Tag Archives | COVID-19

COVID-19 – A socialist response

Both the pandemic and the response to it represent the irrationality and destructiveness of capitalism. The crisis of care was already evident before the outbreak of Covid, but was greatly exacerbated by it.

Over the past few weeks, the subject of anti-Asian racism has received an unusual degree of Western media attention, ever since a video showing the January 28 killing of Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai immigrant in San Francisco, was widely shared on social media.

Senior care puts care workers into racialized, gendered, and age hierarchies, making it difficult for them to achieve social and economic mobility. 

One year ago, as both the Trump administration in the U.S. and the Johnson government in the UK responded fitfully to the growing pandemic, the international media were looking for whipping boys: other countries whose response to the virus was even worse.

The lead up to the second round elections in Ecuador have been marked by misinformation campaigns, a sharp increase in COVID-19 cases and fears of manipulation and fraud.

Nearly three million people have reportedly been killed by the novel coronavirus (SAR-CoV-2) and upwards of 128 million people have been infected by the virus, many with long-lasting health repercussions.

After over a year of suffering, death, and profound transformations of everyday life, International Women’s Day 2021 is an opportunity to take stock of the COVID-19 crisis so far and craft visions for a future centred on the value of social reproduction.

President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez notes the impressive work of the third group of medical professionals from the Henry Reeve Contingent returning from Mexico, after joining the COVID-19 battle there.

As industrial agriculture encroaches into the last wild places of the Earth, it’s unleashing dangerous pathogens. Time to heal the metabolic rift between ecology and economy, suggests Rob Wallace.

One year after the COVID-19 pandemic began, U.S. billionaires have made out like gangbusters at the expense of workers.

Germany, once viewed as an exaggerated model of exactitude and discipline, is currently in a muddle.

Brazil has suffered the world’s second-worst number of COVID-19 death rates, with Bolsonaro’s COVID-19 policy being described as “homicidally negligent”.

In the West, Cuba has set an example of efficiency and shown that another way is possible in the fight against the pandemic. The numbers speak for themselves; we only need to compare Cuba with other countries or even big cities with similar populations to get a very clear picture of the difference in results.

Developing country governments are being wrongly advised to use their modest fiscal resources to pay down accumulated debt instead of strengthening pandemic relief and recovery. Thus, debt phobia risks deepening and extending COVID-19 recessions by prioritizing buybacks.

Vaccine grabs, the refusal to relax patents to enable mass production, and the use of vaccines for diplomacy run the risk that poorer nations may not be protected against Covid-19 quickly enough. This will prolong the pandemic, even for the richer nations.

Mumia Abu-Jamal must be hospitalized. He has tested positive for COVID-19 and isbeingwarehoused in a completely inadequate prison infirmary. Given his age, 67, his liver disease, and his blood-pressure challenges, Mumia’s life is seriously in danger.

The pandemic has sharpened and transformed pre-existing inequalities, reconfiguring the processes that sustain and guarantee life.

Murder is an emotive word. In law, it requires premeditation. Death must be deemed to be unlawful. How could “murder” apply to failures of a pandemic response? Perhaps it can’t, and never will, but it is worth considering.

At the end of December 2019, the world was notified about the existence of a new coronavirus in the city of Wuhan in China. This virus, SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19), rapidly spread and was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020.