On 30 January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, and on 11 March a global pandemic, after the number of cases outside China had increased 13-fold over the previous two weeks. This is fast turning into the biggest shock for the capitalist system since the 2008 financial crisis, with £3.9tn wiped off markets stocks, airlines collapsing or reducing flights, tourism dead, and a global recession is predicted as oil prices have fallen 30% as a result of the crisis.
In December 2019, a series of viral pneumonia cases of unknown cause emerged, centred on China’s Hubei region and its provincial capital, Wuhan. Deep sequencing analysis, to identify the virus’s unique genetic fingerprint, indicated a novel coronavirus, 96% identical to that found in bats, which was named SARS-CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2), and the illness it caused was called Covid-19 (coronavirus disease 2019). The SARS epidemic first reported in China in 2002 spread to 27 countries, infecting 8,437 people and killing 813.
Covid-19
Covid-19 is a virulent, highly infectious disease, and has a case fatality risk/rate (CFR) estimated at between 1% and 3.4%, more than ten times greater than seasonal influenza (0.1%) – itself also from the coronavirus family. Covid-19 is characterised by a cluster of acute respiratory symptoms — fever, cough, fatigue, headache and laboured breathing – as well as diarrhoea, all of which can lead to severe complications such as pneumonia and kidney failure. People over the age of 65, or with weak immune systems due to underlying health conditions, are particularly susceptible to developing complications. These underlying health conditions include: diabetes, heart disease, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and cancer. According to Chinese data, around 80% of cases of Covid-19 are mild, but 15-20% of are classed as ‘severe’, and require hospitalisation.
By 12 March 2020, there were over 126,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 infections in 113 countries/territories around the world, especially in Italy, Iran, France, Spain, Germany, Japan, the US and South Korea. Over 4,600 people have died. However, the fatality rate for Covid-19 depends very much on the levels and quality of health care.
China’s response
The epidemic was centered in Hubei province but several exported cases were later confirmed in 31 provinces of China. 66% of the first 41 patients had been exposed to the Huanan seafood market, which sold both dead and live animals. Such markets pose a heightened risk of viruses jumping from animals to humans because hygiene standards are difficult to maintain if live animals are kept and killed on site. There are an estimated 600-800,000 zoonotic viruses, meaning they have the potential to jump from animals to humans.
Over 80,000 people became infected in China (67,000 in Hubei), and over 3,120 people (3,000 in Hubei) lost their lives. The fact that the majority of the cases and deaths are concentrated in Hubei province is testament to China’s impressive countermeasures. China has built two 1,000-bed quarantine hospitals in a single week, locked down entire regions larger than some countries, ramped up manufacture of protective equipment, deployed its armed forces medical corps to treat citizens, and sent enormous convoys of food and supplies to Hubei province. After Wuhan’s health system was overwhelmed, China has sent 346 medical teams with 42,600 medical staff to Hubei, including 19,000 intensive care medical staff and medical personnel specialising in respiratory, infectious and psychological illnesses. Among them were 28,000 volunteer female medical staff. Chinese experts and medical equipment have been sent to enhance prevention and control of the coronavirus epidemic in Iraq. A factory in Zhejiang province was told to produce 80 million masks in just a few days; factories and shops were ordered not to raise the price of the masks. Hong Kong rioters, supported by their US and British masters, burned down shelters intended to host future victims of coronavirus.
The Chinese National Health Commission has selected a Cuban drug developed on the socialist island, called recombinant Interferon Alpha 2B (IFNrec) in a package of about 30 drugs to use to treat victims of Covid-19 in China. Chinese scientists have noted that the coronavirus depresses the body’s production of natural interferon and IFNrec supplants this deficiency, strengthening patients’ immune systems. 190,000 doses of IFNrec have been produced in China by Chinese-Cuban joint venture ChangHeber in the last few weeks. The WHO has praised China’s response for halting the spread of the virus.
Italy
Italy is the worst hit country after China, with over 12,500 cases by 11 March and over 600 deaths, the majority of them people aged over 90. After detecting its first case on 31 January and only two more by 20 February, there were between 1000-2000 cases in each of the four days from 8-11 March. Local community transmission had been undetected for weeks and spreading to other parts of Europe, while authorities focused on two Chinese tourists with Covid-19 in Rome. Over 900 people are in intensive care. There is a shortage of beds and negative-pressure isolation rooms which protects health workers from contraction of the virus. Medics are under pressure to free up ICU beds quickly to make room for more patients.
Italy has been forced to adopt similar ‘draconian’ but effective measures to those of China, and on 8 March a prime ministerial decree put 16 million people living in Lombardy and 14 provinces in Lombardy’s nearby regions in lockdown until 3 April. Thousands of panicked people tried to flee south. Italy two days later extended travel restrictions and a social distancing to the entire country. ‘There is no more time’ said Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte after cases of Covid-19 were confirmed in all 20 Italian regions. The Italian police and army enforce the quarantine and people violating the lockdown face a fine or three-month jail term. There have been riots at prisons in northern Italy, Naples and Rome after all visits were suspended. Austria has now closed its border with Italy.
In Iran, whose health system has been deliberately destroyed by decades of US and British imperialist sanctions, 354 people have died from among 9,000 cases due to shortages of testing kits, ventilators and oxygen. All the imperialist media can do is dream of mass graves in Iran.
US
Following the WHO pandemic declaration, and after previously playing down the seriousness of the outbreak, saying it would go away, US president Donald Trump limited all travel from ‘Europe’, beginning Friday 13 March for a month. Britain (still in the EU) and all countries not in the Schengen Area, including Ireland, Croatia, Romania, Ukraine are excepted. Trump had claimed only five days earlier that Covid-19 was contained, ‘We stopped it’, when his health experts were warning of community transmission of a dangerous disease whose spread can be extremely difficult to contain. The European travel ban is useless as the disease is already in the US. Trump wouldn’t let sick US citizens off cruise ship Grand Princess and into quarantine so as to keep the official US numbers down rather than help those people.
The US has a serious shortage of test kits and the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had initially been rationing who could be tested, meaning official US figures are a tiny fraction of reality. CDC tests were defective, unpredictable and limited to people who had recently travelled to China or who had contact with a confirmed case, creating a dangerous backlog. The CDC initially declined to test the patient who on 26 February became the first with an unknown origin of infection, as the patient did not meet the testing criteria. By 26 February, the CDC had performed a total of 445 tests, whilst South Korea, with a population six times smaller than that of the US, had conducted 66,652 tests. In 2018, Trump cut $15bn in national health spending, cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS including the NSC’s entire global health security unit and then refused to continue funding the CDC five-year emergency package for the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. These cuts leave the US unprepared to respond to a global pandemic. Millions of US citizens either have no health insurance (27.9 million) or are inadequately insured (87 million) due to high cost.
Britain
The British government response has been too little too late. Having spent the first few weeks sneering at China’s ‘authoritarian’ or ‘draconian’ measures, and wondering if its figures could be ‘trusted’, Britain has dithered about what to do, given conflicting and confusing advice to the public, and vacillated over what measures to take. As ever its primary concern being the stock markets and the economic interests of wealthy elites. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson did not convene emergency Cobra meetings for five weeks. The government then quickly approved, with no parliamentary debate, the draconian Health Protection (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020, to allow the British state to forcibly detain, isolate or quarantine people in England including children, against their will after one person at the Arrowe Park Hospital in Wirral, a designated ‘isolation facility’, wanted to leave and the government realised that they couldn’t legally stop them leaving.
Rather than taking robust containment and control activities, even on 9 March travellers returning from ski trips in Italy were still not being tested, quarantined or followed up for Covid-19. The British government has pledged £46m to rapidly develop a coronavirus vaccine and diagnostic tests. Yet in England, only 43-48% of pre- or primary school children, at-risk adults or pregnant women, get the vaccine against seasonal flu which killed 17,000 people annually on average between 2014-2019. Only 72% of over 65s got vaccinated. Only at risk groups can have the vaccine free of charge due to cost. The austerity cuts imposed since 2009 have left the NHS in a weaker position to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic and will cost lives.
Neglected diseases
Many die every day from easily preventable diseases, but because they are poor, black and/or live in underdeveloped countries, there is little coverage or concern. For instance, the wall-to-wall coverage of coronavirus compares unfavourably to the ongoing Ebola and measles outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In the first full month of the Covid-19 outbreak, more than 41,000 English-language print news articles mentioned the word ‘coronavirus’. By contrast, only about 1,800 published in August 2018, the first month of the DRC outbreak, mentioned ‘Ebola’ (Time magazine, 7 February). This Ebola outbreak has been contained in DRC and Uganda, where it has killed 2,264 of the 3,448 people who contracted it (WHO). The DRC government, under pressure to protect its tourist industry, has claimed to have eradicated Ebola on many occasions only for it to magically reappear weeks later. Putting profit before people costs lives.
DRC is suffering from the world’s worst measles epidemic with 310,000 suspected cases. Over 6,000 people have died. In 2017, there were an estimated 219 million cases of malaria, 92% in Africa, especially in Nigeria (25%) and DRC (11%). 435,000 people were killed by malaria in 2017, 403,000 people in Africa. There is a global pandemic of tuberculosis (TB) with 1.5 million people dying of TB in 2018 – that’s over 4,100 deaths every day, only slightly fewer than those killed by Covid-19 in total to date. Eight countries accounted for 66% of new TB cases in 2018, led by India, China, Indonesia, Philippines, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh and South Africa. Pakistan is in the midst of an outbreak of extensively drug-resistant (XDR) typhoid fever, a strain increasingly being identified in many parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Up to 161,000 typhoid-related deaths occur annually worldwide.
There is no profit for capitalism and the pharmaceutical industry in finding cures or treatments for these diseases as they occur mainly among the poor within the poorest countries. By contrast, the drugs industry has jumped into the race to find a vaccine for Covid-19. On 5 March, US president Trump signed into law emergency legislation enabling extra discretionary funding to tackle the coronavirus outbreak. The main beneficiaries of the $8.3bn Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act 2020 will be the pharmaceutical industry, whose lobbyists successfully blocked attempts to threaten the intellectual property rights for any vaccines the US government decided was priced ‘unfairly’. The US can’t delay the development of any vaccine or treatment in an effort to maintain affordable prices. Big pharma will advance its monopoly power no matter how serious the health crisis, arguing that constraints on price gouging would limit private investment.
Imperialist response
The imperialist nations and their allies initially responded by airlifting their nationals out of China, banning, reducing or suspending flights to China and closing their borders to restrict or bar entry to visitors from China. The WHO advises against the application of any travel or trade restrictions on China. By 7 February, the US (540 citizens), UK (83), Thailand (138), Italy (56), France (244), Japan (565), South Korea (701), Russia (80), Australia (243), Canada (196), India (647) and Malaysia (141) had evacuated their citizens, increasing the chances of importing the virus into their countries.
The imperialist media, led by the BBC and The Guardian, spewed liberal nonsense about ‘free speech’, and toxic lies that ‘China does not appear to have learned lessons from the [2003] Sars epidemic’ (8 February). On the contrary, the evidence shows that China had learnt those lessons and had used them to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Racist attacks on Chinese and Asian people increased throughout Britain, the US and Europe, with mealy-mouthed responses from the authorities. Chinese people have had stones or eggs thrown at them and told to go back to their ‘fucking country’, called a ‘fucking virus’, spat at, denied entry to restaurants, or kicked off buses and stared at for wearing masks. This national oppression (racism) is fuelled by the daily demonisation of China by the imperialist media, with orientalist lies about cover-ups, authoritarianism, non-existent whistleblowers and a seemingly oppressed population.
There’s been a surge in mask, hand sanitisers and glove sales to worried citizens all over the developed world including masks intended to keep out dust and particles far larger than viruses, and useless alcohol-free sanitisers. Hand sanitisers have been stolen from hospitals in Britain, for resale on online e-platforms. Bona fide anti-viral masks should be prioritised to front-line medical and public health workers, and the populace shouldn’t be deceived into purchasing products that offer no genuine protection. The virus of capitalist greed, selfishness and racism must be extinguished.
Charles Chinweizu
