New US coronavirus surge is growing faster than the spring and summer waves of 2020

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/07/30/pand-j30.html







Kevin Reed
11 hours ago







A horrific new surge of COVID-19 cases is sweeping across the US, driven by the highly contagious and deadly Delta variant of the virus as well as the reactionary response of the government at the federal and state levels.

In this April 21, 2021 file photo, a registered medical worker dons protective gear before entering a room at a hospital in Royal Oak, Mich. In 2021. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)

The count of daily cases in the US reached 92,405 on Thursday, approximately the same peak number during the surge in spring when vaccinations stood at just 20 percent of the population. Meanwhile, both hospitalizations and deaths are rising again.

The seven-day averages of all three metrics show a precipitous increase across the US as the Delta variant is targeting unvaccinated sections of the population. According to the health sciences news website STAT, the month of July has seen the fastest increase in cases in the US since last winter. In an analysis published on Monday, STAT said a new analysis of COVID-19 case data “reveals this new wave is already outpacing the spring and summer waves of 2020.”

STAT’s analysis brings together data from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and Our World in Data, along with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data to calculate the rate of weekly case acceleration. The new method measures the rate at which the daily number of cases is speeding up nationally and by each state.

STAT points to the alarming situation, “This view of the data reveals that the United States is currently in the midst of a fifth wave of cases and that this new wave is growing faster than the first and second waves ... ”

In response to the surge, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued new, thoroughly inadequate recommendations on Tuesday, calling for mask wearing, including by vaccinated individuals. The CDC itself was responsible for many states completely removing any mask requirements in May when it said that vaccinated people did not need to wear masks.

The policy of the CDC was in direct defiance of the warnings being made by leading epidemiologists who said that another catastrophic wave was imminent. For example, on March 7, Michael Osterholm said on NBC’s Meet the Press, “Let me just say we are in the eye of the hurricane right now... So right now, we do have to keep America as safe as we can from this virus, by not letting up on any of the public health measures we've taken, and we need to get people vaccinated as quickly as we can.”

The STAT analysis shows that states with the fastest expansion of the pandemic—such as Louisiana, Florida, Missouri, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas—have vaccination rates below the national average.

Of the situation in Louisiana, where only 36 percent of the population has been vaccinated, the STAT report showed the highest rate of case acceleration of any state. Louisiana, Florida and Arkansas have case acceleration rates that are many multiples of the rates of three-quarters of the other states.

A report in the Texas Tribune on Thursday said that hospital officials worry that the “staggering and frightening” hospitalization rates are pushing facilities to capacity while “staffing is short and workers are exhausted.” Some hospitals in rural Texas are reaching capacity and are on high alert. The Tribune report said, “hospitalizations in Bexar County rose by nearly 8 percent” in one night as “almost 100 people were admitted with severe COVID to local facilities on Tuesday alone.”

Meanwhile, the report went on, “In Dallas County, COVID hospitalizations have increased by 99 percent over the past two weeks, reaching 376 earlier this week. The local numbers are expected to hit between 800 and 1,000 by mid-August, according to forecasters at UT-Southwestern Medical Center,” and, “the rising hospitalizations rates have spread outside of the heavily populated metro areas that first began to report increases a few weeks ago. Now they are being seen in all corners of the state, triggering pleas from hospitals for state-backed staffing help to handle the increasing pressure.”

As July 27, 43.4 percent of Texans had been vaccinated. Texas was one of the first states to remove all restrictions, including its mask mandate, last March. Republican Governor Greg Abbott said at the time, “With this executive order, we are ensuring that all businesses and families in Texas have the freedom to determine their own destiny.”

In Arkansas, Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson declared a public health emergency on Thursday as the state recorded 2,843 new cases and one of the largest single day increases since the beginning of the pandemic. Hutchinson said that the White House was sending federal assistance to help bring health care workers into the state to staff medical facilities handling the surge.

Arkansas has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the US at approximately 35 percent. While the governor is calling for a special legislative session to overturn a law that he signed himself in April that prohibits state and local mask mandates, he also said there would not be another statewide mask rule or new restrictions on business.

In Missouri, statewide hospitalizations for COVID-19 have more than doubled and the number of ICU patients has more than tripled since the beginning of June. A report in the St. Louis Post Dispatch on Wednesday said that there is alarming increase in the number of cases among children under the age of 12 in Southwest Missouri.

The Post-Dispatch report quoted Springfield-Greene County Health Director Katie Towns who said, “We’ve seen a rise in cases in that 0-11 age group, and we’ve also seen outbreaks in settings like day cares and camps. We’ve moved to prioritize those types of cases so we can hopefully control disease spread among those who are most vulnerable.” The vaccination rate in Missouri is 41.1 percent.

Projections by the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub predict that the nationwide surge will accelerate throughout the remainder of the summer and into the fall before peaking in mid-October. The hub’s “ensemble” projection combines ten different models from academic institutions and outlines four scenarios based on the Delta variant's spread and US vaccination rates.

The model predicts approximately 60,000 cases and 850 deaths each day in the US. The model forecasts that the death rate will drop to approximately 300 per day, the current death level in the US. This means that somewhere between 100,000 and 120,000 Americans will die from the coronavirus between now and the end of the year.

Justin Lessler, PhD, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill who is on the scenario consortium, responded to the severity of these projections. “What’s going on in the country with the virus is matching our most pessimistic scenarios. We might be seeing synergistic effects of people becoming less cautious in addition to the impacts of the Delta variant.”

The present surge—along with the previous waves of the pandemic that have now killed more than 600,000 people in the US and more than 4 million internationally—is the responsibility of the capitalist ruling elites and their political representatives in the Democratic and Republican parties who have, from the beginning, placed the accumulation of wealth above the health of the public.

DSA isn't democratic or socialist, just opportunist

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/07/30/pers-j30.html




Democratic Socialists of America convention meets to promote Democratic Party

Eric London@EricLondonSEP
11 hours ago







From August 1 to 8, 1,300 delegates of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will meet online for the organization’s biennial convention. The DSA presents itself as a growing left-wing movement whose aim is “to win a world organized and governed by and for the vast majority, the working class,” according to a draft political platform to be discussed at the convention. It is a faction of the Democratic Party led by Democratic Party operatives to block opposition to the political establishment’s march to the right.

Photo of the Democratic Socialists of America Conference in 2019. (Photo: Steve Eberhart, The Nation)



This is the first gathering of the DSA national delegates since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 election, the strikes and mass protests of 2020-21 and the January 6 putsch attempt by Donald Trump. Six months into the Biden administration, the Democratic Party has made clear that it is continuing the social policies of the Trump administration, lifting COVID-19 restrictions, echoing its efforts to scapegoat China for the pandemic, barring immigrants from entering the US, and undertaking no substantial expansion of social programs.

The DSA convention calendar and the draft platform either ignore these fundamental political questions or treat them as afterthoughts to the organization’s efforts to integrate itself into the Democratic Party caucuses of various state legislatures and city councils.

The draft political platform does not include a single reference to Joe Biden or his administration and only a passing reference to the Democratic Party. It makes no criticism of the policies of the Democratic Party in the White House or Congress. There is no reference to “fascism,” to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the election, or to the events of January 6, as though the attempt by the president to carry out a coup attempt are of no real significance. The only reference to Donald Trump or the Trump administration is to track the growth of the DSA’s numeric membership over the last four years.

The draft platform mentions the COVID-19 pandemic only briefly, saying the virus has “killed hundreds of thousands of people.” In fact, the pandemic has killed well over 4 million worldwide, and likely over one million in the US, as measured by excess deaths. The draft platform makes no criticism of the policies of the capitalist class in response to the pandemic, which has been to sacrifice workers’ lives for the sake of capitalist profit.

In contrast, the draft platform features various proposals for small electoral reforms, including changes to the Senate filibuster, adding more federal judges, term limits for Supreme Court justices, and passing various Democratic-sponsored bills on voting (bills which are languishing in the Democratic-controlled Senate). There are dozens of references to middle class identity politics, including 13 references to “gender” or “feminism,” eight to “sex” and over 10 to “race,” plus 11 to “black” and 12 to “white” skin colors.

The convention schedule includes four sessions to discuss tactics for running electoral campaigns in the Democratic Party, including one entitled “Using Elected Office to Build Socialism.” There are three segments dedicated to religion, including “What Can Religious Traditions Offer the Left,” one session teaching members how to fix car brake lights, and no sessions with titles referencing Trump, the Democratic Party, imperialism or war.

The DSA leadership cannot commit the organization’s platform to take any clear positions on fundamental political questions because doing so would expose the contradiction at the organization’s core: The DSA leadership aims to trap growing socialist sentiment within the capitalist, imperialist Democratic Party.

This political dynamic is confirmed by the role played by DSA and DSA-backed elected officials, which the organization promotes as proof of the success of its efforts to pressure the Democratic Party to the left. The draft platform cites the success of “Bernie Sanders’ two democratic socialist presidential campaigns” as well as “working-class electoral victories at all levels of government.”

The draft platform does not attempt to analyze the experience of the Sanders campaign because doing so would require acknowledging that Bernie Sanders’ campaigns did not result in any shift to the left in American bourgeois politics, but to the right. Sanders won the votes of nearly 10 million people in the 2020 Democratic Party primary only to drop out of the race to endorse Biden in April. His campaign did not result in a “political revolution” but in Sanders’ accession to the chairmanship of the Senate committee overseeing the capitalist state’s budget!

In the 2020 general election, Sanders, New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a DSA member) and a majority of the DSA leadership campaigned actively for the right-wing Biden, a representative of the banks, the military, the credit card companies and the prison-industrial complex. The corporate press is now fawning over Sanders’ deepening efforts to prop up the Biden administration, praising his turn to what they call a “pragmatic” approach.

This week, Sanders helped force a conservative infrastructure package through the Senate with Republican support. After voting for the CARES Act—a multitrillion-dollar corporate giveaway—in March 2020, Sanders now blocks calls to spend trillions on a jobs program or on social programs to address poverty and inequality. Former Barack Obama senior advisor David Axelrod told Politico that Sanders has become “pragmatic in a principled way.” Politico reported that when asked whether Sanders has become more conservative, moderate Democratic Senator Brian Schatz “offered a clipped ‘yes’ for an answer: ‘I don’t want to get him in trouble.’”

The Associated Press also reported Wednesday that Sanders’ political organization, “Our Revolution,” “is undergoing a rebranding… Rather than insisting on ‘Medicare for All’—Sanders’ trademark universal, government-funded health care plan—or the climate-change-fighting Green New Deal, Our Revolution is focusing on the more modest alternatives endorsed by President Joe Biden.”

The “Squad” of DSA members in Congress have played the same role. New York Democrats and DSA members Jamaal Bowman and Ocasio-Cortez met with conservative New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Eric Adams (a former police officer) last week. Bowman, speaking next to Ocasio-Cortez, said it was “a good meeting,” adding, “It’s not about ideology or party, all that nonsense. We ain’t talking about that.”

As the DSA leaders rain praise on the right wing of the Democratic Party, the right responds by making clear that it will make no concessions to the DSA on policy. Eric Adams and Biden both recently denounced socialism, with Biden saying, “Communism is a failed system, a universally failed system. And I don’t see socialism as a very useful substitute, but that’s another story.” While denouncing the left wing of his own party, Biden calls for promoting the Republicans. “We need a Republican Party,” he said days after the Republicans backed Trump’s January coup attempt. “We need an opposition that’s principled and strong.”

The DSA convention also aims to promote the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, and the speaker lineup features DSA member and flight attendants’ union president Sara Nelson. The DSA and Democratic Party are distinctly aware of the growing rebellion among workers against the AFL-CIO bureaucracy and present the trade unions as merely the victim of “union busting,” rather than accomplices in a half century of betrayals of the working class. The draft platform presents the teachers’ wildcat strike wave of 2018 as a “union reform movement,” not a rebellion of the rank and file against the union bureaucracies. The draft platform resolves to expand the control of the AFL-CIO over the working class, particularly through the promotion of the PRO Act.

Meanwhile, the DSA and its associated publications, including Jacobin magazine, maintained a complete silence on the strike by Volvo workers in Dublin, Virginia, which developed as a rebellion of rank-and-file workers against the betrayal carried out by the United Auto Workers.

The convention takes place as the DSA is itself racked by internal crisis. Its leadership, comprised of people like former Democratic National Committee staffer David Duhalde, is increasingly seen as antagonistic to those in the rank and file who are genuinely interested in socialism and a break with the Democratic Party.

Thousands of DSA members responded in anger when Ocasio-Cortez told DSA’s Democratic Left magazine in March that the Biden administration and incumbent Democrats were “totally reinvent[ing] themselves in a far more progressive direction” and that pressure from below has caused “almost a radical change” among the Democratic leadership. Ocasio-Cortez attacked socialist opponents of the Biden administration as “bad faith actors” who are “privileged” and racist. Tapping into the anticommunist, Shachtmanite roots of the DSA and its founder, Michael Harrington, Ocasio-Cortez denounced “class essentialists” saying they “deprioritize human rights.”

When the World Socialist Web Site exposed Ocasio-Cortez’s interview in an article that was read by over 100,000 people, including thousands of DSA members, a section of the DSA leadership initiated a campaign to mock the Stalinist assassination of Leon Trotsky and downplay the crimes of Stalinism. On May 22, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairperson David North wrote an open letter to DSA Political Director Maria Svart demanding the organization take action against those responsible, but Svart refused to respond to the letter. Several DSA branches stonewalled requests by members for democratic discussion on the matter.

Amid mass death, the explosive growth of the class struggle, the increasingly urgent climate crisis and the danger of war and fascism, the DSA plays a central role in the farcical dynamic of capitalist politics. The DSA props up the Democratic Party—a 200-year-old institution of world imperialist reaction—which in turn props up the Republicans as a necessary source of social stability. The Republicans then rely increasingly on Trump as the embodiment of “law and order” and the guardian of corporate profits. As a result, the entire political establishment lurches further to the right, taking the DSA with it. To revolutionaries, the DSA is an example of everything socialism is not.

Israel kills child out shopping with his dad

Tamara Nassar Rights and Accountability 29 July 2021



https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/israel-kills-child-out-shopping-his-dad

Muhammad Abu Sara, 11. (DCIP)

An 11-year-old Palestinian child was killed by Israeli occupation forces as he rode in his father’s car on Wednesday.

Israeli forces then fatally shot another Palestinian youth during the child’s funeral in the village of Beit Ummar on Thursday.

On Tuesday, Israeli soldiers also killed the water engineer for the West Bank village of Beita.

The child, Muhammad Muayyad Abu Sara, was running errands with his family near the entrance of Beit Ummar near the occupied West Bank city of Hebron.

The boy’s father, Muayyad Abu Sara, was in the car with Muhammad and his other children, Anan, 9, and Ahmad, 5, he told media.

Six Israeli soldiers reportedly ordered him to stop and opened fire while the car was around 50 meters away.

The soldiers fired at least 13 bullets at the vehicle, witnesses told Defense for Children International Palestine.

A bullet struck the boy in the chest. He was taken to hospital for surgery, but died hours later.

The father told media that as they were driving, Muhammad reminded him that they had forgotten to go to the grocery store.

The father said he turned the car around and felt bullets “raining” on them. He told his children to lower their heads.

His 5-year-old son was able to hide under the seat, but he said he found the 11-year-old unconscious on his sister’s lap.

The father said all four could have been killed in that car.

Pictures of the vehicle’s interior following the shooting show groceries splattered with blood.


“I didn’t have him until six or seven years after I got married. They took him from me, they kidnapped him from my heart,” Muhammad’s father said.



“I also died, not just Muhammad.”

The killing occurred close to an Israeli military watchtower near Route 60, a highway used by Israeli settlers where Israeli gunfire has killed multiple Palestinians.

Palestinians placed a blood-splattered bag of bread on the boy’s body during his funeral on Thursday – a symbol of the ordinariness of the errand his family was on when Israeli soldiers turned it into a scene of horror.

The village municipality announced a general strike on Thursday to mourn the boy’s killing.


Israeli forces fired live ammunition, rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas at Palestinians protesting the boy’s killing in Beit Ummar on Thursday, killing one and injuring at least 12.



Shawkat Khalid Awad, 20, was shot in the head and abdomen and died from his wounds on Thursday, according to Palestinian health authorities.

Local media circulated pictures showing him at Abu Sara’s funeral:



Disturbing video shows mourners running with the body of the 11-year-old Muhammad Abu Sara during the funeral, trying to evade attacks by Israeli forces.



Muhammad Abu Sara is 11th child to be killed by Israeli fire in the occupied West Bank this year, according to Defense for Children International Palestine.



“Israeli forces use lethal force against Palestinian children in circumstances that may amount to extrajudicial or wilful killings,” the human rights group said.
Contradictory accounts

In an attempt to explain the killing, the Israeli army said soldiers saw people digging in a graveyard near the town, and watched them until they left in their car.

The soldiers then went to the graveyard, where the army say they found a bag containing the body of a newborn baby.

Afterwards, according to the army, the soldiers observed a vehicle nearby and assumed it was the same people they claim to have seen in the graveyard.

The soldiers then supposedly initiated an “arrest procedure,” which involved shooting at the car’s wheels and firing warning shots in the air.

This does not explain how the car was riddled with bullets – an indication either that the soldiers intended to fire directly at the car, or are dangerously incompetent with their weapons.

It is also unclear why the soldiers considered people digging in a graveyard to be so suspicious that it needed to arrest or shoot at them.

The army said it would investigate the “claim that a Palestinian child was killed as a result of the shooting” and findings would be submitted to the military prosecutor.

Israel’s military self-investigations routinely whitewash crimes against Palestinians and almost never result in accountability.

The newborn’s father and Beit Ummar’s mayor, however, give a different account of what happened.

Mayor Nasri Sabarneh told the Wafa News Agency that it was Israeli soldiers who dug out the grave.

“The Israeli occupation army exhumed the grave of the newborn girl after she was buried by her parents in the town’s children’s cemetery,” Sabarneh said.

Ali Anwar Zaaqiq, the father of the baby who was named Leen, told Wafa that after burying his daughter, the mayor rang him to tell him what the Israeli soldiers had done.

Zaaqiq said he returned to the cemetery to find “occupation soldiers and Israeli doctors standing near the grave after they had taken Leen out, removed her shroud and left her beside the grave.”
Water engineer killed

Meanwhile, a Palestinian man was fatally shot by Israeli occupation forces on Tuesday.

Shadi Omar Lutfi Salim, 41, was a water engineer in the village of Beita near the northern West Bank city of Nablus.

Beita’s deputy mayor Musa Hamayel told media that Salim was on his way home from work when he was killed.


Salim was the water engineer for the village. “He was killed in cold blood,” Hamayel said, asserting that there had been no protests in the area that night.



According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the Israeli army claimed Salim “had quickly advanced towards soldiers with an object in his hand that was later identified as an iron bar.”

“Witnesses say they saw Salim walking from his car with a wrench toward the main faucet on the night of the incident, and heard gunfire soon after,” the newspaper added.

In recent months, Palestinians have been resisting a new Israeli colonial outpost built on land belonging to the Nablus-area villages of Qabalan, Yatma and Beita. The outpost has been previously evacuated, but settlers have returned to it.
Raiding human rights group

Israeli occupation forces raided the offices of Defense for Children International Palestine in al-Bireh on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Ramallah early Thursday morning.

The military confiscated computers and files related to Palestinian child detainees whose cases DCIP works on.

Security camera footage shows at least a dozen Israeli soldiers in the offices of the human rights group.

DCIP’s field investigations and in-depth reporting are essential to document Israeli crimes against Palestinian children, including injuries, killings and detentions.



Israeli forces also raided the Bisan Center for Research and Development in Ramallah early on Thursday, vandalizing offices and shattering doors.



Israeli forces confiscated computers and rifled through files, Palestinian researcher Ubai al-Aboudi, who heads Bisan, told a local media organization.



Al-Aboudi has been previously detained by Israel.

“This direct targeting of an academic and research institute by occupation forces is a dangerous breach of academic freedoms,” Bisan center stated.




Ali Abunimah contributed reporting.

Black Lives Matter defends Cuba’s right to sovereignty

https://www.workers.org/2021/07/58076/




This statement, first posted on the BLM twitter account July 14, has generated considerable coverage. Many in the corporate media have attacked BLM for the post. Workers World wishes to extend our full solidarity for this courageous statement.

Black Lives Matter condemns the U.S. federal government’s inhumane treatment of Cubans and urges it to immediately lift the economic embargo. This cruel and inhumane policy, initiated with the explicit intention of destabilizing the country and undermining Cubans’ right to choose their own government, is at the heart of Cuba’s current crisis. Since 1962, the United States has forced pain and suffering on the people of Cuba by cutting off food, medicine and supplies, costing the tiny island nation an estimated $130 billion.

Without that money, it is harder for Cuba to acquire medical equipment needed to develop its own COVID-19 vaccines and equipment for food production. This comes in spite of the country’s strong medical care and history of lending doctors and nurses to disasters around the world.

The people of Cuba are being punished by the U.S. government because the country has maintained its commitment to sovereignty and self-determination. U.S. leaders have tried to crush this revolution for decades. Instead of international amity, respect and goodwill, the U.S. government has only instigated suffering for the country’s 11 million people — of which 4 million are Black and Brown.

Cuba has historically demonstrated solidarity with oppressed peoples of African descent, from protecting Black revolutionaries like Assata Shakur through granting her asylum, to supporting Black liberation struggles in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and South Africa.

Now, we look to President Biden to end the embargo, something Barack Obama called for in 2016. This embargo is a blatant human rights violation and it must come to an end.

HUNDREDS of Striking Alabama Coal Miners Protest Outside Blackrock in NYC

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ39hAcvglM

Time to EXPOSE the Media BURYING Flint Water Cover-Up

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GN-e7iLGXU

Russiagate-ers Desperate to Save Tanking Ratings

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMAmUaA4q4g