https://themilitant.com/2020/02/15/coronavirus-shows-need-for-revolution-in-health-care/
Coronavirus shows need for revolution in health care
article
BY ROY LANDERSEN
Vol. 84/No. 7
February 24, 2020
When the first cases of acute pneumonia caused by the new coronavirus
were diagnosed last December in Wuhan, China, government authorities
there downplayed
the development. Now the capitalist rulers worldwide are scrambling
about what to do with an epidemic that has taken over 1,100 lives, worse
than the SARS
outbreak in China 17 years ago.
While the fatality rate is less than half that of severe acute
respiratory syndrome, the coronavirus has a far greater number of
infections — over 44,000
as of Feb. 12. Active carriers of the virus have now been found in two
dozen countries.
Beijing initially tried to minimize and cover up what was happening.
They sent a government health official to Wuhan who told people the
disease was “preventable
and controllable.” Then that person caught it himself and became a
symbol of government lying and incompetence.
Provincial bureaucrats in Wuhan, unwilling to take decisive action
without clear directives from Beijing, allowed the viral outbreak to spread.
Accepting Beijing’s initial reassurances that things were under control,
officials of the World Health Organization waited a month before issuing
an international
health emergency alert Jan. 30. By then the virus had spread well beyond
China.
Ignoring the mounting human toll, the capitalist business press in the
U.S. and elsewhere focused their attention on the threat to stock market
prices
and trading profits.
One of the first individuals in China to sound the alarm was Dr. Li
Wenliang. He raised with colleagues online seeing a strange new
pneumonia-causing virus
that required special precautions. Li was reprimanded by his hospital
bosses and taken away by the police, who forced him and some others to
sign confessions
and pledge to stop spreading “rumors.” But it was the disease that was
spreading.
When Li got the virus and died, it led to an explosion of anger and
protests. Government censors were overwhelmed by online calls for
freedom of speech
and an end to state censorship.
As the scope of the disease became clearer, the Chinese rulers undertook
a rapid and dramatic shift. An unprecedented quarantine lockdown was
imposed on
Wuhan and the surrounding Hubei province. The Lunar New Year holiday was
extended and a large swathe of production and distribution in the
world’s second
largest economy was shut down.
The shutdown of much of China’s economy threatens to cut into global
economic growth. Chinese tourism abroad has dried up and many Chinese
students have
been blocked from returning to educational institutions overseas. Many
governments worldwide also imposed quarantine steps, such as cutting all
travel
links to China. The rulers in Russia and North Korea virtually shut down
their borders with China.
Fighting disease a social question
This progression has stirred outrage and debate in China and across the
world about how to deal with such major public health crises.
There is a shining example of what is possible — the volunteer “army of
white coats,” in the words of Cuba’s communist leader, Fidel Castro, in
October
2014 — the doctors and nurses who, with courage and discipline, extended
their professional experience and working-class solidarity to
successfully help
lead the battle that eradicated Ebola in West Africa by mid-2015.
Because of the social conditions in Africa, a result of decades of
oppressive colonial rule, that outbreak’s 28,652 cases resulted in some
11,325 deaths.
The death rate in China today is far less.
This example of what human beings are capable of when science and
culture are wielded by a revolutionary people in power is described in
detail in
Red Zone: Cuba and the Battle Against Ebola in West Africa.
A majority of the viral infections outside China have been among the
3,700 crew and passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, forced to
sit off the
Japanese port of Yokohama. New cases keep extending the time those in
contact with these individuals are being kept aboard. Those infected
with the virus
are rushed to specialized hospitals on shore, while the rest have to sit
on the boat and wait their turn.
Another cruise ship — the Westerdam, with more than 2,000 aboard — is
roaming the South China Sea with no government allowing it to dock,
although there
are no confirmed cases of the virus on board.
Most of the deaths have been in Wuhan, a port hub of 11 million people
on the Yangtze River, and in that region. The quarantine zone around
Wuhan was extended
to encircle up to 60 million people. The lockdown in major cities, towns
and villages confined many in their homes. They get by with food
delivered by
messengers who carry notes showing they don’t have a temperature.
Despite Beijing’s goal to become a technology superpower, there are less
than two doctors for every 1,000 people in China. In the imperialist
U.S. there
are 2.6 per 1,000, largely deployed in the big cities. In sharp
contrast, there are nine doctors per 1,000 in revolutionary Cuba, one of
the highest ratios
in the world.
Health system overwhelmed
“The hospital systems have been completely overwhelmed by the number of
people who have been seeking care,” Gabriel Leung, dean of the medical
school at
the University of Hong Kong, told the Feb. 9 Financial Times, describing
long lines and overcrowded emergency rooms in China.
In a widely publicized move, the Chinese government deployed soldiers,
using resources from its state-linked construction companies, to build
two new hospitals
with some 2,600 beds in a couple weeks in Wuhan. But this is far from
sufficient. “There are too many patients, far too many of them,” Wang
Jing, a nurse
at Wuhan Union Hospital West Campus, one of the facilities designated
for coronavirus patients, told the Times. “And the demand for beds far
outstrips
supply.”
Concerned about the impact of the unprecedented shutdown of much of
China’s already slowing capitalist economy, the state bureaucracy has
shifted gears
again. President Xi Jinping has reappeared — after virtually dropping
out of sight for weeks — to warn top officials to refrain from “more
restrictive
measures” and to get the factories working again. And he ordered the
state media to focus on “economic recovery.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry appealed to foreign governments Feb. 11 to
lift their travel restrictions, pleading this was needed for the health
of the
global economy (whatever it might mean to the health of the people).
Worried about the combined health and economic crisis fueling domestic
instability,
the Chinese government now seeks to downplay the disease again and
deflect blame from themselves by firing a range of provincial officials.
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“Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen
yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence
as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell
him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who
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incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence what
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― Sam Harris,
