U.S. travel numbers are set to hit a record high this week. More than 5.3 million Americans will fly and more than 55 million Americans will drive at least 50 miles to visit family for Thanksgiving. Misled by the government and media, the vast majority of these people did not realize that their travels coincided with another wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and would contribute to the spread of new waves of new variants, and Potential spread of more new variants. SARS-CoV-2.
The latest wastewater monitoring data from Biobot Analytics shows a 28% increase in COVID-19 transmission in the United States over the past month. Tulane University oncologist Dr. Mike Hoerger used the data to estimate that about 762,000 Americans are now infected with COVID-19 every day, with 5.3 million currently infected. It is expected that by Christmas, there will be about 1.3 million new cases every day in the United States, with the number of infections reaching 8.9 million.
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Dr. Hoerger noted that “the virus is spreading more today than it has on 60% of the days during the pandemic,” and “we are clearly in the eighth wave of COVID-19 in the United States.”
Many European countries, including the Nordic and Baltic states, as well as Poland and the Czech Republic, have experienced similar surges in wastewater or test positivity rates.
The latest wave is driven by the EG.5.1 omicron subvariant (nicknamed “Eris” by variant trackers) as well as other descendants of the HV.1 subvariant in the United States and global XBB recombinant variants.
At the same time, scientists warn that the omicron subvariant BA.2.86 (nicknamed “Pirola”) is becoming increasingly dominant globally, especially its descendant JN.1. Over the past week, multiple variant trackers have drawn attention to the rapid rise of JN.1, which they predict will become globally dominant in the coming weeks and months.
On November 17, well-known variant tracker JP Weiland issue a statement Regarding BA.2.86 and JN.1, it is stated: “The emergence of BA.2.86 represents the largest evolutionary leap since the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in 2019.” After stating that JN.1 contains mutations “laboratory studies have shown that they are associated with BA. 2.86,” he cautioned that “changes in symptom profile or severity cannot be ruled out.” “Additional mutations are expected to arise in JN.1, which would further increase its transmissibility,” he concluded.
In other words, the JN.1 variant is highly immune evasive and is rapidly becoming dominant and is expected to soon become more contagious and potentially more pathogenic than previous variants. This only became apparent after hospitals and morgues began to fill up.
While official COVID-19 death and hospitalization rates have declined in the last year in the United States and around the world, they remain stubbornly high, suggesting that the virus is nothing like the flu or the common cold.
Health expert Gregory Travis recently noted that there were officially 5,305 COVID-19 deaths in the United States in October 2023, compared with 145 flu deaths in the same month. past 12 months Officially, 85,200 people have died from COVID-19.
More than 1.3 million people have died nationwide, while the official COVID-19 death toll is about 1.15 million, according to Travis’ tally of U.S. excess disease mortality during the pandemic, much of which is attributed to COVID-19. .
worldwide, economist The excess mortality rate is estimated at 27.4 million, about four times the official figure of 7 million, and currently stands at 5,240 people per day.
In addition to its enormous burden of killing hundreds of millions of grieving loved ones, the pandemic has triggered the largest wave of concentrated morbidity in human history. The “mass-disabling event” associated with persistent symptoms known as “long COVID-19” affects the brain, heart, lungs, kidneys and nearly every other organ in the body and continues with each new wave of infections and expand. Hundreds of millions of people around the world are now believed to have symptomatic long-term COVID-19.
in a recent interview world socialist websiteImmunologist Dr. Amy Proal, one of the world’s leading experts on COVID-19 persistence, summarizes scientific findings on viral persistence showing that SARS-CoV-2 can persist in countless body tissues, even when asymptomatic The same is true after infection. When summarizing and condemning this policy in the face of the epidemic, he said:
We’re inserting viral RNA into children’s tissues from a very young age, and as the virus continues to mutate, people become infected several times a year, and as you said, we find that reinfection seems to increase the risk of developing chronic symptoms. possibility. This is absolutely unsustainable and a complete crisis.
All the capitalist governments and corporate media in the world have deliberately covered up, downplayed and distorted the entire objective reality of this pandemic. They have instead spread false information to make people believe that Covid-19 has become harmless and the pandemic is harmless. Harmful. Exceed.
The campaign is spearheaded by the Biden administration in the United States. Biden bluntly stated in September 2022 that “the epidemic is over.” In May 2023, the United States ended its public health emergency declaration for COVID-19, resulting in the complete collapse of the U.S. pandemic surveillance system.
Not only is the pandemic still ongoing, but policies that abandon mitigation measures and succumb to the coronavirus are themselves accelerating the rate at which the virus evolves, increasing the danger that the pandemic could take an even more deadly turn in the months and years to come.
The response of the capitalist ruling class to the epidemic constitutes an unprecedented large-scale social crime. Mass infections caused by novel neurotropic viruses mark a fundamental turning point in modern history, with ruling elites declaring war on the working class and society at large. They have stripped workers of all the social gains achieved in more than a century of struggle, ruthlessly prioritizing profits over minimal public health measures.
A group of principled scientists known as the John Snow Project (including Dr. Proal, Satoshi Akima, Christos Argyropoulos, David Berger, Malgorzata Gasperowicz, Lidia Morawska, and others) recently commented on this important issue during the pandemic. Scale social retreat noted:
The informal alliance between employers and dangerous pathogens that emerged in early 2020 as a victor in the battle against public health was greatly strengthened and is on the verge of erasing any objections to this and future pandemics.
The catalyst for this “unofficial alliance” was New York TimesIts author, Thomas Friedman, coined the mantra of the ruling elite in March 2020: “The cure cannot be worse than the disease,” meaning that public health cannot be allowed to affect private profits. The newspaper has continually condemned China’s “zero-COVID” elimination policy, which saved millions of lives in the first three years of the pandemic.
In an article published on Tuesday, era reiterate these slanders and state:
China successfully stemmed the tide with a “zero COVID” policy, but protests against its atrocities were so intense that President Xi Jinping abruptly abandoned the policy in November 2022. The floodgates opened: Within weeks, more than 1 billion Chinese had signed up for omicron, resulting in more than a million deaths.
With these statements, era Make it clear that taking action to stop the spread of COVID-19 is cruel and accepting that millions of people will die is normal. The impact is far-reaching and reflects the current indifference to human life in ruling circles.
The same ruling class has implemented policies that have led to the needless deaths of more than 1.3 million Americans from COVID-19 and are directly responsible for the deaths of more than 400,000 young Ukrainians in the brutal proxy war between the United States and NATO. Russia’s and Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has so far killed more than 13,500 civilians, mostly women and children.
While sending more than $100 billion worth of U.S.-made bombs, missiles, tanks, drones and other military equipment to the far-right governments of Ukraine and Israel, the Biden administration has also cut off all funding and financial assistance to respond to the epidemic. More than 10 million Americans have lost public insurance Medicaid, and millions more are relying on food pantries to get them through the winter.
The U.S. ruling class’s murderous response to the pandemic, preceded by decades of imperialist war and deepening social inequality, produced a massive, albeit still unconscious, radicalization among the international working class. These pent-up social tensions were now brought to the surface by the Gaza genocide, which sparked perhaps the largest global anti-war movement in history.
It is vital that this growing mass movement moves in an anti-capitalist and socialist direction, an important component of which is the struggle for widespread public health expansion around the world.
The John Snow Project points out in its article that elimination strategies to stop the pandemic on a global scale are now more feasible than ever. By implementing all available public health measures, they stressed: “Any country with the necessary resources (or access to them) can achieve full containment within months.”
The only political tendency fighting for this strategy of global annihilation and for the revolutionary socialist program to prevent the slide into barbarism and the Third World War is the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and its national branches, parties. Socialists for Equality. The fundamental task is to build this party as the vanguard of the working class and prepare it for future revolutionary struggles.
(Article originally published in English on November 21, 2023)