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COVID-19

NYC Public High School Student: ‘The Situation Is Beyond Control’

January 10, 2022 Left Voice. , , ,
As the Omicron variant continues to surge, despite 90,132 new positive cases reported in New York on Saturday and one in three Covid-19 tests coming back positive in New York City, schools have been forced to stay open with insufficient safety measures as many students, and staff continue to test positive. Eleven members of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) Solidarity Caucus filed a lawsuit seeking mandatory remote learning until all students and workers can be tested, but Mayor Eric Adams continues to insist that schools must stay open at all costs, and even that schools are the safest place for students to be. Students and teachers are being forced to return to extremely unsafe conditions so that parents can go back to work and the economy can go “back to normal.”

Chicago’s COVID-19 Fight With Teachers Hangs Over A Second Week

January 10, 2022 Press TV. , , ,
Disputed issues included testing and metrics to close schools. The Chicago Teachers Union wants the option to revert to districtwide remote instruction, and most members have refused to teach in-person until there's an agreement, or the latest COVID-19 spike subsides. But Chicago leaders reject districtwide remote learning, saying it's detrimental and schools are safe. Instead, Chicago opted to cancel classes as a whole two days after students returned from winter break. Chicago Public Schools face the same pandemic issues as other districts nationwide, with more reverting to remote learning as infections soar and staff members are sidelined. But the situation in union-friendly Chicago has been amplified in a labor dispute that's familiar to families in the mostly low-income Black and Latino district who have seen disruptions during a similar safety protocol fight last year, a 2019 strike and a one-day work stoppage in 2016.

Oakland Students Petition For School District To Go To Remote Learning

January 10, 2022 Taylor Bisacky, KRON 4. , , ,
Oakland, Calif. — Following a planned “sick-out” on Friday where more than 500 teachers across the Oakland Unified School District called out of work sick, hundreds of students within the district have come together in an online petition demanding increased COVID-19 protocols or else they’ll strike. Students at schools in Oakland Unified School District are now demanding increased COVID-19 protocols and supplies. If their demands are not met, they plan to boycott showing up for in-person classes. “We are demanding KN95 masks for all of the students because they’re not easily accessible to them, twice a week PCR and rapid tests for everyone on campus and more outdoor spaces to eat safely when it rains or if the district doesn’t want to give this to us, we demand a shift to online learning,” said Ayleen Serrano who a 10th grader at MetWest High School in Oakland.

US Public School Teachers Fight For COVID Safety

January 9, 2022 Monica Cruz, People's Dispatch. , , , ,
In New York City, around 200 public school teachers and community members rallied outside the Barclays Center on January 5 to demand safety measures as the COVID-19 positivity rate skyrockets. Organized by the MORE (Movement of Rank and File Educators) caucus of the NYC teacher’s union United Federation of Teachers (UFT), protestors demanded KN95 or N95 masks for all students, faculty and staff, weekly testing of all staff and students, repair or replacement of ventilation systems, excused student absences due to COVID surges and remote-learning options. “All of my students know that I’m here right now,” said Adam, a Brooklyn public school teacher. “I showed them the flyer on the projector and I told them that this is the answer, it’s here. It’s not City Hall who keeps us safe.”

The Highest Attainable Standard Of Health Is A Fundamental Right

January 7, 2022 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , ,
As we enter the new year almost two years after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020, the official death toll from COVID-19 sits just below 5.5 million people. WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says that there is a ‘tsunami of cases’ due to the new variants. The country with the highest death toll is the United States, where the official number of those who succumbed to the disease is now over 847,000; Brazil and India follow with nearly 620,000 and 482,000 deaths respectively. These three countries have been ravaged by the disease. The political leadership of each of these countries failed to take sufficient measures to break the chain of infection and instead offered anti-scientific advice to the public, who suffered from both a lack of clear information and relatively depleted health care systems.

Chicago Teachers Voted To Teach Remotely Amid Omicron Wave

January 7, 2022 Jeff Schuhrke, In These Times. , , ,
As Covid-19 cases surge to record levels, the 25,000-member Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is once again in a standoff with the city’s school system to increase safety measures for educators, students and communities. After Mayor Lori Lightfoot repeatedly refused the union’s proposals for stronger Covid-19 mitigations in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) amid the fast-spreading Omicron wave, 73% of CTU members voted Tuesday night to temporarily teach remotely. In response, Lightfoot and CPS cancelled all classes Wednesday and locked educators out of online learning platforms. “The mayor was extremely angry at the idea that people inside the schools would take action for ourselves,” said CTU President Jesse Sharkey.

Covid Fueled By Neoliberal Austerity

January 5, 2022 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
On December 31, 2019 Chinese media told the world about a newly discovered disease cluster in the city of Wuhan. What was thought to be a viral pneumonia came to be known as SARS-CoV-2, Covid-19. Two weeks later Chinese scientists sequenced its genome and gave the world the ability to test and trace the disease. Covid continued to spread and the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020. China didn’t wait for a WHO declaration in order to take action. The government immediately adopted a zero covid strategy. They dispatched health care workers to Wuhan and built new hospitals to care for the sick. The sick were isolated and the healthy were supported in a variety of ways.

Capitalist Bonanza: Share Buybacks Reached Record High In 2021

January 5, 2022 Otto Fors, Left Voice. , , ,
The coronavirus pandemic continued to wreak havoc in 2021, with the Omicron and Delta variants, supply chain disruptions, and inflation battering the global working class. In the United States, companies continued to put profits before worker well-being while the Biden administration refused to provide relief like continuing the child tax credit. Amid much bad news for workers last year emerged a key victor: wealthy shareholders. Share buybacks hit a record high last year. Companies in the S&P 500 — a market index which tracks the stock prices of 500 leading U.S. companies — repurchased shares worth over $245 billion in the third quarter alone. These exorbitant buybacks helped U.S. stock market indices reach record peaks: the S&P 500 broke 67 records in 2021 and increased its value by 25 percent.

Michigan Teachers Discuss Collective Action To Close Schools

January 5, 2022 Jerry White, WSWS. , , ,
Michigan teachers took part in an emergency meeting Tuesday afternoon to organize collective action to close schools and stop the spread of COVID-19. The meeting, sponsored by the Michigan Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee, included a large number of educators, parents and young people from Detroit and other Michigan school districts, as well as teachers from Illinois, Pennsylvania and New York. Also participating was a leader of the Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee in the United Kingdom, where 218,000 new COVID-19 infections were recorded Tuesday. The emergency meeting was held as the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) reported that the state saw 61,235 new cases and 298 deaths between last Thursday and Monday.

A Roundtable Discussion With Nurses And Teachers

January 4, 2022 Chris Brooks, The Strike Wave. , , ,
The United States has averaged a thousand people a day dying from COVID since August and the total number of lives lost is approaching a million. The number of children hospitalized with COVID has hit an all-time high nationally. During all of that, the rich have only gotten richer. On the same day we set a new national record for COVID cases, Wall Street hit a record high. Labor journalist and NewsGuild organizer Chris Brooks sat down with a group of New York City nurses and teachers to talk about how the institutions they work for are collapsing and what labor activists can do about it. Jia Lee, special education teacher at a public school in Manhattan, United Federation of Teachers (UFT) chapter leader and on the steering committee of the Movement for Rank-and-file Educators (MORE).

Cuba Grows And Advances Despite The Difficulties Of 2021

January 2, 2022 Alejandra Garcia And Gustavo A. Maranges, Resumen. , , ,
This 2021 has been the most difficult year for the Cuban people. In addition to the ravages of the blockade, thousands of people died due to the Covid-19. The list was immense, and as the days went by, names became familiar and beloved faces. Moreover, it was also a year of economic readjustments and changes needed to move the island towards a possible and sustainable development over time. The changes, the deaths, and the pandemic came at a time when the world economy suffered the strongest recession since the years of the Second World War. Cuba suffered double this new crisis since it had already been dragging around the chains of an unjust financial blockade for decades, which between April 2019 and December 2020 alone caused over nine trillion dollars in losses.

2021: A Grim Year For Planet Earth

January 2, 2022 Farhana Haque Rahman, Inter Press Service News Agency. , ,
Toronto, Canada - Between the COVID-19 pandemic and the deadly manifestations of the climate crisis, there were few places to hide for most of us in 2021. Ageing billionaires riding booming stock markets could take their first flights into space in their own rockets, but for the rest of Planet Earth’s 8 billion people with their feet on the ground it was a year of placing hope in the hands of scientists and our political leaders to turn the tide. Our review of 2021, as seen through the eyes of IPS reporters and contributors around the world, must begin as a year ago by paying our respects to those who lost their lives early, while also extending our gratitude to the often anonymous individuals fighting to make things better.

Texas Team Applauded For Giving What Big Pharma Refuses

January 2, 2022 Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams. , , ,
A small team of Texas researchers is being hailed for developing an unpatented Covid-19 vaccine to share with the world without personal profit, with some advocates asking, if they can do it, why can't Big Pharma? Dubbed "the World's Covid vaccine," the inoculation—formally called Cobervax—is an open-source alternative to Big Pharma's patent-protected vaccines. Instead of being produced for profit, this shot could ultimately be manufactured around the world and made cheaply available to all without governmental or private legal retribution. Common Dreams reported this week that Cobervax—developed jointly by Texas Children's Hospital, Houston's Baylor College, and the Indian pharmaceutical company Biological E. Limited—was authorized for emergency use in India amid a surge in infections driven by the highly contagious Omicron variant.

We Dance Into The New Year Banging Our Hammers And Swinging Our Sickles

December 31, 2021 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
Bittersweet is the passage of this year. There have been some immense victories and some catastrophic defeats, the most terrible being the failure of the Global North countries to adopt a democratic attitude towards confronting the COVID-19 pandemic and creating equitable access to key resources, from life-saving medical equipment to vaccines. Tragically, by the end of this pandemic, we will have learnt the Greek alphabet from the variants named after its letters (Delta, Omicron), which continue to emerge. Cuba leads the world with the highest vaccination rates, using its indigenous vaccines to protect its population as well as those of countries from Venezuela to Vietnam, following a long history of medical solidarity.

Global Migration Indicators Report Summarizes 2020 For Migrants

December 31, 2021 People's Dispatch. , , ,
The Global Migration Indicators report by the International Organization for Migration is here, with an update on how COVID-19 affected migration around the world. The report says more than 2,300 migrants died while trying to get into Europe or within Europe in 2020. While the pandemic restricted mobility and reduced international migration, still, there were two hundred and eighty-one million international migrants in the middle of 2020. That is close to four per cent of the world’s population.
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