Pandemic

Analysis: COVID-19 Deaths Likely Undercounted By Over 50,000

August 13, 2020 Kate Randall, WSWS. Educate! COVID-19, Deaths, Pandemic, United States

More than 165,000 Americans have now died from the coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins University data. The US passed the grim statistic of 5 million cases of COVID-19 earlier this month. As horrifying as these figures are, a new analysis shows that the number of deaths from the coronavirus likely has been significantly undercounted. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) analyzed by the New York Times have revealed that 200,700 people died from March 15, when the pandemic took hold, to July 25. This is 54,000 higher than the confirmed death toll, averaged, for the same time period in the previous three years.

After 300 Years, It’s Time To End Capitalism, Not Reform It

August 10, 2020 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. Podcast Capitalism, Pandemic, Recession, Ruling Class

The United States is facing multiple crises with no signs of improvement on the horizon - a deep recession, high unemployment, millions of people soon to be displaced from their homes, a failed healthcare system in the midst of a pandemic, the climate crisis and more. We speak with Professor Richard Wolff, an economist and the author of "Democracy at Work", about the history of capitalism and how it is inherently unstable. Prof. Wolff posits that the United States is now in a situation where capitalism is unlikely to survive. He describes why that is and the lessons we must learn from the fatal mistakes made when the US was in a similar situation one hundred years ago.

Trump’s Order To Bypass Congress On COVID-19 Relief Faces Likely Legal Challenges

August 9, 2020 Chris Megerian, Anna M. Phillips and Sarah D. Wire, LA Times. Resist! Congress, COVID-19, Pandemic, Recession

Washington, DC - President Trump on Saturday said he was bypassing Congress and taking unilateral action to provide financial relief to Americans struggling during the coronavirus crisis, despite uncertainty about his legal authority to do so. Following the breakdown of talks on Capitol Hill to reach a bipartisan deal, Trump signed four orders that he said would extend enhanced federal unemployment benefits, defer some employees’ payroll taxes, continue a temporary ban on evictions and reduce the burden of student loans.

Coronavirus Is Being Tackled By Nicaragua’s Community-Based Health System

August 8, 2020 By Kevin Zeese and John Perry, Popular Resistance. Educate! COVID-19, Health Care, Nicaragua, Pandemic

Nicaragua’s Sandinista government is – like every other government – engaged in a struggle to limit the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on its people. But Nicaragua suffers two additional handicaps. One is that it is subject to US and European sanctions, which severely limit the aid it gets from abroad or from multilateral bodies. The other is its internal opposition, which aims to use the pandemic in its latest attempt to destabilize the government and turn opinion against it. To do so it employs a wide range of propaganda methods, at home and abroad. These were very evident in a recent article in the progressive platform Toward Freedom by Rafael Camacho, whose very title shows it is going to repeat the opposition’s messages: Coronavirus met with denial and silence in Nicaragua.

War And Pandemic Journalism

August 8, 2020 Patrick Cockburn, Tom Dispatch. Educate! COVID-19, Pandemic, Polio, Propaganda

The struggle against Covid-19 has often been compared to fighting a war. Much of this rhetoric is bombast, but the similarities between the struggle against the virus and against human enemies are real enough. War reporting and pandemic reporting likewise have much in common because, in both cases, journalists are dealing with and describing matters of life and death. Public interest is fueled by deep fears, often more intense during an epidemic because the whole population is at risk. In a war, aside from military occupation and area bombing, terror is at its height among those closest to the battlefield.

Our Planet Missed The Opportunity To Unite Against The Pandemic

August 6, 2020 Andre Vltchek, Popular Resistance. Educate! COVID-19, International Solidarity, Pandemic

It is time to stop irresponsible finger-pointing. All over the world, as this essay is being written, well over 17 million COVID-19 cases have been reported, and 676,000 people died. And instead of concentrating on serious research, trying to save human lives and attempting to stop the global calamity, 'residents' of the White House are spending all the energy on their own political survival, as well as on the survival of the regime. In the U.S., both the establishment and opposition are buzzing with phantasmagoric conspiracy theories. Everyone is shouting, and no one is listening.

Humanity Protests Against The Crimes Of Death

August 1, 2020 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! COVID-19, Healthcare workers, Pandemic, Public Health

On 23 July, World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that the world now has 15 million people infected by COVID-19. ‘The pandemic has disrupted the lives of billions of people. Many have been at home for months’, he said. The trauma of the Great Lockdown is taking a serious psycho-social toll. ‘It’s completely understandable that people want to get on with their lives’, Dr. Ghebreyesus said. ‘But we will not go back to the “old normal”. The pandemic has already changed the way we live our lives.

It’s Time For A New Labor Movement In The Performing Arts

July 30, 2020 Josh Loar, Current Affairs. Organize! Pandemic, Performing Arts, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

I'll never forget the time I 128 hours—without overtime. There are, of course, only 168 hours in a week, and by the time you have worked your 128th, you no longer have professional standards, boundaries, or even much of an identity left. Me, personally? I was cackling at every provocation and blinking too often to chase away sleep. At the time, I was a concert sound engineer, lighting designer, and technical director, and I was in the process of opening a new concert venue (that must remain nameless) in New York City.

Pandemic Worsens, Resistance Will Follow

July 28, 2020 John Clarke, Counterfire. Strategize! Capitalism, COVID-19, Pandemic, Public Health

Two recent developments in the US seem to capture just how the destructive, profit-driven irrationality of capitalism renders it incapable of effectively containing the present global pandemic. On July 10, the US recorded a staggering 70,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day and Florida saw 11,433 cases, with 435 more people hospitalised. The next day, the reopening of “The Most Magical Place on Earth,” Disney World, began in that state. Admission tickets for the four theme parks are already sold out for the month of July.

Homelessness In The COVID-19 Era

July 27, 2020 Rajan Menon, Tom Dispatch. Educate! COVID-19, Homelessness, Pandemic, Public Health

The novel SARS-CoV-2 has roared through the American landscape leaving physical, emotional, and economic devastation in its wake. By early July, known infections in this country exceeded three million, while deaths topped 135,000. Home to just over 4% of the global population, the United States accounts for more than a quarter of all fatalities from Covid-19, the disease produced by the coronavirus. Amid a recent surge of infections, especially across the Sun Belt, which Vice President Mike Pence typically denied was even occurring, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that the daily total of infections had reached a record 60,000.

Is The United States A Failing State? A Failed State?

July 25, 2020 Richard Falk, Global Justice in the 21st Century. Educate! Failed State, Pandemic, Recession, United States

To ask whether the United States, the world’s dominant military power, is ‘a failing state’ should cause worldwide anxiety. Such a state, analogous to a wounded animal, is a global menace of unprecedented proportions in the nuclear age. Its political leadership is exhibiting a reckless tendency of combining incompetence with extremism. It is also crucial to ascertain at what point a failing state should be written off as ‘a failed state’ for which there is no longer a clear path to redemption. The November elections in the United States will send a strong signal as to whether the United States is failing or has failed.

Capitalism May Not Survive The 2020 Global Crisis

July 24, 2020 Richard D. Wolff, RT. Educate! Capitalism, Economic Recovery, Pandemic, Recession

The current global crisis triggered by Covid-19 is the third capitalist crash in this century. And governments’ incapacity to consider non-capitalist solutions threatens to keep deepening this crisis into capitalism’s worst. The first was in early 2000. Because it was triggered by the absurdly high prices of dot-com stocks, it got named the “dotcom crisis.” In 2008, the trigger was widespread subprime mortgage default in the US and the crash was far more serious, one of the worst in capitalism’s history, second only to the crash of the 1930s. And now, in 2020, the trigger was a viral pandemic, and we have a far deeper crash than in 2008.

Cuba Defeated The Pandemic, Is Preparing To Face The Economic Crisis

July 24, 2020 By Arleen Rodríguez Derivet, Resumen English. Create! Cuba, Pandemic, Recession, Socialism

Possibly no other country in the world has it worse when it comes to facing what Cuban President Miguel Díaz Canel has defined as the very challenging global economic scenario, after the impact of a pandemic that in the first six months of the year put almost all economies on hold and is still slowing down the most dynamic productive, financial and commercial processes on a planetary level. But surely no one else, among the small states of this unbalanced and unjust world, is in a better position to attempt another giant leap from uncertainty to risk.

Human Solidarity And A Global Health Commons

July 17, 2020 Christian Laval, ROAR Magazine. Create! COVID-19, Healthcare, Mutual Aid, Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic reminds us of the most fundamental features of the human condition: the solidarity that exists between humans across borders, between humans and all other living beings, as well as between living beings and their environments. This reminder, which obtuse nationalisms and competitive logics are already rushing to hush up, invites us to rethink what a true global political institution should be — what we will here call the “global commons of humanity.” The lessons from the pandemic also apply to other major problems that confront humanity, starting with global warming and the procession of disasters that are predicted to occur, and for which we are no more prepared than we were to confront the global virus today. In no way do our economic and political institutions arm us to face what lies ahead. It is then more urgent than ever to politically rethink the necessary conditions for the survival of humanity on Earth.

Pausing In The Pandemic Portal

July 16, 2020 By Hussan, S.K., Medium. Educate! Capitalism, COVID-19, Pandemic, Workers Rights and Jobs

Think of the clarity that this moment has provided you with who sustains you. Who sustains us. The farmworker. The health worker. The delivery worker. The cleaners. The grocery store workers. Can you hold on to this clarity as we step through the portal? That what sustains life is not those that choose profit, but those that ensure care. And can you remember that it is those that sustained us who were forced to keep on working? Can you remember once we are through this portal that we lived through once a period where almost all inessential travel was stopped. Where people chose to stay home, and often consume less. And yet climate change marched on. That individual action is not enough to stop the climate catastrophe. Can you remember that in this moment, it was not corporations or privatization that protected us? But social services and mutual aid.

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