Tag Archives | COVID-19

There were less than 400 cases of infection across the country during that period, most of them imported, and zero deaths, a remarkable accomplishment considering the country’s population of 96 million people and the fact that it shares a 1,450 km land border with China.

In April 2020, a month after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the pandemic, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) warned that the numbers of people who lived with acute hunger around the world would double due to COVID-19 by the end of 2020 ‘unless swift action is taken’.

We need strong unions, all of us. Tragically, even during the pandemic, businesses continue to aggressively resist worker attempts at unionization. And recent decisions by the NLRB only add to worker difficulties.

Eleanor Goldfield reports from Stockholm on how COVID-19 has laid bare the U..S-style capitalist reality creeping into Sweden’s already struggling socialized programs.

As a coup de grâce to the Bernie Sanders campaign Joe Biden declared that he would veto Medicare-for-All. This could drive a dedicated health care advocate to relentlessly pursue Med-4-All as a final goal.

In Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage, he reports on interviews he did in February and March with U.S. President Donald Trump about the coronavirus.

Over 2,000 people have written to the CBC to condemn its deletion of the word “Palestine” and its subsequent apology for uttering it. Still, the broadcaster insists the word falls outside its standards.

Over two decades ago, Professor Richard Levins, one of the founders of Science for the People, described this phenomenon as the “dual nature” of science.(1) On one hand, scientific investigations discover truths about material reality that are independent of ideology or politics.

The U.S. Commerce Department blacklisted a Russian research institute that helped create the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine.

Well-thought-out policies can reverse the results of incompetence; the onus is on the Centre to spend now

THERE is a commonly-held view that the current crisis in capitalism, which has resulted in a massive output contraction and increase in unemployment, is because of the pandemic; and that once the pandemic gets over, things will go back to “normal”.

The number of continued claims for unemployment compensation, while below its peak, rose from the previous week and was more than 29 million American workers—a figure that includes workers receiving Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.

Social media, in March 2020, was awash with rumours. Swans and dolphins could be seen in totally deserted Venetian canals. A group of elephants marched into a village in Yunnan (China), drank corn wine, and went to sleep in a tea garden.

The danger doesn’t only come from the symptoms of a virus: it comes from our distorted relationship with the natural world.

In the spring, we shut down our lives and our economy in hopes of reducing the spread of COVID-19 enough to be able to manage it through widespread testing and contact tracing. In spite of that shutdown, today the virus is raging virtually uncontrolled. We didn’t stick with it until the job was done.

“Russia’s health workers and teachers will be the first ones to receive the vaccine in the country,” Russia’s Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said.

Patrick Cockburn examines the threads between the pandemic and the media’s coverage of age of endless war.

Nothing happens in Beirut and Lebanon that is transparent; plots of all kinds unravel against the ordinary hopes of the population.

The rising toll of diseased and deceased from the COVID-19 pandemic has hit Bolivia particularly hard, in a continent that is now in the lead in global contagion rates.

Jhuliana Rodrigues works as a nurse technician at the Hospital São Vicente in Jundiaí, Brazil. “It is very difficult,” she says of her job these days. Brazil has just passed 100,000 deaths from COVID-19, with 3 million Brazilians infected with the virus.