No amount of money will allow the sudden reversal of the cuts and austerity in the NHS in Britain, underfunded, over stretched, too high a bed occupancy, almost 100,000 staff vacancies, with NHS hospital trusts still to pay out £55bn (a sixth of the entire NHS budget) to private companies in the Private Finance Initiative deals. There are 8,000 ventilators where there need to be 30,000; there is a criminal lack of personal protective equipment; testing is completely disorganised and vacancies are worsened by up to 30% of some hospitals’ staff off with illness or self-isolating.
No amount of money will allow the establishment of primary care and community services in time to deal with Covid-19 epidemic; no amount of money can get you population education and consciousness overnight, so that communities are ready to be organised and collective in an epidemic. Despite this, all over Britain neighbourhoods are trying, people are getting organised, Mutual Aid groups are springing up, there is an attempt to try and reach the elderly and the disabled. But it has to be a class war, not charity: working class people know that the government has never been there for them, they have experienced the cuts in education and healthcare, the effects of the bedroom tax and the benefit sanctions, the damp, cramped, infested temporary accommodation, those in work living in the private-rented sector pay over 50% of their salary, many people are one pay cheque away from destitution. It is now increasingly evident that food supply chains are breaking down, and that more and more people will be forced to use foodbanks which themselves are unable to secure supplies and struggle to operate within the framework of social distancing requirements.
The World Health Organisation says our task is to identify, isolate and support/treat the infected who are ill and rigorously trace the contacts. We need testing, testing of the whole population, testing of the ill isolated at home, testing of the symptomatic who are well enough to be discharged from A&E departments, testing of those who think they are infected and are isolating themselves, and testing the health workers so that they can come back to work, testing of the exposed to isolate and reduce the transmission. This also has to be coordinated and results centralised and with no one making a profit. Several private companies have raised the price of a home testing kit by up to 67% to almost £300, making them available only to those who can pay, rather than those who need it. That is the ethic of capitalism – we need to fight for an ethic of socialism. Universal testing now!
Hannah Caller
