The World Health Organization declared on 5 May that the public health emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic is over. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus proclaimed that the downward trend of the pandemic has “allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before COVID-19”.
This was a partial statement of fact. Governments around the world were way ahead of the WHO, having already scrapped most of the health measures required to keep the disease at bay. They had already replaced the mantra of “Learn to live with the virus” with “What virus?”
What was left out of the WHO declaration was the awkward truth that people around the world are still dying and suffering long-term debilitating health effects from the virus. COVID-19 remains a leading cause of death in most countries (it’s number three in Australia). Worldometer, one of the many online sources run by scientists attempting to make what data there is publicly available, puts the death toll of the pandemic so far at nearly 7 million.
But if you look up WHO figures for COVID deaths, you find a total of just 1,345 worldwide for the week to 14 June. What is striking about the data as you scroll down the page is that most countries registered zero deaths. After Afghanistan (two deaths), Australia is the next country, with 240 deaths, that records anything. Bolivia records two, Brazil 384, China one, the United States zero. 
Altogether, the countries that the WHO classifies as “high income” and “upper middle income” account for 1,301 of the recorded deaths. This is not because COVID-19 is killing more people in them, but because these countries are more likely to have some remnant of record keeping still in place. Total deaths, whether recorded or not, are disproportionately in poorer countries.
Even in the wealthiest countries (witness the US’s zero deaths), the records do not reflect reality. In the past twelve months, the disease has been recorded by US government bodies as the cause of around 125,000 deaths. That’s a death rate two to ten times that of US deaths from the flu.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged that reduced data availability (for example, US hospitals no longer have to report when cases of COVID are contracted by patients in their facilities) means that it can no longer reliably calculate rates of community transmission.
As Matt Mazewski, a fellow at the think tank Data for Progress, <a href="https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/covid-19-biden-vaccines-debt-ceiling-masks">recently wrote in Commonweal magazine</a>: “Donald Trump rightly got blowback from many quarters for musing in 2020 that ‘if we stop testing, we’d have fewer cases’, but his successor has brought his vision closer than ever to reality. When it comes to Covid, there is now a solid bipartisan consensus that ignorance is bliss”.
And for the capitalist class and its mouthpieces in government and the media, it is. COVID denialism serves the interests of the ruling class well.
The measures that would dramatically reduce transmission and the social burden of the disease are already well known. Epidemiologists and other scientists have developed an array of health measures that should be implemented, from ventilation and air purification in all indoor public spaces, along with vaccination, testing, contact tracing, supported isolation, waste-water monitoring, the use of high-quality masks, funding for cures and research into “long COVID”. 
But while every one of these meets the demands of human need, none of them meets the demands for business profit. Instead, in the US, vaccines, antiviral treatments and high-quality PCR tests will no longer be paid for by the government and provided free to all. Instead, companies such as Pfizer and Moderna intend to jack up the prices of their vaccines well above cost. White House Covid Coordinator Ashish Jha spoke enthusiastically about this at an event sponsored by the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, telling attendees: “My hope is that in 2023, you’re going to see the commercialisation of almost all of these products”. 
But ignorance is not bliss for the working class and poor of the world, disproportionately more likely to die and to be less able to cope with the effects of long COVID and other effects of the virus. Infection can increase the risk of developing other chronic health problems, including cardiovascular disease, auto-immune conditions or neurological disorders. According to the WHO, “current evidence suggests approximately 10-20 percent of people experience a variety of mid- and long-term effects”.
All of which gives the lie to any idea that capitalism has any concern for the lives of those on whose labour it depends. Nor should the hypocrisy around COVID be a surprise. It’s hardly unique. The system rewards bosses for exploitation, landlords for evicting people, arms companies for dealing death, fossil fuel and mining companies for destroying the planet, and much more.
What the capitalists really care about was succinctly revealed in a 2023 PwC report titled “Changing places: how hybrid working is reinventing the Australian CBD”, which laments in its conclusion: “We may look back at the COVID-19 era as one that adversely impacted the owners of CBD properties”.
As ever, the priorities of capitalism are not human life. Last month, the US ruling class used the manufactured crisis of a self-imposed debt ceiling to cut social spending by $136 billion. With support from both Democrats and Republicans, Congress also added work requirements to getting food stamps, restarted student loan repayments, approved another natural gas pipeline, froze health spending and clawed back $27 billion in COVID spending. It also approved tax cuts for the rich and nearly a trillion dollars for the military.
The message couldn’t be clearer. From a capitalist point of view, COVID-19 is too expensive to manage in a way that prioritises human life and health.

Diane Fieldes

The descent into COVID denialism

Video footage from late December shows elderly patients infected with COVID-19 on stretchers receiving oxygen stored in large blue bottles. They are being treated on the road outside the emergency department of Zhongshan Hospital, one of the largest in Shanghai.
Behind the emergency room doors, hundreds of patients and their relatives fill the foyer. More than 50 people can be seen waiting in a line in front of the first counter, regularly pushed by passing stretchers, wheelchairs and doctors in a hurry. In the rooms, corridors and even in front of the toilets, hundreds of mostly elderly patients are receiving the same treatment as those on the road outside. 
“The healthcare system has collapsed. Hospitals everywhere in China resemble the one that I work in”, Li,* a doctor at Zhongshan Hospital, tells Red Flag via encrypted message. He says that while staff at the hospital no longer have to treat patients on the road, the hospital continues to be overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. “Many are stuck waiting in the emergency room for hours, and there are not enough staff or resources to treat them.”
Since the ruling Communist Party abandoned its commitment to COVID zero in early December, the Omicron variant has moved through major cities at a blistering pace. In Beijing, an estimated 17 million people (80 per cent of inhabitants) have been infected, while in Shanghai, an estimated 17.5 million people have been infected (70 per cent of inhabitants, according to statements by local health officials). The highest rate of infection is in Gansu province in north-western China, with 23.9 million people (91 per cent of the population) infected with COVID-19. An estimated 900 million people in total have been infected since mid-December, according to a recent study by Peking University.
Official statistics are skewed by the lack of testing and criteria that rule out the virus as the cause of death if the deceased had a pre-existing health condition. But evidence is mounting of a massive unrecorded death toll from COVID-19: video footage on Chinese social media from countless locations across the country shows vehicles delivering bodies and residents in long queues at crematoria, and many social media users have posted about losing loved ones to the virus.
Most estimates put the likely death toll at more than 1 million in the coming year. UK health analytics company Airfinity estimated that China's cumulative deaths since December would reach 584,000 by 23 January and 1.7 million by the end of April. It pegged daily cases at 2.99 million and daily deaths at 18,900 as of 9 January.
Although the wave of infections has reportedly peaked in major cities, the virus is now hammering smaller cities and rural areas, where serious illness and death will likely be more widespread given older populations and the lack of medical resources. As of 2020, there were only 1.6 healthcare workers for every thousand people in rural China, compared to 2.9 doctors and 3.3 nurses nationally.
Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters that the second wave will be accelerated by the arrival of Chinese New Year on 22 January, when many migrant workers traditionally travel from cities back to their homes in the country. He added that these two waves will be followed by a third wave lasting until mid-March. Many provinces, including Zhenjiang, Shandong and Hubei, expect the outbreak to peak later this month.
Despite the peak of the first wave of infections in major cities, hospitals continue to be overwhelmed. In addition, deaths tend to lag infection by several weeks, so hospitals and morgues will continue to fill even as cases in major cities decline. “The hospital cases and the severe cases will not peak at the same time”, Li says. “It’s one or two weeks later. So we may still be seeing more hospitalisations in the coming weeks and more severe cases and more deaths, even if the infections have already peaked. Health workers must continue working even when they test positive or have not fully recovered.”
Li contracted the virus in December and “had no choice but to continue working”. He says that many staff are having to work shifts of anywhere up to 48 hours while infected. “We work with high fever, tight chest, constant coughing and pumping heart. We can work hard; we can work overtime. But we are made of flesh, not iron.”
According to a survey by Yimi Research, an estimated six out of ten doctors and nurses have been working while infected. The survey found that 70 per cent of the surveyed 3,013 medical workers across China had contracted COVID-19 between 20 and 26 December.
Many hospitals have tried to separate the positive cases from the negative to protect the most vulnerable groups—including the pregnant, the elderly and those with severe chronic conditions—but they soon find there aren’t enough COVID-free health workers for the negative zone. 
Hua,* a doctor from the obstetrics and gynaecology department at Wuhan University’s Renmin Hospital, central Hubei province, told Red Flag via encrypted message that her hospital initially designated an area for pregnant women, but a patient who tested positive after undergoing surgery on 19 December soon infected the entire department.
Hua says she is concerned about the prevalence of severe illness caused by COVID-19 among pregnant women. “Fever is a dangerous situation for pregnant women and babies”, she says. “When some babies are cut out of the amniotic fluid, it feels like they’ve been in boiling water. Many are sent to the ICU immediately after birth.”
Jing,* a nurse at the same hospital, says there are so many patients with pneumonia caused by COVID-19, mostly in their 70s and 80s, that the hospital had to take over wards from other departments, such as paediatric, surgical and orthopaedic, with beds filled as soon as they become available.
Jing also witnessed deaths, mostly of the elderly, more frequently than before the COVID-19 wave. “Too many old people have passed away lately. One or more every day on average in our hospital. It used to be very rare, maybe one in a few months”, she says.
Li says that those who are routinely held up by the Communist Party as “the heroes who build the nation”—mothers, the elderly, health workers—have become “nothing but cannon fodder in this crime against humanity”.
For many commentators, the pace at which the Chinese government has abandoned its commitment to COVID zero has come as a shock. For almost three years, Xi Jinping pinned his legitimacy to suppression of the virus. Unlike the United States, where a “profits before people” political framework often dominated, resulting in more than 1 million fatalities, China’s policy had, until late last year, averted mass death. (Despite having four times the population of the US, China had reported just more than 5,000 fatalities by late November.) For the Communist Party, COVID zero demonstrated a commitment, in its words, to put “people first, life first”.
Ji Hengge,* a Marxist on the Chinese mainland, says that despite the different approaches of the US and China towards COVID-19, both strategies have been underpinned by a commitment to maintaining the logic of competitive capital accumulation.
“When COVID-19 first emerged in late 2019, the Chinese government initially adopted a policy of suppressing information about the virus”, he says. “It was only when COVID-19 was no longer under control—generating popular backlash against the Chinese state’s failure to deal with the virus—that the government shifted to a strategy of suppressing the virus. By April 2020, these measures had evolved into the ‘dynamic COVID zero’ strategy.”
During 2020 and 2021, COVID zero was largely successful, with overwhelming public support for the health measures. For the Chinese capitalist class, the economy was able to maintain growth and profitability, while the avoidance of mass infection and death was used to increase the legitimacy of the government. Meanwhile, the surveillance capacities of the regime were expanded by increasing its monitoring of personal information and movement. 
Over the course of 2022, however, confidence in the strategy began to fall apart. “During the Shanghai lockdown, which brought production and life to a halt, many more people died from the lockdown measures than from COVID-19 itself”, Ji Hengge says. “This discontent finally erupted into the anti-lockdown social movement in November 2022. In response, they quickly abandoned COVID zero.”
Before the pandemic, China’s economic growth rates had been in decline for several years. Ji Hengge says that the impact of the pandemic has exacerbated a decline in Chinese manufacturing and burst China’s real estate bubble: 
“Although the abandonment of COVID zero will lead to a recovery in industries such as hospitality and tourism, and a small recovery in manufacturing, the fundamental problems that triggered the economic crisis will not have been solved. Factories will continue to lay off workers and attempt to relocate overseas. The US-China trade war over high-tech industries such as semiconductors will continue. The real estate crisis will increase the level of financial risk in China, which will make international finance capital less stable. And so, the Chinese economy will show slow growth in the next few years, and may even contract at times.”
Ji Hengge says that recession in China would further concentrate monopoly in the economy and push big capitalists to increase their export of capital overseas. “In terms of trade and investment, this will intensify competition with other countries. It will also lead to increased geopolitical confrontation.”
Inside China, political polarisation has emerged among some of the government’s most ardent online supporters. Many have begun to express unease at the way in which the abandonment of COVID zero is playing out.
“The tsunami of infections caused by Omicron in Beijing has surpassed expectations”, wrote Hu Xijin, a nationalist former newspaper editor, on his Weibo account on 25 December. Concerning the COVID-related deaths of old people, he told his nearly 25 million followers, “This kind of price causes people sorrow”. Another Chinese journalist, with nearly 1.9 million followers, called the relaxation of COVID controls “chaotic” and “ill prepared”. On 29 December, a neo-Maoist website, Utopia, published a commentary accusing the government of ditching its strategy too swiftly. “We’re not a racing car, but a big bus full of old, weak, ill and handicapped people”, it said. “A smooth and steady transition is extremely important.” (The article has since been deleted by the censors.)
Many commentators have also sought to blame the protests that took place in late November for the current outbreak and rising deaths. But Au Loong Yu, author of China’s Rise: Strength and Fragility, says that the demands and aims of the November protests must be separated from the current wave of infections and deaths. “The November protests did not have as their goal the abandonment of all the health measures. The protests were not even anti-lockdown per se. What they were fighting against was ‘lock up’: ‘lockdowns with Chinese characteristics’”, he says via email.
He notes that “lockdowns with Chinese characteristics” had no regard for basic human needs, such as access to food or medicine, and failed to protect human life. “The people endured the lock up for three whole years”, he says. “Then they understood that the only way to protect human life and their freedom of movement was to rebel against the lock up.”
In the absence of any political leadership that could provide the protests with coherent demands—such as public health measures that both protect lives and respect other basic human needs—the Chinese state was able to suppress the protests through the threat of repression, while conceding to one of their main demands (“end the lock up”). In doing so, the government was able rapidly to abandon the entirety of the health measures over the course of December.
Although the abandonment of COVID zero has not been met with the same scale of resistance seen in November, there have been moments of confrontation.
In mid-December, demonstrations took place at medical schools and hospitals in Chongqing, Chengdu, Nanjing, Xuzhou, Nanchang, Kunming, Guangzhou, Nanning, Nanchong and Hefei. Most of the demonstrators were professional graduate students in various hospitals who must perform the same work as other trainees and residents, but are deprived of the same salary rights on the grounds that they are students. “If we are regarded as doctors, then we must have equal pay for equal work, guaranteed treatment and clear scope of work responsibilities”, graduate students from Soochow University said in a statement. “If we are regarded as students, then unreasonable requirements for posting must be cancelled, give the students a holiday to go home and rest, and stop the squeeze in the name of dedication.”
In Chengdu, Sichuan province, south-western China, 300 students from the West China School of Medicine demonstrated and marched in mid-December after the death, due to heart failure, of a medical student surnamed Chen, who was working as a trainee. Although the administration did not link his death to COVID-19 or any underlying health issues, a post by Chen’s classmates on Weibo revealed that he was forced to continue working after testing positive for the virus days before he died.
In early January, thousands of retrenched workers clashed with riot police at a pharmaceutical plant in Chongqing operated by COVID test kit manufacturer Zybio. The factory fired more than 10,000 workers, many of whom were owed back pay, due to a drop in orders from medical companies following the government’s abandonment of the COVID zero strategy.
Video footage shows workers throwing traffic cones, boxes and stools at police carrying riot shields. In another video, hundreds of workers are seen destroying rapid antigen test supplies and finished products while chanting, “Return our money!” In response, Zybio has been forced to pay at least some of the unpaid wages. 
Ji Hengge says that sporadic struggles of Chinese workers have been taking place around unpaid wages for the period of leave due to COVID-19 infection, albeit in an isolated manner. “Alongside the Foxconn riots in Zhengzhou last November, these are early indicators that working-class combativity may become more frequent in the coming period”, he says.
The handling of the outbreak has created a crisis of legitimacy for Xi Jinping’s government. “This crisis further exposes that the CCP is corrupted to its core”, says Au Loong Yu. “And one thing is increasingly clear to larger numbers of the population: Xi Jinping and the CCP are the biggest threat to the health of the Chinese people.”
*Name changed.
Lam Chi Leung contributed to this article.

Robert Narai

From crisis to catastrophe: COVID-19 engulfs China

In the twelve months that we have been forced to “live with” COVID-19, average life expectancy in Australia has fallen for the first time in generations. As of October, 8,832 people were counted as dying from COVID-19, and thousands more died “with” the virus. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that, just like rents, fuel and electricity prices, deaths were up in 2022 by 17 percent—18,671 more than the recent average.
Social inequality is woven into these grim statistics. Aboriginal people are twice as likely to die from COVID-19 or end up in intensive care from the disease, while the lowest income earners are nearly three times more likely to die than the rich. 
The ruling-class offensive against public health unleashed in late 2021 has resulted in health outcomes going backwards, in real terms, for the first time in generations. Life expectancy increased almost inexorably throughout the twentieth century. Reducing the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19 was key to enabling people to live longer. In the early 1920s, infectious diseases accounted for 15 percent of all deaths, according to the ABS; by the 1990s, that figure had fallen to less than 1 percent. Now, COVID-19 is the third leading cause of death in Australia, behind heart disease and dementia. By abandoning well-established, proven measures for preventing the spread of infectious diseases, Australia is ending 2022 with a health profile that belongs in the last century. 
Compare these figures to health outcomes in 2020. Public health restrictions such as lockdowns and mask mandates led not only to extremely low case numbers of COVID-19 in Australia, but to a drop in overall mortality. 
Government social support also dramatically reduced inequality and allowed workers to save money. In the second quarter of 2020, household deposits increased by $33.4 billion. For many surviving on Centrelink, the pandemic, grotesquely, provided a chance to pay for basic needs for the first time. Cassandra Goldie, CEO of the Australian Council of Social Services, noted at the time that the increase to JobSeeker allowed people to “access the essentials, like prescription glasses, a fridge and warm jumpers for their children to get through winter”. 
This didn’t mean lockdowns and social distancing measures were easy. They were trying, boring, stressful. They were arduous for essential workers such as teachers, thrown into an environment of online learning with no extra help or compensation. By and large, however, people supported the measures because, unlike the vocal minority of anti-vaxxers who argued that their individual rights trumped all broader social considerations, most people could see the point.
Collective discomfort served a greater good: stopping someone’s grandparents dying or the health system being wrecked. It was good to have avoided the scenes of overflowing morgues that emerged from Italy and the United States. It also showed that governments could find resources to shelter the homeless and pay for social support, if they wanted to.
Sections of Australia’s ruling class railed against these public health measures, in particular retailers and hospitality bosses. Keeping people alive required restricting economic activity: fewer people were spending money in their shops. Paul Broad, the chief executive of Snowy Hydro, expressed these political priorities when he told the Australian Financial Review: “The economy is hurting ... if consumption of electricity is any guide to what’s happening out there, activity is way down”. Gerry Harvey, interviewed for the same piece, said that the public health measures were “overkill, and the problem with doing overkill is you make a lot of people very angry”. 
State Labor governments, and in particular Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, copped the ire of the mainstream media, small business organisations, fascists and the federal government for maintaining life-saving lockdowns. In late 2021, they caved. State and federal governments agreed to a roadmap for opening that involved gradually reducing and eliminating entirely a range of public health measures. The strategy was justified with reference to health pseudo-arguments. The transmissibility of the omicron variant rendered measures such as lockdowns futile, they said. There was nothing to be done to stop the spread. Initially, the roadmap was based on states meeting vaccination targets, creating the perception that Australia was simply adopting a new approach to handling the pandemic. 
In truth, opening up was about abandoning measures to contain the pandemic at all. Governments were led, not by objective science about the transmissibility of the virus, but by a political argument that business profits were more important than public health. As the year has progressed, even the most unobtrusive public health restrictions, such as compulsory mask-wearing on public transport and planes, have been scrapped. The most basic initiative to stop the spread of COVID-19, staying home if sick, has been attacked. First, payments for isolating workers were reduced, then abolished, preceding the lifting of mandatory isolation requirements for positive cases altogether. And the take-up of third and fourth doses of the vaccines—the initial pillar of opening up—has fallen precipitously. When the government has encouraged people not to take COVID-19 seriously, what would compel individuals to take the initiative to get vaccinated? 
Industry has hardly lifted a finger to strengthen public health—even measures that don’t require the lockdowns and social distancing they so despise, that wouldn’t stop people working or spending money. The pandemic centred attention on air filtration as a pillar of public health. Proper ventilation, installing air filters and C02 monitors, can help maintain clean air and reduce infection. But there are virtually no mandated indoor air quality standards, or even bodies to monitor indoor air quality as part of occupational health and safety. And no wonder: why would bosses spend money and time ensuring adequate ventilation if they aren’t required to? 
Daniel Andrews defended his government’s inaction against rising omicron cases in October, saying that “the era of COVID exceptionalism is over”. The statement encapsulates the extent of the ruling-class victory in trashing public health: people get sick and die from all sorts of things, so why should the government be expected to treat the pandemic as something special? 
But COVID-19 is exceptional. In August, fourteen people died from influenza, but at least 1,061 died from COVID-19. Comparing the two is like comparing an overflowing bath to a flood. 
The health impact of COVID-19 can’t be measured in lives lost alone. Long COVID is a tragedy. Researchers from the University of Tasmania suggest that half a million people will have long COVID symptoms by Christmas. Many have become disabled by it. Governments and businesses are not providing anywhere near the level of attention or resources this crisis demands. Australia is not even tracking cases of long COVID, as are many other countries of comparable size. For people suffering, accessing help is nightmarish because long COVID clinics are overrun or closing. 
In Sydney, the long COVID clinic at St Vincent’s Hospital has an eleven-month waiting list, while the Austin Hospital in Melbourne ran out of funding and completely stopped providing long COVID services. And more than one-third of Australian workers don’t receive sick pay. The inability of workers to take time off contributes to ill health by prolonging illnesses that could have been managed with rest and prevents people accessing the help they need. 
The most lasting impact of COVID-19 may prove to be the devastation it has wreaked upon Australia’s public health system. Every long-term weakness has been exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic. The president of the Australian Medical Association, Omar Khorshid, said in October: “Every part of the system is clogged with people who are waiting to be treated, from queuing ambulances outside the EDs, those waiting inside the EDs, to people waiting for elective surgery”. This year, almost every state experienced record high calls for emergency help, and record high levels of ambulance ramping. The overcrowding led to terrifying events, such as the Melbourne Royal Children’s Hospital turning away patients in December. Patients have died from preventable illnesses, with or without COVID-19, because the health system is in crisis. 
Record numbers of healthcare workers left the industry this year. In Victoria, they left at a rate of more than 200 per week, 20 percent higher than the year before. The federal secretary of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation says there are double the number of vacant nursing jobs in 2022 than last year. Can you blame them? Imagine entering an industry with a desire to help people, and instead managing a pandemic the government is pretending no longer exists without the resources to adequately provide for those who need care. Nurses’ strikes in NSW and WA have highlighted the anger and resentment workers in the industry are feeling right now. 
There are no easy fixes to the crisis in public health. But if working conditions aren’t improved, it won’t be possible to stem the tide. There is a broader problem with Australia’s health system. Many presentations to hospitals could be prevented if the general standard of health was raised. This would rest not on hospitals, but on easier access to local health practitioners. Yet out-of-pocket costs for GPs are rising, and bulk-billing practices are usually overrun. The high cost of primary health care in Australia contributes to working-class and oppressed people having a poorer standard of general health and landing in hospital for illnesses that could have been prevented if health care was genuinely universal. 
At the very least, beginning to address the crisis in public health will require massive injections of funds: more beds, more staff, more equipment and better wages for workers. But in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s first budget, hospitals received $2.4 billion less funding than they had anticipated. Not only did federal and state governments decide to let more people get sick by letting COVID-19 rip; they also tightened the resources available for the public health system to look after them. 
COVID-19, then, is exceptional. Alongside the ransacking of public health, opening the economy has been a political and social assault. By relegating the virus to just another disease, the bosses have lifted the bar for how much pain, neglect and hardship workers are expected to accept. We are asked to take solace from the fact that “only” the vulnerable and elderly are dying from COVID-19. A few hundred deaths per month doesn’t sound too bad, if you don’t think of the faces behind those numbers. 
This debasing of social consciousness has broader implications than apathy towards illness and disability. It also undermines consciousness of the real causes of much ill health. It was right that, for a period, people demanded feats of ingenuity and an enormous, unusual allocation of funds to defend public health. If social resources were dedicated to making sure everybody was well looked after all the time—indeed, if the economy was organised on such a basis—there are myriad widespread and debilitating health problems that could be lessened, if not eradicated. 
If big companies were ordered to stop pumping sugar into every foodstuff and cramming junk down our throats, that would measurably reduce the rates of diabetes and heart disease. If unions could enforce safety standards to the letter, workplace deaths could be rapidly scaled down from the figure of almost one per day.
But as the ruling class has asserted again in 2022, the point of capitalism is profit for the few. That’s where resources go and what drives decisions. By allowing COVID-19 to spread throughout society, the ruling class has had a tremendous victory. Health care has returned to being an individual, rather than collective, responsibility, just like everything else is individualised: finding a way to eat, having a roof and bed, getting an education and so on. It should never be forgotten that the death and disability inflicted upon Australian workers were a choice. The bosses chose to do this to us, because it was good for their class and good for their system. 
There is no single policy that will solve the health crisis they have created. It will require an upheaval of social priorities, of the structure of the economy, of what guides political decision making. The bosses want us to think there was no alternative, and not to care about the victims of their cruelty. Instead, we should never forgive, or forget.

Priya De

The ruling class gets its way as Australian life expectancy falls

Video footage shows a crowd of students at Tsinghua University in Beijing holding up blank pieces of paper and chanting, “Democracy, rule of law, freedom of expression!” Through a loudspeaker, a young woman can be heard in the background shouting: “If because we are afraid of being arrested, we don’t speak, I believe our people will be disappointed in us. As a Tsinghua student, I will regret this my entire life!”
“We are holding up blank pieces of paper because it represents everything we want to say but can’t due to the censors”, Zhao* tells Red Flag via encrypted message from the Chinese mainland. He is a 22-year-old Shanghai native who recently graduated from a university in Beijing. Zhao says many young people have lost confidence in COVID zero after a string of tragedies such as the Guizhou bus crash, which killed 27 patients who were being transported to a quarantine facility. Meanwhile, the consolidation of Xi Jinping’s rule for a historic third term—combined with widespread youth unemployment and diminishing job prospects for university graduates—is creating disaffected layers of youth in Chinese society.
“This sense of powerlessness and fear makes us feel disheartened about our future”, Zhao says. “Many of us say we’ll be the ‘last generation’ [young people in China who choose not to have kids as a form of protest] and choose to ‘lie flat’ [do the bare minimum], because we don’t think that things will get any better. We’re unwilling to allow the unborn generation to come into this world and endure the torture of not being free.
“I joined the protests because they were a new and incredible experience for me. It is difficult for us mainlanders to have any first-hand experience of social movements because of state repression ... I stand with all those who are fighting for their freedom: Uyghurs, Tibetans, the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan. I want the entire system to be dismantled and for everyone to be able to speak freely.”
Historically, students have been at the forefront of resistance to Communist Party rule. During the 1989 uprising, they played a leading role in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, which acted as the social detonator for a nationwide strike movement. But after the movement was defeated, university campuses became tightly monitored and increasingly repressive. 
From the mid-2000s, a less authoritarian environment led to the emergence of Marxist student groups with some degree of independence from the Communist Party. Student activists connected with networks of labour activists in the Pearl River Delta and involved themselves in labour organising. 
This came to an end in 2018, when a failed unionisation drive provoked a crackdown by authorities. University administrations disciplined students and severely restricted the activities of the Marxists. Peking University disbanded its Marxist Studies Society in the name of “reorganisation”. In early 2019, the students who protested against disciplinary actions were harassed, beaten and jailed; some even disappeared.
“The protests on campus mark the beginnings of a student movement, especially as some activist students are beginning to distrust the government and school authorities”, Ji Hengge,* a Marxist, tells Red Flag from the Chinese mainland. “These demonstrations, which took place at more than 50 university campuses [from 26 to 27 November this year] were the largest since the 1989 uprising. This is still a long way from a large-scale student movement, especially as students are not sufficiently organised at the moment. Their protests are mostly spontaneous, their demands are often not unified, and most students have not even acted yet. But these protests in university can become a model for other students—they have shown that students can fight for their rights through protest.”
The Foxconn iPhone assembly plant in Henan, the provincial capital of Zhengzhou, employs more than 200,000 workers and accounts for 60 percent of the province’s exports. It has been the site of fierce resistance to industrial policies that force workers to live inside the factory. 
In late October, information began circulating about COVID infections and deaths inside the factory. Fearing infection and being unable to leave, thousands of workers scaled the factory walls and squeezed between fences to escape to their hometowns. “They always put the quantity of products first and human life comes second. Human life means nothing to them”, remarked Ms Zhang,* one of the workers who escaped, in a Chinese-language interview on WeChat. 
In the aftermath, local governments across Zhengzhou initiated a draft to ease Foxconn’s labour shortages. (Apple was counting on Zhengzhou Foxconn to produce its new iPhone 14 in time for the Christmas season.) 
In early November, 10,000 new workers from Henan and surrounding provinces arrived at the factory. But the bonus payments the new workers had been promised upon arrival (6,000 yuan, approximately US$860) were reported to be withheld until March next year. In response, thousands of workers clashed with riot police, breaking through barricades and hurling them at security personnel. Foxconn was forced to compensate each recruit 10,000 yuan and provide free bus rides to workers who wanted to leave the factory and return to their hometowns.
“Foxconn presented in concentrated form what many people have been experiencing inside China”, Eli Friedman, co-editor of China on Strike: Narratives of Workers’ Resistance, says via Zoom from the United States. “Since the Shanghai lockdown earlier this year, capital has been allowed to circulate freely while human mobility is reduced to a bare minimum—with workers forced to sleep, eat and work in their places of employment—in an effort to contain the virus while maintaining economic growth. This is a very different situation to the zero COVID policy in Wuhan in 2020, when only the bare essentials of life were operating.” 
In this “closed loop” system, responsibility for the workers’ welfare (including COVID measures) is placed on individual firms such as Foxconn. “These corporations have no experience, no capacity and frankly no interest in keeping these workers alive at any decent level of humane subsistence”, says Friedman. “It is easy to see how a situation like this quickly falls apart: rumours start to spread, healthy people are getting sick, co-workers are dying in their dormitories. And so it makes complete sense: workers ran for the exit.”
Friedman points out that any form of coordinated action such as this requires at least some level of organisation. “From the outside it is hard to know exactly what networks were involved. But if you lock up 200,000 mostly young people in a factory and force them to live in dormitories together—it is precisely this type of environment where grievances can be discussed and labour organising can start to happen.”
Jude Howell, in a piece for Made in China journal, notes that, from the early 2000s, a more relaxed attitude toward foreign NGOs on the part of the Chinese government led to the creation of independent labour organisations. These, in turn, helped generate activist networks involved in an upswing of working-class self-activity, which coincided with a boom in export-oriented manufacturing. In 2010, strikes erupted at Foxconn and Honda in Guangdong province, before spreading to Toyota in Tianjin, a city near Beijing in the north-east, and throughout several factories in the south of the country. The strikes won a series of wage increases and improved conditions, spurring on a strike wave in mostly foreign-owned factories until late 2015.
Since then, Xi Jinping’s government has been largely successful in eliminating the networks, arresting labour leaders and activists, driving others into hiding, and closing the independent labour organisations. Combined with an economic slowdown and a decline in working-class confidence, the result has been a dramatic decrease in strikes and labour organising in recent years. 
The initial impact of the Foxconn uprising is cause for quiet optimism. “The image of migrant workers standing up to big capital and the Chinese state has now entered the national imagination”, Friedman says. “Although it has been erased from the mainstream narrative, the Foxconn uprising laid the basis for the riots that would follow in Urumqi and the subsequent demonstrations that erupted on the campuses and in the streets.”
A fire in an apartment block in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, in which at least ten people died—widely blamed on COVID restrictions that lock apartment buildings from the outside and prevent access to emergency services—sparked demonstrations across the country that took aim at aspects of the public health measures that many believe are failing to protect lives. The victims of the fire were all Uyghur: the oppressed Muslim-majority ethnic group in Xinjiang. After the fire, riots broke out when thousands of Han majority demonstrators surrounded government buildings and demanded justice for the victims, as well as the relaxation of COVID restrictions to allow greater access to food and essential services.
Demonstrations in solidarity with the victims of the Urumqi fire soon spread to Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Guangzhou and many other towns and cities in late November—lighting candles, laying white flowers and holding blank pieces of paper over their faces and heads (white is the traditional colour of mourning in China). Many demonstrations evolved into calls to end the lockdowns; some even demanded that the Communist Party and Xi Jinping step down. In Beijing, at least a thousand people gathered along Beijing’s third ring road, chanting: “We are all Xinjiang people!”
“Fewer Uyghurs than Han participated in the protests, in large part because the government has been more politically repressive and vindictive towards Uyghurs”, Ji Hengge explains. “Although the movement quickly subsided and the subject of Uyghur oppression is not currently on the agenda, the demonstrations showed the potential for Uyghurs and Han Chinese to fight in unity in the face of a common oppressor ... Overall, it was a struggle for unity between the Uyghurs and the Han Chinese.”
Outside the mainland, solidarity protests spread to Hong Kong on 27 and 28 November. Students at the University of Hong Kong distributed leaflets relating to the Urumqi fire and held up blank pieces of paper, while small groups of people gathered in the central business district with messages of solidarity for the mainland. 
“These people have shown immense courage by gathering again to express their dissatisfaction with the regime”, Lam Chi Leung, a socialist, says via email from Hong Kong. “Since the defeat of the 2019 uprising and the passage of the national security law, many people have been too afraid to protest. The mainlanders have given Hong Kong activists some confidence and provided them with a reason to stand up and fight.”
Since the 1990s, Hong Kong has been home to groups dedicated to the development inside the Chinese mainland of social movements related to gender equality, human rights, environmental issues and labour solidarity. Most organisations have either ceased operations or significantly reduced their work due to the increased repression.
Small numbers of pro-democracy activists who once held a negative view of mainlanders—due to their indifference (or opposition) to the 2019 uprising and the previous waves of pro-democracy struggles—have changed their attitude and involved themselves in solidarity protests. Others have refused to do so because of the lack of mainland solidarity with Hong Kong in the past. 
“I completely disagree with this attitude”, Lam Chi Leung says of those who refuse to offer solidarity. “It serves only to divide the people of Hong Kong from the mainland; it strengthens the CCP regime that oppresses us both. The working class of China and Hong Kong have a common interest in fighting for democracy and social equality in our countries. Only when people in China and Hong Kong unite in common struggle do we have any chance of defeating the CCP.” 
Since 1989, the Chinese Communist Party has faced much larger protests than those that took place in recent weeks. But the previous waves of struggle have been mostly localised and have tended to avoid criticising the national government. The narrowing of the field of acceptable dissent under Xi Jinping—primarily through greater repression—created the conditions for the most widespread protests since 1989. 
Beijing has now abandoned its commitment to COVID zero and lifted certain public health measures such as lockdowns. Feng Zijian, an adviser on China’s COVID task force, estimates that the resulting surge could infect 60 percent of the country’s 1.4 billion population. New modelling by Wigram Capital Advisors, a macroeconomic advisory group that has provided modelling to governments during the pandemic, published in the Financial Times suggests that as many as 1 million people could die in the coming months. The figure might seem improbable, implying as it does a death rate higher than any other country has yet experienced. But even a fraction of such a total would be a public health disaster. In a country such as Australia—which is far better placed and better prepared to deal with the fallout from letting the virus rip—the hospital system remains in crisis and long-COVID has become its own public health disaster, crippling tens if not hundreds of thousands of working-class people. 
One question is whether Beijing, in dropping its incredibly punitive lockdowns, will implement public health measures that both protect lives and respect other basic human needs. Such measures would include paying workers to stay at home while ensuring their needs are adequately met, shutting down non-essential industries, implementing strict occupational health and safety measures in essential industries that remain open, dramatically expanding healthcare infrastructure and introducing vaccination mandates using vaccines that are scientifically proven to be the most effective.
Another question is whether those forms of “institutional memory” in the Chinese labour and student movements that Xi Jinping’s regime has effectively destroyed can now be regenerated as the virus widely spreads. Only time will tell. After all, while the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States flourished despite the carnage of the pandemic, in other places, such as Hong Kong, political activity was severely reduced as young people implemented their own public health measures, cautioning against public gatherings that might contribute to a deadly outbreak of the virus, particularly among the elderly.
For a brief moment, the protests against the Chinese state highlighted the potential power of workers and students to challenge the regime. “From the outside, the CCP can appear monolithic, with Xi cementing total power and control over China for many years to come”, Ji Hengge says. “These [protests] have now completely shattered that illusion—their impact will be felt for many years to come.”
* Names changed.

Inside China’s protests

A surge in both COVID-19 cases and protests inside China presents a dilemma for the ruling Communist Party. 
The regime has long adopted a successful strategy of eliminating the virus. Unlike in the United States, where a “profits before people” political framework often dominated, resulting in more than 1 million fatalities, China’s policy has averted mass death. Despite having four times the population of the US, China has reported just more than 5,000 fatalities. 
“Even allowing for propagandistic understatement of the Chinese numbers, Xi’s China has clearly been far more successful in protecting its population from the worst effects of the virus than any country in the West”, historian Adam Tooze noted last week. “As a result, it cannot be stated too often, China’s life expectancy overtook that in the United States in 2021, a truly historic marker.”
Yet three years into the pandemic, China appears ill prepared to deal with its most serious outbreak yet. According to OECD data, the country has fewer than four ICU beds per 100,000 people—compared to 9.4 in Australia and 34 in Germany—and a nurse-to-population ratio that is perhaps one-fifth of the average in developed countries. Its elderly population has a relatively low vaccination rate by international standards and as such is incredibly vulnerable.
The Chinese Communist Party has relied almost totally on lockdowns and an incredibly punitive quarantine system, which is generating increasing resentment that has exploded in street demonstrations and riots in recent weeks.
Beginning in response to a fire in an apartment block in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, in which at least ten people died—widely blamed on COVID restrictions that lock apartment buildings from the outside and prevent emergency services from accessing those in need—the demonstrations have taken aim at draconian aspects of COVID-19 measures that many believe are failing to protect human lives. 
On 25 November, thousands of Han majority demonstrators hit the streets of Ürümqi. Demonstrators surrounded government buildings and demanded justice for the victims of the fire, as well as the relaxation of COVID restrictions to allow greater access to food and essential services. They sang China’s national anthem, with its lyric, “Rise up, those who refuse to be slaves!”
Demonstrations in solidarity with the victims of the Ürümqi fire spread to major cities across the Chinese mainland from 26 to 29 November. In the capital Beijing, at least a thousand people gathered along Beijing’s third ring road, chanting: “We are all Shanghai people! We are all Xinjiang people!”
In Shanghai, youth-led gatherings converged on Middle Ürümqi Road—named after the Xinjiang capital—lighting candles, laying white flowers and holding blank pieces of paper (in reference to state censorship) over their faces and heads (white is the traditional colour of mourning in China). Demonstrators openly criticised the Communist Party and President Xi Jinping, chanting: “Communist Party! Step down! Xi Jinping! Step down!”
Student demonstrations took place at more than 50 university campuses, including a number of elite universities, such as Tsinghua University and Peking University. Video footage shows students singing “The Internationale” and chanting “Freedom will prevail!”
In cities including Lanzhou, Wuhan and Guangzhou, demonstrators clashed with police and destroyed tents and COVID-19 testing booths. Security forces responded by erecting barricades, closing university campuses, deploying pepper spray and carrying out mass arrests. By 30 November, hundreds of government vans, SUVs and armoured vehicles had been stationed in major cities; police and paramilitary forces were conducting citizen ID checks and searching mobile phones, looking for foreign apps, photos of the protests or other evidence that people had taken part; online mentions of the protests were deleted by the regime’s censors. 
“There has been nothing like this on this scale and so openly anti-government in China for more than three decades”, Bai Zhi,* a long-time activist, says over the phone from outside the mainland. 
“China has had waves of large-scale protests and strikes in the 1990s, 2000s and early 2010s. But these actions have been localised, and protesters tended to avoid criticising the national government. Instead, they blamed local officials or employers in the hope of avoiding repression and persuading the national government to take their side in the disputes. Not since 1989 [Tiananmen Square] have there been protests on a national scale.”
This is because large sections of the population have begun to lose faith in the ability of the regime to handle COVID-19.
During 2020 and 2021, COVID zero was largely successful, with overwhelming public support for the health measures. Over the course of 2022, however, Bai Zhi says a string of incidents have undermined confidence in the strategy: many cities have been in lockdown for months at a time; untold numbers of people have become seriously ill and died after being locked in their homes, unable to access medical care; suicides are on the rise; mandatory tests have become super-spreader events; a bus carrying infected patients to a quarantine facility crashed, killing 27 people; and the “big whites”—public servants and police in white hazmat suits—have gone from national heroes embodying the collective good to impersonal enforcers of brutal policies, who regularly carry out public beatings of individuals. 
The consolidation of Xi Jinping’s rule for a historic third term has also stifled any illusions in political change taking place within the CCP. Combined with a slowdown in economic growth, rising youth unemployment (almost 20 percent among those aged between 16 and 24) and diminishing job prospects, the economic uncertainty and pain are being felt by wider sections of the population.
“The majority of people on the streets think that COVID is a threat and needs to be adequately dealt with”, he says. “But they also think that their livelihoods need to be met. The CCP is failing to achieve either.”
To keep industrial profits flowing, the state has instituted a range of inhumane policies. Eli Friedman, writing in the Boston Review, calls it the “closed loop” system, which allows capital to circulate freely while human mobility is reduced to a bare minimum in an effort to contain the virus while maintaining economic growth: 
“Closed loop manufacturing requires that workers enter the factory and stay there—eating, sleeping, and working solely within the grounds of the plant ... Meanwhile the work-from-home regime that white collar workers endure is in essence a closed loop organised at the level of the household.”
But many poor and working-class residents of the major cities don’t fit into either of the closed loops, being rural-to-urban migrants prevented from leaving the city to go back to their homes during lockdowns; they are denied access to state provisions such as welfare, food and medicine. These measures have generated forms of resistance among those trapped inside (or outside) the closed loop.
Food riots occurred on the outskirts of Shanghai after migrant workers in informal housing went weeks without either income or state-provided food deliveries. In at least one reported incident, they commandeered a vegetable truck and distributed the goods freely to a gathering crowd.
The most dramatic example of working-class resistance to the closed loop system erupted at the Foxconn iPhone assembly plant on 22 and 23 November. The factory in Henan, the provincial capital of Zhengzhou, employs more than 200,000 workers and accounts for 60 percent of the province’s exports. Workers rioted when the company tried to prevent them from leaving the factory after COVID was detected.
Video footage shows thousands of workers clashing with riot police, breaking through barricades and hurling them at security personnel, before thousands are seen jumping over walls and squeezing between fences to escape to their home towns. Many had to walk for miles along roads and through fields without food or water, surviving thanks to the goodwill of locals who provided them with provisions and shelter. 
Zhengzhou was subsequently placed under lockdown in an attempt to quell the rioting; Foxconn was forced to offer 10,000 yuan (approximately US$1,400) and free bus rides to workers who wished to leave the factory and return to their home towns. 
“What started as a labour dispute escalated into a riot that caught the attention of the entire country”, says Bai Zhi. “The Foxconn workers demonstrated that if you stand up to the Chinese state and capital, you can win.”
The Communist Party has responded to the wave of protests by lifting some restrictions, such as lockdowns and mandatory PCR testing, while placing the blame on local politicians for the poor implementation of national policy. In the meantime, the threat of repression has been enough to keep demonstrators off the streets of major cities. But none of this has solved the dilemma the Chinese state now faces. 
If Beijing continues to lift restrictions and lets the virus circulate freely, then China will suffer a surge in cases and deaths. “Such a catastrophe could provoke an even worse legitimacy crisis for the Chinese state, which likely has been part of their calculation to maintain COVID zero”, says Bai Zhi. If the state attempts to suppress the virus through the blunt instrument of onerous lockdowns, it could generate new rounds of mass protests and a potential crisis for the regime. 
“Whatever the outcome of this unfolding crisis”, Bai Zhi says, “it will leave a mark on collective consciousness for years to come”. 
* Name changed.
Lam Chi Leung contributed to this article.

China’s COVID-19 crisis

“You need to understand that we’ve got 20 to 25,000 Australians who will die this year because of COVID, a good 15 percent increase on our normal death rate. These are people who would otherwise have lived. I didn’t hear that really stressed today.”
—Brendan Crabb, director of the Burnet Institute
“We think it’s good for business.”
—Andrew MacKellar, chief executive of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry
 
It’s as sickening as it is predictable. A national cabinet meeting led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/sep/30/australia-to-end-mandatory-covid-isolation-period-and-disaster-payments-for-workers">decided</a> to scrap all COVID-19 isolation requirements for the vast majority of people in Australia from 14 October. Financial support for those isolating, except for workers in health and aged care, will also be cut from that date. 
Anyone who has no sick leave due to casual employment will have to work without federal support, and face the awful choice between potentially infecting others or being plunged into poverty. The same choice faces those who have exhausted any paid sick leave entitlement—usually two weeks. That is plenty of us, considering we have endured four COVID-19 waves over the past twelve months, with large numbers affected by the well-documented poor health that often follows infection.
Government and business have claimed that an “immunity wall” from vaccination and prior infection will keep the virus at bay, and have asserted that COVID-19 is just like the flu or any other respiratory disease. This is a straight-out lie. 
Raina MacIntyre, Brendan Crabb and Nancy Baxter—three of Australia’s best-known public health experts—point out in an article for the <a href="https://theconversation.com/if-you-think-scrapping-covid-isolation-periods-will-get-us-back-to-work-and-past-the-pandemic-think-again-191670">Conversation</a>: “There have been 288 deaths from influenza so far this year compared to more than 12,000 deaths from COVID”.
And this horrific short-term death toll is actually only the tip of the iceberg. In a blistering <a href="https://www.burnet.edu.au/news/1677_covid_isolation_rule_change_disappointing">interview</a> with the ABC, Brendan Crabb pointed out:
“It’s an infection of the organs in your body, of your heart and of your brain and of your blood vessels. And it’s leaving this long COVID burden that is possibly worse than the acute burden.” Even for those with mild cases, infection and reinfection <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-24/reinfection-covid-more-severe-new-variants/101178246">increases the risk</a> of long-term <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/16/1064594686/how-covid-threatens-the-brain">health problems</a>. 
In a sign of just how appalling the new policy is, the body which usually signs off on public health measures, the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, was not asked for advice on this occasion. Instead, it was left to national Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly to stammer his way through an incoherent justification for this strategy of unmitigated mass infection.
Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton has a record of pragmatically adapting to the political winds on COVID-19. But the nearly total abandonment of health protections was clearly too much for him. Sutton <a href="https://twitter.com/VictorianCHO/status/1575633834812461056">tweeted</a>, “Sleepwalking into COVID is not a strategy I would recommend”, linking to an article in <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/big-covid-19-waves-may-be-coming-new-omicron-strains-suggest">Science</a> discussing highly infectious new variants that can evade immunity from prior infection and vaccination. 
These variants are already producing a significant new surge in the UK. COVID-19 hospitalisations in England have <a href="https://twitter.com/COVID19actuary/status/1575411339350216704">risen</a> 48 percent in a week. If and when this wave crashes over Australia, we will face it with even less public health protection than in the most recent surge, which left a wreckage of death (and most likely of long COVID) much worse than any previous wave. For those who are particularly vulnerable, the isolation and stress caused by the progressive scrapping of protective health measures will only be intensified. 
Those at the front line of treating people affected by COVID-19 have also expressed serious concern about the consequences of dropping isolation requirements. A statement from the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Association expressed concern that the full impact of the reduction in the isolation period had not yet been felt, and that “removing all isolation periods for the general community, particularly in the context of uncertainty regarding the emergence of new variants and potential waning immunity, will put further pressure on our healthcare systems”. “We believe the suggestion that COVID-isolation is a matter of ‘personal responsibility’”, the union goes on to say, “is just a way of Governments shifting their responsibility onto the individual when it should be theirs”.
The new policy is particularly shocking given that <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/covid-zero-catastrophe-how-did-it-come">the history of the pandemic in Australia</a> was initially one of state governments and the population at large succeeding—unexpectedly and against steep odds—in eliminating the virus. But the time bought by that success was largely wasted. Instead of pouring extra money into expanding the health system and mitigation measures like better ventilation and air filtering, Australian governments bowed, one after another, to the interests of business.
In a profit-driven system, health care in general is seen as a high fixed cost to be minimised, rather than as a prime necessity of a decent life. Increasing those costs or letting public health (or public anything) get in the way of business as usual, has always been opposed by business interests, both small and large. Even straightforward and effective measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19, such as staff wearing masks, might remind customers that a pathogen that can kill and maim may be hanging in the air, potentially reducing cash flow.
So the latest move to scrap isolation rules and isolation payments is appalling, but no surprise. All the signs have been present since Albanese took office. As I <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-pandemic">wrote</a> in Red Flag in July: “In all its essentials, Labor’s policy is a continuation of the policies [of the former Morrison Liberal government] that have led to a new and severe burden of ill health being imposed on the population—and on the working class and poor in particular”.
The handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has always been a battle that pitted public health against a highly profitable “business as usual”. If anyone was still in any doubt, the scrapping of isolation rules and isolation payments makes it absolutely clear which side Labor is on in that contest.

Jerome Small

Labor lets COVID-19 rip, again

Australia is being engulfed by a fourth wave of COVID-19 in a year. Hospitalisations hit 5,133 on 19 July—a surge of more than 50 percent since the start of the month. Ambulance services are overwhelmed. COVID-19 is one of the leading causes of death in Australia right now, with 77 deaths recorded on 15 July. Credible estimates of the extent of “long covid” start at 400,000.
Amid the carnage, we’re getting a clear view of Labor’s approach to managing the pandemic. In all its essentials, Labor’s policy is a continuation of the policies that have led to a new and severe burden of ill health being imposed on the population—and on the working class and poor in particular. 
We’re on a course for the wholesale removal of isolation for positive cases. False promises of “post-covid” normality will continue to be smashed on the rocks of long-term underfunding of public health, and mitigation measures that are far too little, far too late. 
Senior ministers in the federal government spent weeks defending the abolition of the Pandemic Leave Disaster Payment, giving casual workers the choice of either working while sick and likely infectious, or starving. This policy was inherited from the Morrison government but carried out—and defended with zeal—by the new Labor government. 
Federal Labor stepped back from this appalling policy only after being denounced by unions, sections of business, some Labor backbenchers, and prominent Liberals including the New South Wales premier.
The reprieve is only temporary, however. The payment to casual workers will be resumed from this week, but only until 30 September. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s announcement of the concession was accompanied with the now-familiar lecture that COVID-19 assistance “can’t continue forever given the fiscal constraints” facing governments. The possibility of addressing “fiscal constraints” by reversing the $184 billion worth of <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-11/stage-3-tax-cuts-middle-income-earners-go-backwards-inflation/101053322">tax cuts</a> for high income earners—another Morrison government policy embraced by Labor—didn’t get a mention from our new PM. 
Nearly one-quarter of workers have no sick leave entitlement because they’re employed casually. A further 13 percent have no sick pay because they’re sole traders or contractors. From 30 September, not one of these 5 million people or their families will have income support from the federal Labor government if they are unable to work due to COVID-19. From 30 September, all these people have to work sick or starve. Signed, Albo. 
Many commentators noted the contradiction: people are required to isolate to stop the spread of a vicious disease, while being denied the financial support they need in order to do this. But of course, there are two ways to resolve this contradiction. It’s possible to pay people to stay at home—the temporary measure adopted by the federal government and national cabinet on 16 July. But it’s equally possible to resolve the contradiction by abolishing any requirement to isolate at all for positive cases or close contacts. 
It’s this latter course which has been adopted in the UK as of February. It’s a course <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/13977240">openly advocated</a> by New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet, with no apparent pushback from federal Labor or any other premier. It’s a course <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/victoria-to-hire-400-strong-hospital-strike-force-20220717-p5b27m.html">explicitly endorsed</a> by Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews in a press conference on 17 July. And it’s a course that, step by step, we have been moving towards over the past year—reducing isolation times, narrowing the definition of close contacts, allowing close contacts to mix in the community while wearing a mask, and so on. 
The <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/covid-zero-catastrophe-how-did-it-come">history of the pandemic in Australi</a>a has been one of following the disastrous path of the UK, though with a delay thanks to the welcome and unexpected elimination of the virus in most states in early 2020. There is no indication that Labor intends to alter this grim trajectory—quite the contrary judging by Andrews’ statements.
The Andrews government has decided to flat-out ignore official health advice to reduce transmission of the virus. Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas announced virtually unchanged health orders on 12 July. While the official advice from acting Chief Health Officer Ben Cowie hasn’t been released yet, the health minister says that she has disregarded a recommendation from Cowie to extend mask mandates from public transport and hospitals to include early education (where kids are too young to get vaccinated) and some retail settings (presumably retail services like hair dressing or nail salons, where workers and customers spend extended periods in close proximity).
Thomas announced a public awareness campaign about the phrase (buried in the new health orders) that wearing masks is “strongly recommended” indoors where distancing is not possible. A similar approach has been adopted by the national cabinet, which met on 16 July.
This concession to public health has been a long time coming. When the Victorian Greens raised the idea of a publicity campaign to encourage mask use back in May, Andrews literally scoffed at the idea and dismissed it out of hand, declaring: 
“I’m terribly sorry but I’m not taking health advice from them, I’m just not. That’s just pure rank politics. And it doesn’t work against this virus ... I will instead consult with the medical experts and I don’t think Victorians would want it any other way.” 
The Andrews government has now chosen to ignore the advice of the medical experts by refusing to even marginally expand mask mandates. In the meantime, that scoffing, dismissive approach has led directly to thousands of cases. 
Anecdotally, even the slightly stronger messaging on masks from the Victorian health minister has led to a noticeable uptick in the use of masks in public in Melbourne over the past week. This accords with polling that has found high levels of support for stronger measures to combat the spread of the virus. If the government’s messaging had been stronger earlier, countless thousands of cases of COVID-19 could have been avoided, and many hundreds if not thousands of hospital admissions could have been prevented. 
Mandating masks in indoor settings would strengthen public health still further and is a no-brainer in the current context. It would not only make it much less risky for people to do their shopping and carry out other essential activities; it would also make workplaces much safer. Plenty of bosses lean on their workers to not wear masks, as it sends a message to customers that a dangerous pathogen is circulating in the air and detracts from their experience with the business. A mandate strengthens the hand of workers in this situation.
Obviously, there are other priorities than public health and safe workplaces for Labor. The most obvious consideration is electoral. Reintroducing almost any level of public health measures draws attention to the fact that both wings of the political establishment promised a bunch of bullshit: that vaccines alone are the path out of here, that the pandemic is over or all but over, that it is possible to return to the “normal” of 2019 when a vicious and increasingly transmissible disease is being allowed to circulate freely. 
All of this is a lie and is proven to be a lie with every succeeding wave of ill health and death—and the estimated 400,000 people in Australia suffering from long covid. But admission of this basic fact has been slow and grudging. 
Labor in Victoria has spent a year failing to politically challenge the right-wing movement against public health measures such as vaccine mandates, lockdowns and masks. This leaves them vulnerable to an electoral challenge from the right.
But electoral considerations are only part of the story.
Labor is also unwilling to stand up to the demands of business in the way it was earlier in the pandemic. The Victorian health minister’s justification for rejecting the chief health officer’s recommendations regarding expanded mask mandates was that business and industry leaders had not been supportive. This is the consistent message of business. The Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has emphasised the need to eventually end COVID-19 support payments, even if it reluctantly accepts their extension in the current context, and opposes any further government mandates to control COVID-19. 
The Property Council of Australia and Business Council of Australia have likewise opposed the reintroduction of working from home mandates and bemoan the practice at every opportunity. Meanwhile, the Australian Industry Group rejects remote work and mask mandates because they would “hurt the momentum that businesses have built since the lockdowns”, despite masks being one of the simplest and most effective measures to stop the spread. 
Any sane society’s approach to a new and vicious disease would not start from what’s good for business, but what will maximise health and prevent unnecessary death. That would involve a massive reordering of priorities, including doubling health spending, spending serious money on ventilation and reworking education, work and recreation to massively reduce the risk of transmission.
This would cost a lot of money and would cause an enormous level of disruption. Less costly to the bottom line, and to the business as usual of the capitalist class is, to downplay the risks, and to endorse a vaccines-only approach that can reduce death rates but, by allowing the virus to spread unchecked, still lead to a massive level of death and ill health. 
For the capitalist system, health care is not one of the main necessities of a decent life but a high fixed cost that should be reduced. So long as we’re not keeling over in numbers that make continued profit-making unviable, there’s really not much of a problem for our rulers. The billionaires, after all, are doubling their wealth and bidding up the price of private jets. The rest of us are stuck in cattle class breathing virus-laden air.
Capitalism is a system of crisis. Capital demands that the cost of each crisis—whether economic or health—is imposed on the working class. Liberals can relish the “survival of the fittest” rhetoric. That’s not usually Labor’s style, but the party wants to govern that same system. Which means imposing its priorities on the whole of society. 
Hence federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers offering zero to the tens of thousands of people relying on food banks. Hence the government’s pathetically weak climate legislation, and endorsement of further planet-cooking gas and coal projects. Hence the new government marching in lock step towards a new imperialist war. And hence their sickening, business-as-usual approach to the pandemic.

Labor’s pandemic

Australian governments and their counterparts around the world have largely succeeded in desensitising us to avoidable mass deaths and disease. In the week to 6 July, 294 people died of COVID-19 in Australia, more than 40 a day. 
In May, OzSAGE, an organisation of health-related experts, issued an <a href="https://ozsage.org/media_releases/covid-19-has-become-a-leading-cause-of-death-in-australia-urgent-call-for-action/">urgent call for action</a> to prevent COVID-19 deaths, pointing out, “Higher COVID case numbers are leading to increased hospitalisation, suffering and death. This is the first time an infectious disease has been a leading cause of death in modern history”. In that month, Australia had the highest rate of new infections in the world, apart from a few small islands.
Already stressed hospital workers and facilities continue to be overwhelmed by new cases. One of the latest strains of the Omicron COVID-19 variant is even more virulent than its predecessors and, rather than our noses and throats, targets our lungs in particular. That makes it a greater threat to health.
“Long COVID”, ill health caused by the disease that lasts weeks or months, is affecting large numbers of people. <a href="https://theconversation.com/triple-vaccination-seems-to-reduce-the-chance-of-long-covid-but-we-still-need-to-prepare-for-a-jump-in-cases-183428">University of Sydney health researchers</a> point out: “With one in 20 people with COVID still experiencing symptoms three months later, long COVID might even become Australia’s most significant cause of longer-term disability”.
Yet despite the rising death toll, hospitalisations and long COVID, governments have been making us more vulnerable to the disease by lifting measures that protect us. The availability of fourth vaccine doses may have been extended to those over 30 on 7 July, but it is still not available to everyone. And that announcement came the day after the Albanese government scrapped the requirement that people arriving in Australia have at least one vaccine dose, in effect inviting new strains of the disease to enter the country freely. 
This follows states dropping or scheduling the dropping of vaccination requirements for teachers, and the abandonment of many of the simple but effective measures that prevent disease spread, such as mask mandates for public indoor areas. Enforcement of mask mandates on public transport is generally extremely slack in Australia.
Governments claim to be “following the expert advice”. No doubt. But it’s the best advice money can buy, from people on government payrolls, whose incomes, statuses and careers could be jeopardised if they embarrass their employers.
In reality, governments seem to have had two main concerns in setting their COVID-19 policies: their electoral viability and keeping production and profits going. To start with, when the dangers of COVID-19 weren’t clear, the most precautions were taken: lockdowns and mask mandates along with large-scale public information campaigns. In richer countries, like Australia, there was unprecedented income support provided for those who couldn’t work. Governments didn’t want a substantial chunk of the workforce starving or turning on them.
But, in some cases, like Sweden and federal US policy under Donald Trump, production and profits were the top priority from the beginning. This was only thinly disguised by disingenuous appeals to “herd immunity”, supposedly generated by mass infection. That was UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s initial response, while in private declaring his intention to “let the bodies pile high”. Scott Morrison’s Liberal government in Australia had the same inclination, but it was tempered by the actions of state governments, whose actions raised public expectations about the right to be safe and the responsibility of government to contain infectious disease.
Then vaccines became available. The partial protection they provided was very welcome. But with time and the emergence of new variants, their effectiveness has declined. Still, they have been increasingly used as a justification for dropping lockdowns, along with the test and trace systems, that worked well in Australia, and other measures aimed at preventing disease, most recently weakening isolation requirements for people who are infected.
The early Omicron variants, while more infectious, were less virulent (likely to cause severe disease or death). That too was used as an excuse to remove public health measures and shift responsibility for public health from governments and society to the decisions of individuals. But there is no guarantee that Omicron won’t be replaced by another even more infectious but also more virulent strain.
Conservative politicians, backed by far-right mobilisations on the street, led the let-it-rip charge. Dan Andrews’ Victorian and Mark McGowan’s Western Australian Labor governments held out longest against this push, and had very widespread support for doing so. But they too fell into line.
Australian governments’ increased health funding in the face of COVID-19 has been trivial and wholly inadequate compared with what’s needed.
Around the world, governments have given in to the virus, prioritising the imperative that businesses operate freely and produce profits. “Don’t focus on the number of infections”, they say, “but on hospitalisations”. The unstated message is “Don’t care about people dying”.
As the rate of people in hospital with COVID-19 has surged, governments have gone quiet about hospitalisations as well. On 9 July, more than 3,800 people were in hospital with COVID-19 in Australia, the highest number since the initial Omicron outbreak in early 2022. That number is rising fast. More than 1,840 of these patients are in New South Wales. That’s the equivalent of the state’s two biggest hospitals full entirely with COVID-19 patients.
We can add to that the many people whose health has been badly affected by the virus. A large US <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00403-0">study</a> in February found that the risk of stroke is elevated by 52 percent after a COVID-19 infection, heart attack by 72 percent. A <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-25/long-covid-clinic-st-vincents-cognitive-decline/101178450">study</a> at St Vincent’s hospital in Sydney tracked 128 people in the year following their infection—a majority of whom had only mild cases. The ABC reports that “some sort of cognitive decline was recorded in almost all of the participants, regardless of the severity of the initial infection”.
Every week, more studies are being released that confirm that the scrapping of health measures is inflicting a greater and greater level of ill health on the whole population, and especially on the working class. OzSAGE, whose members are not on the payrolls of government COVID-19 advisory bodies, has a series of important recommendations to minimise the death toll and disease burden. These would not be cheap, but they would put people’s health before profits. They include the provision of free high-quality masks, expanded eligibility for the fourth booster dose, legislated standards for indoor ventilation and air filtration, free and accessible PCR and rapid antigen tests and improved access to treatment.
Any sane society confronted by a vicious new disease would do everything in its power to suppress it. If that wasn’t possible, it would dramatically and permanently expand the health workforce, rather than relying on already overburdened staff to do even more. It would maintain testing, rather than severely restricting access to PCR tests, as the Andrews government has just done in Victoria. It would have income support for everyone affected by COVID-19, a measure now wholly abolished by the Albanese government.
A decent society would mount a colossal public education campaign about how to avoid getting infected or infecting others, and train a public health workforce in the thousands. It would put massive resources into vaccine and treatment research but also into ventilation and air filtration. It would reorder the way schools, workplaces, shops and recreation facilities operate in order to minimise risk of aerosol transmission. And it wouldn’t be intimidated by a tiny minority of far-right sociopaths who oppose broadening requirements for people to be vaccinated and to wear masks so they are much less likely to infect workmates, friends, family and people in the shops.
Our rulers have done none of this. Over the past year they’ve just let the bodies pile up and hoped that we are all too excited about getting back to the gym to notice or care. And businesses have seen the cash pile up, as thousands suffer and die. A sickening and thoroughly capitalist crisis continues.

Rick Kuhn

COVID-19: a sickening capitalist crisis continues

If you listened only to the world’s political and business leaders, you could be forgiven for thinking that the pandemic is all but over. Or, in the most repeated words of the last twelve months, that we’re “learning to live with it”.
Yet in the last 28 days, a further 288,000 people are dead with COVID-19, according to the official global tally collated by Johns Hopkins University of Medicine, one of the world’s foremost research centres.
The Economist magazine is also keeping a running estimate of “excess deaths”, which is a gauge of how many people are dying because of the pandemic in general—including, for example, people with non-COVID-related illnesses who would otherwise have been expected to live if it weren’t for overwhelmed health systems preventing them from getting treatment.
By its estimate, somewhere close to 1 million people died in the last month because of COVID-19. The final week of January was the second highest death surge since the pandemic was declared.
<div class="column_width_image article_inline_image"><img alt="Stats on COVID-19 deaths and hospitalisations" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/living%20with%20covid%20graphic.jpg" /></div>
Despite these astonishing and horrific figures, the lion’s share of media attention continues to be about public health measures being just too inconvenient and onerous for business owners to bear. The people who really seem to matter aren’t the ones enduring incredibly painful, suffocating deaths, but tourism operators, airline executives, shopping centre operators and so on.
In Australia, there have been more than 1,700 COVID deaths in the last month. Yet state and federal governments are doing away with even the most basic of public health measures, such as mask-wearing indoors. If terrorists killed just 1 percent of the number that COVID claimed in February, the whole country would be on a war footing. Politicians would be screaming “never again!” and throwing billions into the intelligence agencies and the military. Can you imagine any of them saying, “Well, we just have to live with it”?
But with COVID, we are reminded again and again that the deaths primarily are among the elderly and others with “pre-existing conditions”. So we needn’t worry too much—just get out there and spend, spend, spend. What better indication of the priorities of capitalist society, in which the cries of billionaires to let the virus rip are heeded while the elderly, the disabled and the sick are just so much collateral damage in the pursuit of profits.
Osama bin Laden could never have hatched and executed such a plot to kill so many innocent people for such nefarious ends. Such is the cunning of the billionaire class and its servants in parliament and in the media.
It is true, thankfully, that the Omicron wave is subsiding. But the capitalists and the politicians want us all to forget what’s just happened. We’ve had a series of infection “waves” that, despite mass vaccination programs reaching nearly two-thirds of the world’s population, have gotten worse in many places, the United States being an obvious example.
And there’s been a series of virus mutations—Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Omicron being the most notable. No-one can say that the next mutation won’t be deadlier and more transmissible. Yet nothing is being done to prepare for the worst. Every move is to tear down public health barriers and enable business to make profits like there’s no tomorrow.
It is truly a sick system.

The COVID-19 pandemic isn't over

Some societies value old people. Australian capitalism shovels them away in an underfunded, largely privatised and deregulated aged care system. And now, that system is killing them wholesale.
In the first 39 days of this year, 587 people have died “with Covid” in the country’s residential aged care facilities. Others overcame the initial infection but died shortly afterwards. “Complications following a Covid infection” is the euphemism.
But let’s not beat around the bush: the main “complication” causing mass death in the country’s nursing homes is the federal government—along with decades of underfunding and deregulation.
It was the Howard government in 1997 that <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/24-years-18-inquiries-can-we-face-the-truth-of-aged-care-20210225-p575qs.html">abolished</a> any minimum requirements for nursing and support staff in aged care. Regulation was made “light touch”. The sector, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7368">already open</a> to private profiteers, rapidly became dominated by them. Governments and local councils sold off their aged care facilities. Nutrition, social activities, proper staffing—all the things that add to length and quality of life as well as the ability to withstand a disease—came under merciless pressure from the profit motive.
So when the pandemic came along, it found the doors wide open to the most vulnerable population in the country.
The first mass death event was at Sydney’s Newmarch House, where 19 died in March of 2020. In the aftermath of this tragedy, the <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-31/aged-care-the-lessons-for-victoria-from-newmarch/12505710">lessons were clear</a>. COVID-19 had been assisted in its deadly path by the lack of infection control, the lack of permanent work and paid leave for the low-paid staff and the lack of a “surge workforce” that could be deployed at short notice.
But nothing was done. No extra measures put in place.
So just a few months later, the Andrews government in Victoria built a <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/renewed-hope-as-aged-care-emerges-from-a-shattering-year-20210624-p5841g.html">temporary morgue</a> at the Royal Melbourne Hospital’s aged care facility, to deal with 32 COVID-19 deaths. Altogether, Victoria’s “second wave” of 2020 killed 655 residents of aged care homes—around three-quarters of Victoria’s COVID-19 deaths that year.
Again, the lessons were clear. The death toll in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/10/the-lesson-from-aged-care-in-victoria-for-profit-services-drive-standards-down">for-profit aged care services</a> was far higher than in government-owned facilities. Regulation, resourcing and fixed staffing ratios save lives.
And again, nothing fundamental was done. There was a trickle of extra money, but extra regulation never materialised. Neither did the staffing ratios recommended as an urgent measure by the Aged Care Royal Commission. The rollout of the third vaccine dose in aged care was criminally slow.
So when Morrison and the state premiers decided to “let it rip” at the end of last year, just as the Omicron wave burst on Australia, the results were as catastrophic as they were predictable.
By 14 January, there were 1,100 active outbreaks, with more than 7,000 cases among residents and staff. Months before, the federal government had promised a surge workforce in case of outbreaks. It was a lie. Veteran journalist Michael Pascoe <a href="https://thenewdaily.com.au/opinion/2022/01/17/aged-care-emergency-michael-pascoe/">reported</a>, based on government data, that not a single shift had been filled by this mythical supplementary workforce in the week to 14 January. The government had promised the sector rapid tests back in August—but had <a href="https://insideageing.com.au/nurses-union-urges-govt-to-do-more-to-protect-aged-care-residents-and-staff/">done nothing</a> to secure supplies. Supervision from the sector’s regulator was <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/thousands-of-residents-infected-as-aged-care-sector-hits-crisis-20220111-p59nix.html">nonexistent</a>.
The New South Wales Nurses and Midwives Association <a href="https://thelamp.com.au/specialities/aged-care/aged-care-in-desperate-need-of-support-from-morrison-government/">reported</a> on 12 January: “Our members in aged care are reporting a staffing crisis, lack of access to suitable PPE, substandard infection control practices, and with many residents and staff still awaiting their booster”. More and more reports were emerging of residents locked in their rooms for days, even weeks, as a last, desperate infection control measure.
Obviously, it was time to go to the cricket.
On 14 January, federal aged care minister Richard Colbeck declined to appear at a parliamentary committee to discuss the mounting crisis, saying this would “impact the urgent and critical work the department is undertaking”. Instead, Colbeck attended to the “urgent and critical work” of attending the Ashes test in Hobart. For three days.
Since Colbeck’s oh-so-crucial attendance at the cricket, Australia’s Omicron wave has turned from crisis to catastrophe in aged care, with more than 500 deaths recorded.
Desperate and in damage control, the government decided to throw some money at the aged care workforce. A maximum of $800—less than Richard Colbeck’s daily wage—will be available to workers in the sector, to encourage them to work through the catastrophe.
Meanwhile, the federal government has declined to support a union <a href="https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/work-value-aged-care/application/am202099-f46-individuals-121020.pdf">application</a> at the Fair Work Commission to boost the wages of many aged care workers by $5 per hour. Indicating how low existing pay in the sector is, this $5 would represent an increase of 25 percent.
It’s not as though there’s no money around that could be used. Australia’s 47 billionaires have <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-17/oxfam-report-covid-pandemic-billionaires-increase-fortune/100760968">doubled their wealth</a> to $255 billion during the pandemic—an extra $8.2 million every hour. But don’t look at the billionaires. Look at the cricket. Or look at the government sending in 1,700 army personnel. With more than 1,000 active outbreaks, it’ll be barely noticeable.
And still, nothing has been learned. Nothing has changed. The funding increase recommended by the Royal Commission into Aged Care has not been budgeted. The government has put extra money into the sector—but it’s $6.5 billion a year short of what was recommended, according to the <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/the-aged-care-funding-shortfall/">Australia Institute</a>. And there are no assurances that (for instance) the extra $10 per resident per day now given to operators to try to eradicate <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6217">starvation</a> in Australian aged care homes (yes, you read that right) will actually be spent on food, rather than going to corporate profits.
The reason for nothing being learned here is not stupidity. It’s capitalism.
The brutal reality of Australian capitalism is that old people aren’t going to produce a profit by working for a boss again. So the system treats them as dispensable. Their care is seen, not as a necessity in a decent society, but as a high fixed cost to the economy. So that care is cut to the bone—and then opened up as a source of profit, at the rate of at least <a href="https://www.thesenior.com.au/story/6917556/report-to-royal-commission-shows-most-aged-care-homes-are-making-a-profit/#:~:text=Aged%20care%20providers%20made%20$1.1,2018%2C%20royal%20commission%20is%20told.">$1 billion per year</a>. During the two months so far of the Omicron outbreak, as old folks lie in shit or are locked in their rooms, it’s a reasonable estimate that around $160 million in profit has been extracted from the aged care system.
These are people whose labour has built the corporate empires. People whose taxes have built every scrap of decent services that exist. People who have raised the next generation of workers. Thanks for all that, say Australia’s rulers. Now face the obscene, economically rational choice of being locked in your room, or dying.
And nothing will change. Until we change it. The crisis in aged care is just one sickening manifestation of a system built for profit rather than human need. Until the crisis of health for ordinary people is turned into a crisis of politics—and profits—for our rulers, the current disaster will stumble on into the next disaster, and the one after.
In the bleak reality of “living with Covid”, one of the few sparks of hope is to be found in the protests of nurses and other healthcare workers. The strike and protest of nurses in New South Wales on 15 February—for ratios, wages, workers’ compo and resources—deserves to be huge. It deserves to be supported by sympathy strikes in other industries. It deserves to be repeated and extended and enlarged and repeated again and again, to win resources and dignity in hospitals and aged care and the rest of our health system.
On a popular <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/sydney/comments/sik9oy/nsw_nurses_move_for_statewide_strike_action/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=mweb3x">Reddit thread</a> about the 15 February strike, one Sydney nurse summed it up:
“The whole system is sickening. We don’t want applause. We want your support. Please stand with us”.
Jerome Small is the Victorian Socialists candidate for Calwell in the upcoming federal election.

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Labor’s pandemic

COVID-19: a sickening capitalist crisis continues

The COVID-19 pandemic isn't over

Deaths and profits pile up in aged care

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