Official academics downplay the risks of school reopenings as pandemic rages across the US

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/05/scho-n05.html




Benjamin Mateus
12 hours ago







Last month, the Atlantic published an article by Professor Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, titled “Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders,” which has since been promoted by multiple media outlets to pressure communities to resume in-person learning in K-12 schools and universities across the United States. The New York Times has been early and steadfast in its endorsement of the policy.

In her article, Oster argued that “fear and bad press” led to the slowing down and cancellation of school reopenings in late summer, even in places “with relatively low positivity rates” like “Chicago, L.A., and Houston—all remote, at least so far.” As her article title suggests, Oster seeks to allay these fears by asserting that schools are not super-spreader locations, where one person transmits COVID-19 to multiple others.
In reality, COVID-19 is often transmitted in “super-spreader” fashion because its aerosolized form allows it to linger and concentrate in a closed space, with poorly-ventilated and overcrowded classrooms being highly conducive to this type of spread.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) reported Monday that there were 61,447 new child COVID-19 cases last week, bringing the total in the US to 853,635. This represents 11.1 percent of all US cases, up from 2 percent in April. In October there were nearly 200,000 new cases in children, predominately in Western states such as Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Utah. Other states reporting a greater rise among children include the Dakotas, Kentucky, Michigan and Wisconsin, where recent surges have been significant. These rapid rises coincide with the expansion of school reopenings in recent weeks.

The basis of Oster’s data was limited to the last two weeks of September, where she notes that infections in schools were very contained. She writes: “Our data on almost 200,000 kids in 47 states from the last two weeks of September revealed an infection rate of 0.13 percent among students and 0.24 percent among staff. That’s about 1.3 infections over two weeks in a school of 1,000 kids or 2.2 infections over two weeks in a group of 1,000 staff. Even in high-risk areas of the country, the student rates were well under half a percent.”

According to CISION PRWeb, only 38 percent of K-12 school students were attending schools in person on Labor Day. However, by Election Day that figure exceeded 60 percent, with 35.7 percent of schools offering in-person learning every day, 26.5 percent in a hybrid schedule of 2-3 in-person days per week and 37.8 percent of schools only offering virtual learning.

There are more than 53 million K-12 students enrolled in schools in the US, meaning that over 30 million students are attending schools that now offer some form of in-person learning. The Brown University data set represents 200,000 school children during a period of time when schools were largely being conducted remotely and community transmissions were low.

With close to 10 million cases of COVID-19 in the US, the seven-day moving average has climbed from 35,000 at the end of summer to over 85,000 cases per day. Hospitalizations across the US have exceeded 50,000, and the number of daily fatalities is climbing again. Just yesterday the number of new cases exceeded 108,000.

The conclusions reached by Dr. Oster should be treated with the utmost skepticism. The siloed approach of the study is not appropriate for the complex, dynamic disease transmission of COVID-19, which is spreading amid a complete lack of any coordinated governmental effort to locate the contagion at a granular level. The study is analogous to a blurry, static photograph taken from a film reel. However, these are real-life situations with deadly consequences that require the utmost precision and careful analysis.

In her efforts to downplay the impacts of reopening schools, Dr. Oster is joined by her new colleague at Brown University, Dr. Ashish K. Jha. After working with the Harvard Global Health Institute and serving as a frequent guest on cable news programs throughout the pandemic, Dr. Jha was recently appointed the Dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health.

In an interview Monday with Education Week, Dr. Jha stated callously: “Obviously, if going back to in-person education was going to lead to a lot of infections and deaths, you’d say OK, that’s a cost we can’t bear. But districts that are being too cautious are doing enormous harm to children and families in their communities.”

Seemingly oblivious to the deepening surge of COVID-19 cases across the US, Dr. Jha added: “I’m not saying schools should never close. They probably should at some point if things get really horrible.”

Such casual asides by Oster, Jha and their ilk demonstrate deep resentment of and contempt for the working class, including the more than 50 teachers, staff, maintenance workers and students who have perished from COVID-19 since schools began reopening in late July.

The arguments put forward by these upper-middle-class “liberal” academics follow a similar logic to that proposed by the Great Barrington Declaration of “focused protection,” as advocated by Stanford University neuroradiologist and Trump acolyte Dr. Scott Atlas. This variant of herd immunity is intended to ensure that the workforce is fully engaged in producing profits and not parenting.

More principled academics have approached the question of school reopenings with greater concern. Zoe Hyde, a senior research officer at the University of Western Australia, stated recently: “If community transmission rises, then you will see outbreaks in schools. This has become very apparent in Europe as they battle their second wave.” She added, “It’s quite likely we are not spotting a lot of the infections which are occurring in children.”

Kim Powers, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, commented, “While we know we are only seeing part of ‘the iceberg’ of all infections, we don’t exactly know how much of that iceberg we are seeing.”

As part of its homicidal efforts to achieve “herd immunity” through the mass infection of the population, the Trump administration has aggressively pursued school reopenings. Democrats and Republicans at every level continue to support this reckless policy, while the teachers unions have worked with Democrats to promote the fraud that schools can “safely” reopen with a slight increase in funding.

Numerous studies from case reports, modeling analysis and clinical epidemiological research have found that not only are children able to be infected but are a critical component of community transmission. It is precisely for this reason that it becomes necessary for health departments to make all efforts to follow-up and test children in the chains of transmission.

Additionally, it has been recognized that some children can develop severe Kawasaki-like symptoms that can have significant morbidities and even be fatal. More recently, it has been determined that post-viral syndrome, also known as “long-COVID,” impacts a substantial percentage of the population, including children and young adults. Patients can have an assortment of dysautonomia disorders, which can cause their heart rates to race at dangerously high levels. Others suffer from chronic fatigue and poor concentration for several months.

What is required is a comprehensive strategy of public health measures, including scaled testing, a massive investment in contact-tracing resources, and offering isolation and quarantine facilities that can monitor and treat individuals while safeguarding their families and communities’ livelihood.

Stated bluntly, there is no national contact-tracing infrastructure in the United States. Presently, there are only 53,116 contact tracers in the country, a four-fold increase since April but a far cry short of the more than 100,000 that are recommended. As of October 8, only six states have reached their per capita benchmark: New York, Massachusetts, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Utah, as well as Washington D.C. However, as the surge proceeds, even these limited systems are becoming overwhelmed. It has been estimated that fewer than 5 percent of those infected are traced in time to stop them from transmitting to others.

The continued reopening of schools amid a raging pandemic is unconscionable and will only exacerbate the spread of COVID-19 throughout the US and internationally.

Rank-and-file educators must recognize that they can help bring an end to the pandemic through unifying their efforts against state and federal mandates to resume in-person learning. The official bourgeois academics and health experts, as evidenced by the likes of Oster, Jha and Atlas, place the profit interests of the ruling class above the safety and lives of the working class.

Schools and the children who attend them are society’s most precious resources. Educators play a pivotal role in society as community leaders and stand in a position to sway considerable influence within the broader working class. Only through coordinating their efforts with the working class, in preparations for a general strike movement, will teachers and education workers be able to close schools and ensure that adequate resources are provided for high-quality remote learning and the social needs of working-class families.

The Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site have been at the forefront of the struggle to build independent, rank-and-file safety committees among educators, parents and students in California, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Tennessee and New York. We have organized online discussions to coordinate these efforts, while publishing numerous articles on the terrible impacts of school reopenings throughout the US and internationally. We urge all those who take science and public health seriously, and who wish to fight for the closure of schools until the pandemic is contained, to join the Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee and contact us today to get involved.

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COVID-19 cases spike across US as health care workers struggle with understaffing in hospitals

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/05/nurs-n05.html




Alex Johnson
12 hours ago







With infections and deaths from COVID-19 reaching extraordinary levels in the United States, opposition among nurses and health care workers is brewing against the unmitigated spread of the disease and unpreparedness of hospitals for the deluge of sick patients.

The US is experiencing a sharp increase in coronavirus cases, which is coinciding with dangerous upticks in hospitalizations. Daily confirmed cases have hovered near or above 100,000 over the past several days, reaching record-shattering numbers, surpassing the number of infections in April, when the virus was at its peak. The total death toll now stands at nearly 240,000 as of this writing.
Nowhere are these conditions being expressed more catastrophically than in hospitals, which are witnessing a flood of COVID-19 patients that risk bringing the nation’s health care system to the breaking point. An estimated one-quarter of US counties have reported a peak of new cases in the past month, including most cases in states where officials were most eager to prematurely reopen their economies.

These include Ohio, Indiana, North and South Dakota, Wyoming and Wisconsin. Capacity levels are also becoming more acute, as 80 percent of hospital beds in cities such as Atlanta, Minneapolis and Baltimore near full occupancy.

Shortages of health care workers are reaching disastrous levels. In Montana, which is seeing a dramatic rise in infections, staffing shortages caused by the pandemic have shut down a clinic in the state’s capital. Employees at one Northwestern regional hospital who have been exposed to COVID-19 have been told to continue working despite the danger.

In St. Vincent Hospital in Billings, one of the largest cities in Montana, three COVID-19 units were expanded last week, after the state reported its second-highest daily cases on record. Michael Skehan, St. Vincent’s chief operating officer, called the situation facing the hospital a “crisis.” One healthcare worker from the hospital told NBC News, “I never thought we would be anywhere close to where we are now. I’m a good nurse—and the nurses I work with are good nurses—but we are broken.”

In North Dakota, a state where cases are growing at a rate faster than any other, hospitals are being compelled to forgo elective surgeries again because of the surge. Many hospitals are debating plans to potentially request government assistance to hire more nurses, in the face of the abysmal staffing levels.

Despite the imminent crisis facing hospitals, nurses and health care workers are being forced to contend with the virus with little to no changes in hospital conditions or adequate protection. The anger of health care workers has been expressed in several recent demonstrations demanding safe conditions.

In San Luis Obispo, California, workers at 11 Tenet-owned Hospital conglomerates voted overwhelmingly for strike action in opposition to unsafe conditions and hospital neglect. The 4,300-workforce across the region voted by 96 percent in favor of the strike.

Tenet is a multinational and investor-owned health care corporation with 65 hospitals and more than 500 health care facilities. The company has boasted more than $1 billion in profits in 2020 so far and received more than $250 million in CARES Act-related bailout money from the California state government. The company denounced the strike vote in an official statement and is threatening to hire strikebreakers. “Our hospitals will remain fully operational and patient care will continue uninterrupted,” the company said.

In Connecticut, more than 400 nurses held a two-day strike in mid-October over low wages and severe shortages of personal protective equipment. Dozens of nurses picketed outside William W. Backus Hospital in Norwich to charge the hospital with “unfair labor practice,” with many nurses chanting “PPE over profits.” The Backus Federation of Nurses, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, called the limited strike to allow workers to blow off steam, while behind the scenes it negotiated a sell-out contract that failed to address nurses’ demands.

In Redding, California, health care workers at Shasta Regional Medical Center (SRMC) staged a picket protest outside the hospital for two hours on October 28, demanding a change in the hospital’s patient staffing levels, which have remained intolerably low for months.

According to the California Nurses Association (CNA), health care workers sent Casey Fatch, CEO of the SRMC, a petition a month ago outlining more than 200 staff concerns relating to patient safety protocols and staffing policies. Hospital management, however, has responded to nurses’ demands with a callous dismissal, with Fatch telling a local newspaper, “staffing levels are appropriate and adequate for our census and patient level of care needs.”

The unions have rejected any struggle to unite nurses and other health care workers across the state in a common struggle against the health care monopolies and unsafe staffing levels that threaten both frontline workers and patients. Instead, the AFT, the United Nurses Association of California/Union of Health Care Professionals (UNAC/UHCP) and other unions announced on October 29 that they had sued Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for failing to protect health care workers during the pandemic.

There is no doubt that the Trump administration and OSHA are criminally responsible for conditions that have led to the infection of more than 192,000 health care workers and at least 771 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But equally guilty are the Democrats, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. It was Cuomo who inserted liability protections for nursing home chains into the state budget. A Biden administration will be just as committed to the profit interests of the health care giants as Trump and the Republicans.

The Washington Post reported that the lawsuit was the outcome of frustration on the part of “labor advocates and Democrats” over OSHA’s criminal refusal to enforce safety guidelines in hospitals and other workplaces. During the summer, a judge dismissed a similar lawsuit filed by the AFL-CIO while the pandemic was raging across industries after lockdown measures were lifted.

The OSHA filing is a publicity stunt on the part of the unions, which have done nothing to protect health care workers. That is why nurses, physicians, and other health care workers must form rank-and-file safety committees, independent of the unions, to unite their struggles and enforce health and safety. This must be combined with the development of a powerful political movement of the working class against both corporate-controlled parties, to fight for socialism, including the replacement of for-profit medicine with a socialized system guaranteeing free, high quality care for all.

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German teachers, students and parents oppose keeping schools open as pandemic spreads

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/05/schl-n05.html




Gregor Link
11 hours ago







The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany’s main disease control agency, reported 17,214 new coronavirus infections on Wednesday. According to statistics from Johns Hopkins University, daily infections in Germany rose well above 19,000 in recent days.

In neighbouring Austria, daily infections have risen above 5,000, with hospitals on Monday reporting a 78 percent increase in patients requiring intensive care treatment within a week.

In late September, students in Greece occupied over 700 schools to protest the unsafe restart of in-person teaching and demand safe education for all. A few days later, similar nationwide protests erupted in Poland after two teachers and a student died of COVID-19. Students in France have been striking and protesting since Monday against the unsafe return to schools following the end of the autumn holidays. A parent organization in the UK has called a strike for Thursday to oppose the Johnson’s government’s refusal to close schools.

Under conditions of an explosion in new infections, which is the direct product of the German government’s deliberate policy of mass infection, strong opposition to keeping schools open is also developing among students, teachers, and parents in Germany. After a rank-and-file safety committee was founded by students in Dortmund in August, students in Karlsruhe and other cities are now calling for such committees to be established and the closure of schools to be organised.

There is growing support for the call by the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei and International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) for the building of a network of rank-and-file safety committees and the preparation of a Europe-wide school strike against the policy of mass infection.

Tensions are running especially high in Bavaria, where the state government will hold a school conference today with students, parents, and teacher representatives. As in other German states, hardly any local authorities in Bavaria are dividing up classes to keep groups small, even though most regions have a seven-day incidence of 100 infections per 100,000 inhabitants. Even though the RKI published guidelines two weeks ago advising that regular in-person teaching should be halted when infection levels reach such heights due to medical risks, the ministers of education in Germany’s states simply ignored them.

In an open letter to the Education Ministry, the Bavarian State Student Council referred to a “grading spree” of up to four tests per week. This puts students “under incredible pressure to perform, which shows no regard for the current situation.”

An open letter from the State Association of High School Parents and the Bavarian Parents Association complained that the “pace of performance assessment” has been “massively increased since the beginning of the school year,” with the result that “children and their families are groaning.” Hygiene conditions are also catastrophic: “Despite extra buses, students from different classes and different schools are still standing side-by-side. This contradicts all of the regulations we have been asking our children to follow since the beginning of the pandemic.”

The letter continued, “Across Bavaria, the second wave of the pandemic is overwhelming many families. Children are at risk of being left behind. One quarter of Bavarian parental households are affected by short-term work or unemployment. The worry about incomes and jobs is oppressive…Financial resources are inadequate. The four walls of many homes are shaking.”

Instead of easing the pressure placed on students to perform amid this unprecedented social crisis, it is being intensified. “How is it possible to learn the material that was missed out last year and still internalise new content—effectively learning twice as much material?” continued the letter. Rules that previously applied to “regulate schoolwork are being tossed aside without any consultation in the school forums.”

The order for teachers to continue academic testing as if there is no state of emergency is leading to further social turmoil for children and poor families. “The teachers are supposed to dance around the golden calf of awarding grades and are not able to concentrate on that which is the essence of education. As a result, many children are losers of the pandemic…Social relief for the disadvantaged is essential but is neither being considered or granted.”

With the words “that’s enough, this far and no further,” the letter from the parents’ associations concluded with the appeal for “statewide assessments of learning progress without the awarding of grades,” “the repetition of the pandemic year without consequences,” and centrally coordinated digital learning material and significantly reduced learning plans.

In October, 20 parents’ associations from across Germany protested against the brutal policy of reopening schools and the efforts by health authorities to cover up cases. In a joint letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and several other federal politicians, they expressed their alarm “that the entire class or year group does not need to go into quarantine, but only often the person who was sitting next to the infected person.”

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Surge in coronavirus pandemic produces deadly situation in hospitals throughout Europe

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/05/hosp-n05-1.html




Markus Salzmann
15 hours ago







The massive increase in COVID-19 infections is pushing hospitals throughout Europe to their limits. In Germany, the number of intensive care patients grows daily. Doctors’ representatives and other experts are increasingly warning of the consequences of a shortage of nursing staff and intensive care beds.

The Robert Koch Institute reported 1,700 coronavirus patients in Germany’s intensive care units on Friday morning. By Saturday, the figure had risen to 1,830 and by Monday to 2,243. The number of cases subject to intensive care treatment has almost tripled in the past two weeks.
Despite these figures, the federal and state governments have not imposed a necessary lockdown, but only highly inconsistent restrictions on contact. Schools and daycare centres remain open so that work can continue in the factories and other workplaces.

The German Hospital Federation expects the number of intensive care patients to reach a new peak soon. The head of the organization, Gerald Gass, assumes the previous peak of April will be exceeded in two to three weeks and can no longer be prevented. “Anyone who is admitted to hospital in three weeks is already infected today,” Gass told the Bild newspaper.

Due to the extreme shortage of intensive care specialists, Gass announced that nursing staff from non-intensive medical areas would be deployed in intensive care units, which was “not optimal.” This is highly dangerous for patients. The fact that it is nevertheless being considered shows how desperate the situation is. Due to the complex equipment and procedures in intensive care, the use of untrained personnel poses considerable risks. At the same time, training and instruction can hardly be provided adequately due to the stressful situation in the clinics.

“There is not much leeway left in some federal states. Berlin has only 14 percent free intensive care beds, Bremen 17 percent,” warned Uwe Janssens, president of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine (DIVI). This was also since most clinics are still carrying out their “routine programme.” For many clinics, the urgently needed conversion of capacities to coronavirus cases means financial ruin. While in the spring there was a flat-rate payment to hospitals for keeping a certain number of beds free for coronavirus cases, this no longer exists.

At the same time, the care of other acutely ill patients is also at risk. According to a report by broadcaster NDR, a second intensive care unit has now been opened at the University Hospital in Essen. Ninety patients with COVID-19 are being treated there, 27 of whom are receiving intensive medical care.

The director of the Eye Clinic, Nikolaos Bechrakis, reports that he and his team operate on 400 people every year, many with serious tumours, where every day counts to prevent the threat of blindness. “In the first wave, we already had to lose 25 to 30 percent of our capacity. I am afraid that when the second wave comes it will be more severe,” said Bechrakis.

Saarland’s State Premier Tobias Hans (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) admitted the severity of the crisis this week. “The situation is frightening and alarming: soon many of the 1,900 hospitals in Germany may collapse,” he said. Wards and emergency rooms may have to be closed due to missing or sick staff. “Triage and Italian conditions threaten if we don’t take countermeasures now.”

It is becoming more and more obvious that claims that the lessons from the situation in spring had been learned and that care in German hospitals was stable, which Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) repeats like a mantra, are nothing more than deliberate misinformation intended to lull the population into a false sense of security.

The federal and state governments have done nothing to prevent the impending collapse in health care. Although experts have been calling for it for a long time, there is not even a proper record of how many nursing staff with intensive care training are available in Germany. Also, as the number of infections increases, a growing number of doctors and nurses are becoming ill. There is no uniform testing strategy to effectively protect employees in hospitals, nursing homes and similar institutions.

Instead, the precarious situation is at the expense of doctors and nursing staff, who are already working at the limits of their ability to cope with stress. Lower Saxony has again increased the maximum working hours for employees in clinics and nursing homes to up to 60 hours per week and up to 12 hours a day. The other federal states will follow suit. The measure had already been decided at the beginning of the pandemic. Now it will remain in place until May next year.

“For months, the country has been asleep rather than preparing medical facilities for the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic,” Nadya Klarmann, president of the Chamber of Nursing Care, noted. “Now it is up to the employees in the systemically important professions to again save the situation at the risk to their own health.”

The situation is alarming throughout Europe. The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned against overloading the health care system. “Many countries in the northern hemisphere are currently seeing a worrying increase in cases and hospital admissions,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said recently in Geneva.

In Austria, the situation is worsening day by day. The government has stated that with 6,000 new infections per day, there is a risk of overloading intensive care beds in hospitals. In extreme cases, doctors would then also have to decide who would be treated and who would not, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (Austrian Peoples Party, ÖVP) noted.

On November 4, a record 6,901 new infections were reported in the Alpine republic. The measures in force since Tuesday, such as a curfew from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., are unlikely to prevent an increase in cases and deaths. Despite the seriousness of the situation, businesses, daycare centres and the majority of schools—all drivers of the pandemic—remain open.

In Belgium, the health care system is already collapsing. A growing number of clinics can no longer deliver intensive care. According to the trade unions, dozens of doctors and nurses are on duty despite being infected with coronavirus. They receive no protection or support from the government or the trade unions.

“We have to choose between a bad or a very bad solution,” said Philippe Devos from the Federation of Medical Unions. The very bad solution was not to treat patients at all, broadcaster Deutsche Welle quoted the union official.

In terms of population, Belgium is the European country with the most new infections. By November 2, 1,074 out of 100,000 inhabitants had been infected with the virus within the previous seven days.

Switzerland also has an extremely high seven-day incidence, with 588 infections per 100,000 inhabitants. On Monday alone, almost 22,000 new infections were registered in the country with almost 9 million inhabitants. According to media reports, the government in Bern estimates that all intensive care units will be occupied by the middle of the month. In some cantons, such as Geneva and Valais, the treatment limit has already been reached. In Valais, 2,530 out of 100,000 inhabitants have been infected in the last 14 days, in Geneva 2,373 out of 100,000.

The government of the richest European country, whose pharmaceutical industry has an annual turnover of €80 billion, quickly lifted the initial protective measures in the spring, took hardly any precautionary measures and is now sacrificing the lives of countless people. More than 2,400 people have now died of COVID-19 in Switzerland, with 80 each day last Friday and Monday alone.

The situation in Eastern Europe has been extremely tense for weeks. COVID patients from the Czech Republic have already had to be brought to Germany for treatment. The Ministry of Health in Prague has ordered the postponement of all elective surgery.

In the Czech Republic, there were 782 infections per 100,000 inhabitants in the last seven days. According to the doctors’ medical association, more than 13,000 employees in the health care sector have become infected with coronavirus. If they did not continue to work when they showed no symptoms, providing treatment would no longer be possible. In the meantime, the government has imposed a night-time curfew. But that will hardly be enough to avert the complete collapse of hospitals.

In Poland, hospitals are completely overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing number of COVID-19 patients. The hospital in the border town of Slubice, which has been reconfigured for coronavirus patients, recently reported four deaths from the disease within 24 hours, according to broadcaster rbb. On HTS local television, managing director Lukasz Kaczmarek spoke about the catastrophic situation. “There is a lack of cleaning agents, body-care products such as cream and shower gel. That is bad. Also, our hospital has an infrastructure from the 1960s. We have to cope with this situation.” There was also a lack of disinfectants, food and garbage bags.

The situation in France and Britain is similar.