https://socialistaction.org/2020/03/14/china-coronavirus-challenge-spreads-to-world-stage/
China Coronavirus Challenge Spreads to World Stage
Socialist Action / 23 hours ago
By JAMES FORTIN
As the novel coronavirus continues to dominate the concerns of health
officials around the globe, two truths about the contagion have remained
unchallenged: Nations are ill prepared for the arrival of the virus and
once it lands, cannot readily stop its spread despite herculean efforts
in some cases to do so.
As we go to reporting deadline for this paper the coronavirus continues
to ravage China and is spreading through the rest of the world, despite
some thought that the rate of infection is slowing. The World Health
Organization tabulates that more than 83,652 individuals in 25
countries, spread across all continents except South America, have
contracted the disease. Over 2,858 have died in China to date.
Epicenter of the health crisis.
The epicenter of the viral contagion, the city of Wuhan in south Central
China, has been the focus of ongoing urgent research by Chinese and
international health authorities. At the onset of the epidemic in
Wuhan, efforts by the Chinese to unlock the genome of the virus – the
virus’ complete set of genetic instructions found in its DNA – were
successful. In the spirit of international cooperation China provided
their findings to the entire scientific world. This will ultimately
allow for the development of a vaccine, a likelihood still 6 to 12
months away, however.
Many unanswered questions remain regarding the virus and its spread,
however, and until experts have more answers the full potential of the
evolving pandemic will not be known. Data so far supports an incubation
period of 5 to 14 days before infected parties show symptoms – a major
challenge to keeping the disease contained. The viral impact and its
mortality are greatest among older adults, the obese, and those with
underlying conditions such as diabetes, cancer or other diseases. To be
determined yet will be the national and global extent and severity of
the pandemic which is worsening daily.
After initial hesitation, the Chinese government began a mobilization of
doctors, government workers, Communist Party members, and units of the
Peoples Liberation Army and local police to carry out widespread
screening of the population in the heavily impacted zones of Wuhan and
its province, Hubei. Simultaneously, a quarantine of the town and
province. If not all of China, has been implemented in an attempt to
contain the virus’ spread.
A prioritized, unprecedented effort began to construct hospitals for
quarantine and treatment purposes using prefabricated sections. A
workforce approaching 10,000 has been mobilized to work 24 hours a day.
In this effort the 1,000 bed Huoshenshan Hospital was constructed and
made operational in just 10 days. At another site 25 miles distant the
Leishenshan Hospital with 1600 beds was built in two weeks. Numerous
additional hospitals ranging from 50 to 1,000 beds have been built or
are under construction. Hundreds of other public spaces across China
have been converted for quarantine purposes as well.
So exhaustive has been the response to keep the virus contained that the
head of the World Health Organization has praised China for having
“bought the world time” and that other nations should make the most of it.
Slanted coverage, revisited tropes, in mainline news and right-wing
social media.
Despite the massive campaign by the Chinese government to stop the
spread of the virus, now labeled COVID-19, its efforts have been met by
the U.S. mainstream media with bias and derision. Day after day
reporters for the New York Times and Washington Post find some point of
criticism of the Chinese government’s efforts.
Along these lines two different articles on the quarantine housing
appeared on the same date in the New York Times. Covering the
quarantine effort in China, Times reporters characterized the effort as
“rounding up the sick and warehousing them in enormous quarantine
centers” or “with the sick being herded into what amount to makeshift
internment camps.” The reporter went on to speculate that the
quarantined would soon run out of food, providing no evidence of this
happening.
While in Australia another Times reporter took a different tone
regarding the placement of Australian evacuees. “Sure, the steel on the
building’s façade is rusted in parts. Wi-Fi is shaky, especially at
mealtimes when he [an evacuee] and others are trying to contact their
families and friends. Dinner, at least on Tuesday, the first night he
spent there, was uninspiring and mushy.” Going on the reporter notes: “
the travelers found dead cockroaches on the floors and spent much of
their first night in the center cleaning. Mr. Huang [the evacuee] said
he didn’t really mind.” The reporter, in his almost cheery account,
neglected to identify the location of the quarantined Australians – an
immigration lock-up and detention center on Christmas Island, an
isolated speck of land in the Indian Ocean 870 miles off the western
Australian coast.
Right-wing social media has been less polite, raging against the victims
and their government with anti-Chinese and anti-Asian diatribes and
invoking historical mischaracterizations of China as an incubator of
infectious disease.
It might be well that these journalist-critics and others more
appropriately reflect on the history of viral transmissions, the U.S.
providing an unfortunate deadly example. “By October 1918, the United
States had been an active participant in World War I for more than a
year. And while the declared enemy was overseas, there was a killer
working stateside as well,” as The EcoHealth Alliance summarizes.
“Cities were gripped with fear: school was canceled; theaters, places of
worship, and other places of “public amusement” had been shuttered. That
month alone 195,000 Americans died, making it the deadliest month in
American history; the killer was none other than influenza… perhaps the
second deadliest disease outbreak in human history. Though the pandemic
lasted just 15 months, 500 million people worldwide fell sick and it
killed between 3-5% of the world’s population.” It is now suspected
that the origin of the 1918 international pandemic was none other than
the U.S. Army base at Fort Riley, Kansas.
Nature of the current virus
At this time (the science continually gets refined) the World Health
Organization reports that the new coronavirus is a “close cousin” of
viruses previously found in bats and likely transferred to small
animals. The WHO thinks the current contagion in China possibly
originated from people who came into contact with such animals being
sold in a food market in Wuhan, and who in turn became transmitters of
the virus to other humans. Still other evidence suggests that the
earliest infections were in people not associated with the market and
the viral jump from animals to humans occurred elsewhere.
This places the COVID-19 outbreak within the category of Zoonotic
diseases–those that can be transmitted between animals and humans.
Scientists estimate this class of disease represents three-quarters of
the newly emerging diseases currently affecting people. As with the
Avian Influenza, HIV/AIDS, SARS, and Influenza H1N1, the new coronavirus
spreads rapidly in an era of globalization and its accompanying travel
and trade.
World science does not yet fully grasp the underlying causes of virus
formation. It is suggested that ongoing deforestation around the world
including China has been the result of the expanding need of industrial
agriculture to find sufficient lands to grow crops profitably in that
mode of production. The deforestation in turn, combined with human
encroachment, has altered the existing ecosystems and displaced numerous
species. This greater interaction between animals and people is
occurring and with it a more serious opportunity for disease
transmission arises.
At the same time a connection is being made between the origin and
spread of infectious diseases and an international agribusiness that has
bent science to its quest for greater, faster profits. Millions of
industrial animals – poultry and pigs, particularly — are being
produced with altered genetics, cramped together in factory-like
quarters, and then slaughtered and shipped long distances in
ever-shorter periods of time. Accompanying these industrial farming
practices of contemporary capitalist agriculture are the deadly
pathogens that mutate and come out of the agri-factories. Today,
science has already linked some of the most dangerous viral diseases in
humans to modern day food systems, notwithstanding efforts by the U.S.
government which rushed to conceal such evidence during the 2009 H1N1
influenza pandemic, shielding American agribusiness from charges of
complicity.
Capitalist agribusiness has shown no interest in alternatives to its
profitable production methods. It has been only small segments of
modern-day farming to experiment with alternatives promoting safety
firewalls around our food supply. These include integrated pathogen
management, mixed crop-livestock environments, strategic re-wilding and
other tactics intended to keep pathogens from developing in the first
place.
And Big Pharma has no interest in participating in efforts to find a
solution either, when antiviral vaccines provide a handsome profit in
their own right with orders from captive buyers such as governments,
hospitals, and drug store chains. Pharma does not have to advertise for
customers as they do all sorts of other ailments identified on
television. They can focus their dollars on multi-million dollar
marketing campaigns to the U.S. public and medical communities where the
profits for their drugs are even greater. Only a few governments in the
world have devoted resources to this end provided that such efforts are
not cancelled by rising autocratic, anti-science regimes such as the U.S.
Cuba sets the example and leads the way
Most noteworthy, Cuba, even with its resources severely constrained by
the U.S. embargo, can claim the moral high ground for cooperation and
solidarity with victims of the coronavirus. Several years ago Cuba
entered into a joint Chinese-Cuban effort to produce antivirals, a class
of drugs that fight a virus’s ability to replicate, while awaiting the
development of actual vaccines. Sharing their technology with the
Chinese a jointly operated facility was built and opened in China. One
of the drugs, IFNrec, is now being employed by the Chinese National
Health Commission to fight the coronavirus based on its effectiveness
shown previously against viruses with characteristics similar to those
of the COVID-19. Cuba’s biomedical technology and social goals, unlike
so much of the pharmaceutical world, is focused on the need to help
viral victims, not the drive to make a profit.
In a humane society a government institution such as a National
Institute for Health would amass research scientists under its own
roof. Funding would be public and the resulting solutions and vaccines
common property operating to advance the general health of society. Free
or inexpensive vaccines would be distributed thoroughly via hospitals
and clinics, workplaces, schools, and community centers. Gone would be
the televised advertising bombardment for high-priced drugs from the
U.S. pharmaceutical cartel.
Cuba is the single standout in the entire world for a health system that
most closely resembles this model and then goes even further. Cuban
society has devoted decades to building a health care system on the
island which is the envy of Latin America in terms of doctors per
capita, low infant mortality, infectious disease preventive care and
general wellbeing – all without a profit motive. Displaying a level of
compassion for human beings not visible in the capitalist world,
hundreds of doctors from Cuba have participated in U.N.-organized
campaigns to battle the Ebola virus outbreaks of west Africa, putting
their own lives on the line. Which other countries will rise to this
level as the COVID-19 pandemic develops?
Lightning-speed spread of disease, continent to continent
Worrying many governments is the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic
developing within their own countries if not around the world. In the
modern era typified by global businesses, extensive international
recreational travel, and military deployments of tens of thousands of
troops by dozens of countries, the reality of extremely rapid
international viral transmissions is present. While many countries
including the U.S. already have barred entrance to their airports to
Chinese nationals, sometimes on racist terms reminiscent of the “yellow
peril” rationale of earlier decades, attempts to block a virus at any
nation’s border is proving nearly impossible.
A case in point is an example documented by the New York Times in early
February of a British businessman who attended a conference in Singapore
where it is believed he contracted the coronavirus. From Asia the
individual flew to Geneva, Switzerland, and then travelled on to a ski
resort in France near the Swiss border. There he shared lodging with a
group of fellow Britons over a 4-day period before he and the others
returned to the U.K. In England eight cases of the coronavirus
subsequently were traced to this sequence of events.
The generalized unpreparedness and fear of world capitalist nations of
the spread of COVID-19 has been evidenced in assorted ways. Pakistan,
for example, outright refused to allow their own nationals who were
stranded in China from returning home. Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, the
Philippines, and the U.S. territory of Guam all refused to permit a
luxury liner that had visited Hong Kong from docking in their ports,
even though there was no evidence at the time of an infestation on
board. There apparently is no doubt in the thinking of health officials
internationally that the example and impact of the viral infection in
China could readily happen anywhere, particularly in their own countries.
In the United States warning flags are being raised as well as to the
inadequate preparedness for a potential pandemic reaching American
shores. Tom Inglesby, Director of the Center for Health Security at the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and writing in Foreign
Affairs, urged preparation for just such a large outbreak. His urgent
call included global cooperation and financing of rapid vaccine
development, manufacture and international distribution, mass production
of test kits and a mobilization of labs that can accurately test for the
virus as well as strengthening of hospital infection control procedures
and re-training of health workers. Inglesby also included an immediate
focus on establishing a reliable supply of masks, gowns, and gloves –
items he acknowledges are present in woefully inadequate quantities.
Just as the United States is unprepared for a major outbreak, the entire
international order of capitalist nations is as well. As revolutionary
biologist Dr. Rob Wallace stated recently, if COVID-19 “is indeed the
BIG BUG, and it is not clear yet if that’s the case, there is almost
nothing to be done at this point. All we can do is batten down the
public health hatches and hope the virus kills only a small part of the
world’s population instead of 90%. Clearly, humanity shouldn’t start
reacting to a pandemic when it’s already underway. It’s a total
dereliction of any notion or forward-thinking theory or practice.”
Growing national and international economic impact
In addition to the human tragedy widely unfolding, the domestic economy
of China is taking major hits. The quarantines and lockdowns across
Hubei province are preventing business-related travel as well as the
movement of goods and workers. Areas where there has been infection, or
the possibility of exposures have kept people in their homes.
Restaurants, amusements, shopping malls, transport providers and
virtually most other establishments are experiencing a major negative
impact.
In the international markets, the spread of the virus is generating an
economic contagion as well. China is the world’s largest manufacturer,
and because of this role the entire world supply chain is being
impacted, often in complex ways. With the globalization of capitalism
many international companies are doubly affected, first by reduction of
products being made for them in China where wages are lower, and then by
reduced sales of finished goods to the up-to-now bourgeoning Chinese
domestic markets.
China’s exports range from parts and finished goods to the world’s
electronics sector, to every sort of part for the global motor industry,
including assembled BMWs, to household furnishings and medical supplies,
deliveries for all of which have been largely suspended. Raw materials
purchased overseas by China are being place on hold as well causing
additional disruption. Machine tool and construction equipment orders
are significantly lagging. Oceanic transport has been stifled and air
travel to and from China has been severely curtailed, with flights
canceled by Delta, United, Lufthansa and British Airways. Economists are
increasingly pointing to possible Eurozone and Japanese recessions
together with declining economies elsewhere as a result. The U.S. casino
capitalist stock market has taken its greatest hit since the Great
Depression of 2008.
Somehow seeing a silver lining in the overall dismal cloud of news, U.S.
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross pontificated: “So I don’t want to
talk about a victory lap over a very unfortunate, very malignant
disease… But the fact is, it does give businesses yet another thing to
consider when they go through their review of their supply chain… On top
of all the other things, you had SARS, you had the African swine virus
there, now you have this… It’s another risk factor that people need to
take into account. So I think it will help to accelerate the return of
jobs to North America. Some to the U.S., probably some to Mexico as well.”
The unpredictable future
The proverbial chickens have come home to roost. The international
capitalist system has registered only minimal efforts to solve the
problem of infectious viral diseases. In this century alone the planet
has encountered over two dozen new strains and “near nothing real was
done about any of them,” quoting Dr. Rob Wallace once more. “Authorities
spent a sigh of relief upon each’s reversal and immediately took the
next roll of dice, risking snake eyes of maximum virulence and
transmissibility.”
How long it will take to bring the current near pandemic to a halt is
the major social, political and economic question being posed. It is
doubtful that capitalism will amass and spend the resources to once and
for all tame this terrible contagions. Indeed, the Trump administration
cut funding for pandemics like COVID-19 to the tune of $15 billion!
Regardless of cost the working classes of all countries expect their
governments to muster necessary resources to solve the problem whenever
it occurs. The right to be free from infectious diseases is a prime
expectation of all humanity. When governments fail in this critical
arena their excuses no longer find receptive ears. Anger, voiced
rightful indignation, and civil outbursts begin to occur. How this
pandemic will play out amidst the growing international radicalization
is a question on the table for all of us.
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March 14, 2020 in Uncategorized.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”
― Neil DeGrasse Tyson
