Services, Ministry of Health, Henry Mwebesa has revealed that [three recently discharged patients] who had tested positive [for the] Coronavirus were treated using the controversial hydroxychloroquine drug, that was used in the 90s and early 2000s to treat malaria.”

Plaquenil is one of many brand names for the drug Hydroxychloroquine. (Photo credit: Twitter/Manon01901750)

Mwebesa tweeted, “The patients we are discharging today were on hydroxychloroquine and erythromycin actually.” He made his remarks in response to one of his followers, Brandon Ndoni, who asked the Ugandan government to clarify the controversy over the use of CQ and HCQ in light of the fact that the “WHO, Europe (bar France) are yet to authorize use of Antimalarials Hydroxychloroquine, Chloroquine in treating Covid-19 pneumonia.”

Health Minister Dr Jane Ruth Aceng sought to justify this, telling a press conference in Kampala that, although HCQ is still undergoing testing, it can stop the spread of the disease by stabilizing red blood cells and promoting the uptake of oxygen.

The government’s endorsing of HCQ and CQ has helped promote panic buying and stockpiling of the drugs.

In February, Janet Diaz, head of clinical care for the WHO Emergencies Program, answered a reporter’s question about CQ at a press conference, saying that there was no proof yet that it was an effective treatment.

Just last week, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated their therapeutic options guidance, removing any reference to HCQ and stating explicitly, “There are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19.”

Having spent decades slashing health care systems and starving them of resources, African governments are attempting to promote HCQ and CQ as quick-fix cures to conceal the impact of privatisation and budget cuts carried out at the behest of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as the condition for loans.

While the WHO reiterates that mass testing, contact tracing, isolation and treatment are the most effective ways to fight the virus, African governments—like their counterparts in the advanced industrial countries— refuse to mobilize the necessary resources to fight the virus.

President Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1986, has spent his years in office giving away Ugandaʼs assets to international financial interests and carrying out a punishing series of privatisations. This wholesale robbery and looting of resources on behalf of international capital and its local agents has had a catastrophic effect on the working class and poor farmers.

In 2017, the country ranked 162 out of 189 on the UN’s Human Development Index. Three-quarters of the population lives on less than $3.10 per day. Life expectancy is just 62 years, only two years more than war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo; 51 percent of Ugandans lack access to safe water; 82 percent do not have access to improved sanitation facilities; and acute malnutrition (wasting) among children between six months of age and five years old is four percent, but 10 percent in the West Nile sub-region of Uganda.

In a bid to stop the virus spreading, the government ordered a lockdown at the beginning of April. But with 71 percent of people who live in the capital, Kampala, sharing a one-roomed home with several others, this is a terrible ordeal.

There is a ban on all transport and a night-time curfew, now extended beyond the initial two weeks for a further three weeks, amid a national power outage. Security forces have fired on people violating the curfew. The ban on all private and public transport extends even to medical emergencies, and at least seven pregnant women have died as a result of the lockdown.

Scovia Nakawooya’s unborn child died inside her as she struggled to reach a hospital on foot. Her husband Francis Kibenge begged drivers to take her to a hospital a mile and a half away. Grace Nagawa, the couple’s 19-year-old daughter, wept as she explained, “Sometimes she would stop, bend and put her hand on her thigh to support her body, just to rest a bit.” Nakawooya died at the medical centre the next morning.

The situation facing the country, which hosts Africa’s largest refugee population—1.4 million from neighbouring DRC and South Sudan—is dire. Julius Kasozi, a public health officer with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Uganda, said, “I fear a high death toll if the virus reaches the settlements.”

As well as all the other restrictions, the lockdown bans the movement of refugees outside these settlements, preventing them from getting food rations and other essentials. The UN’s World Food Programme has announced a 30 percent reduction in the rations it distributes to refugees due to a loss of 67 percent of its funding for East and Central Africa.

A second locust swarm that is sweeping East Africa and the Horn is devouring newly planted crops and livelihoods in its path. It is expected that poor farmers and semi-nomadic herders in the east and the semi-arid northeast Karamoja region will be the hardest hit, even as the coronavirus sweeps the country. The flight and travel bans imposed to stop the spread of the virus mean that much needed pesticides and international personnel to fight the locusts are not available.

While the government has urged farmers to start planting to ensure food security, Loupa Pius, project officer at Dynamic Agropastoralist Development Organisation in Karamoja, told Al Jazeera, “People should be advised to halt planting of crops to observe the direction and the stage of desert locust outbreak.

“Otherwise, if this is not taken into action, the usual food insecurity will override the region, including capable people who can usually easily find their own food without aid. This time round, they are likely to ask for it because the situation has been hit by COVID-19.”

The United Nations is already warning that the locust swarm could increase 500-fold by June.

The global elite seek their pandemic retreats

Paul Bond

… But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys … The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime, it was folly to grieve, or to think.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death

The devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic is being felt by billions of people the world over, most acutely in densely populated working class areas and among the poorest layers of society, where social distancing is a physical impossibility and economic desperation makes lack of income life threatening.

For corporations the rising death toll cannot long be allowed to disrupt profits or their usual operations, while parasitic marketeers are increasing their speculative creation of fictitious capital requiring renewed exploitation of the labour power of the working class—however dangerous the conditions.

Views across the Mediterranean and bay of Cannes from the Alang Alang resort (screenshot from villa-alangalang.com)

Against this polarised world situation, the most grotesque picture emerges whenever an occasional news report shines a light on the behaviour of the super-rich.

Last week, it was reported that French authorities refused to allow ten passengers of a British private jet to disembark at Marseille-Provence airport. The party had planned to travel onwards in three private helicopters to a £50,000-a-night luxury villa in Cannes.

The party comprised three male billionaires in their 40s, three female escorts in their 20s, a secretary, a translator and bodyguards. The trip was organised by a Croatian businessman working in a finance and estate agency in Britain, who reportedly had “paid for everything.”

Travel into France is still permitted, but the government lockdown includes restrictions on non-essential trips. Travel to a holiday villa for weeks on end is not included.

An aerial view of the Marseille Provence airport in Marseille, southern France. (Boris Horvat, Pool image via AP)

Police turned back the three helicopter pilots, fining them for breach of lockdown regulations. The passengers were not fined because they were not allowed to step onto French soil.

The arrogance and self-entitlement were palpable. The businessman had booked the flight with French authorities in advance, hence the police being in place on their arrival. One of the businessmen told press that they were not holidaymakers but were on their way to complete a deal that would have seen the creation of nearly 1,000 jobs.

The businessman blamed “the stupid ignorance in the time of COVID-19.” According to one source, the party’s leader told police, “I have money, let’s talk,” when they boarded the plane. The party also “tried to make use of their connections and made a few phone calls.”

Nine of the party returned to Britain. The tenth chartered another plane and flew to Berlin.

The unsuccessful jaunt to the French Riviera points to the phenomenal resources the rich can call upon. A police source told press the businessman was “looking forward to the break,” intending to lockdown at the villa.

The Alang Alang resort (screenshot from villa-alangalang.com)

Little wonder. The 17,200-square-foot Villa Alang Alang is the most luxurious in the south of France, valued at $70 million and is rented out for £360,000 a month. It has eight bedrooms, a private cinema and nightclub, wine cellar, gym, spa, steam room and indoor pool, an outdoor infinity swimming pool and a jacuzzi. Its multiple terraces overlook the Mediterranean and a private beach. Decorations include a “living wall with a tropical water feature” and a dinosaur skull overlooking the marbled entrance hall and its three flights of steps.

A dinosaur skull overlooking the marbled entrance hall and its three flights of step (screenshot from villa-alangalang com)

The flight on an Embraer Legacy jet that cost £5,300 an hour and the three helicopters were organised by London-based firm PrivateFly. Such companies internationally are reporting an upsurge in bookings. US-based FlyEliteJets was reporting a nine-fold increase in weekly inquiries by the middle of last month.

Many are chartered to fly the super-rich to private islands, with rent or purchase already a boom industry. Gladden Island, off Belize, for example, is extremely popular because it is totally private and only has one residence. Staff for the property stay on a separate island and must turn on lights remotely to let guests know when they are coming. The island usually costs $2,950 per night for two people, but this is a sellers’ market.

The wine cellar and cigar room at Alang Alang (screenshot from villa-alangalang com)

The same company—Private Islands, Inc.—is also handling 700-acre Blue Island in the Bahamas, which has attracted attention because it has a private runway. This has led to an increased interest from those with a private jet and nowhere else to land it. It costs around $70 million to buy.

Private Islands’ CEO, Chris Krolow, said recently that he had been receiving calls from people on yachts, sailing around islands “trying to find a safe place to go and willing to pay a premium.”

Private companies hiring luxury yachts are making landing an option for those who can afford it. This is not shipwreck survival stuff. Reporting one seven-week charter by a family, the CEO of Burgess Yachts said the children would be home-schooled aboard and would also receive cooking lessons from the crew’s chef and be shown the ship’s engine room. It was unclear who would be doing the home-schooling. British property services’ companies report an increase in requests for private tutors from parents taking their children out of school, as well as a large demand for places in boarding schools.

Manufacturers of bunkers and bomb shelters in the US are reporting a spike in orders. The Rising S Company has seen a fourfold increase in business on this time last year, with business coming from many countries they had not previously supplied. The average cost of a bunker being considered is $150,000.

Cinema/Games Room at Alang Alang resort (screenshot from villa-alangalang.com)

For the slightly less well-off, who have been unfortunate enough to have contracted COVID-19, the Maldives government has built a coronavirus quarantine resort, including a luxury hotel built in just 10 days on Villingillivaru island, with 30 air-conditioned rooms complete with en-suite medical care.

The rapacious quest for hideouts by the super-rich starkly demonstrates the waste of societal resources under capitalism. London property services company Quintessentially Estates has been inundated with calls from those looking for isolated castles, islands, mansions, yachts and jets. One client was after a new property with a large spa so that his wife would not need to leave the house for her beauty treatments.

A lounge at Alang Alang (screenshot from villa-alangalang com)

Quintessentially’s CEO, Penny Mosgrove, told the Evening Standard that a client with a £35 million mansion in upscale Mayfair was looking for an apartment to rent when he came back to London. He did not want to return to his own mansion “in case he infected the premises” and was looking at renting a four-bedroom duplex on Grosvenor Square in Mayfair for £18,000 a month.

Despite all this, the elites have continued to socialise within their own circles, at disastrous human cost. Last month, half of Uruguay’s sudden proliferation of positive cases was traced to a society wedding attended by a fashion designer recently returned from Spain.

In Brazil, the elite Rio de Janeiro Country Club has been heavily hit by the virus. At least 60 of its 850 members tested positive shortly after a dinner given by members of the former royal family. Over half of the guests at the dinner also tested positive. It is difficult not to think of Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death.

The vast squandering of plundered resources for the benefit of a tiny handful of profiteers stands in stark contrast to what is available to the working class. Public spaces are closed even for essential exercise, workplaces remain open without regard for the welfare or safety of workers, and health care is subordinated to the demands of profit and the market. Every day the pandemic is laying bare the urgent need for a revolutionary overturn to sweep aside this brutal and barbarous system. The vast reserves of wealth must be expropriated by the working class, and a rational and organised deployment of resources put into combating the pandemic and protecting the health and future of the population.