By John Pickard
In the coming months, every political leader around the world will be judged by how they handle the effect of the coronavirus pandemic in their own countries, and none more so than Donald Trump. So far, the ‘leader of the free world’ has demonstrated only his ignorance, arrogance and acres of brass neck. But it will be his undoing in the long run.
Donald Trump’s address to the nation, in which he banned all inward travel to the USA from the European Union (excluding Ireland the UK, for some inexplicable reason) took everyone by surprise, not least the governments of the EU. This move, the first such travel ban since the Second World War, was meant to calm the nerves of the American public, but it did the exact opposite, leading to a crash on Wall Street bigger for one day than anything since 1987. As one wag put it, it was the most expensive speech ever by a president.
No-one know what Trump will do next
This is the man who told the US public just a few days ago to “stay calm…this will go away”. Nor is it that long ago that he referred to the coronavirus as a “hoax” and part of a conspiracy to undermine his run for re-election this year. Faced with the biggest public health crisis in a hundred years, the USA has a commander-in-chief who is completely unpredictable. Put simply, no-one knows, least of all administration officials, what he is going to do or say next. From playing the issue down, he now thinks that some grandstanding gesture and labelling the problem as a “foreign virus” is going to satisfy his public. It won’t.
Serious health officials in the USA say that millions are going to be infected with the virus. Even on the basis of, say, a 2 per cent fatality rate, it means up to two million deaths and many of these will fill up the hospitals before death, blocking the health system up completely.
Meantime, Trump’s administration is doing everything wrong. The travel ban, according the World Health Organisation, may actually be counter-productive, because it stifles the flow of medicines and health equipment and “may divert resources from other interventions.”
US level of testing is woefully inadequate
The US Congress has voted for a $8.5bn package of emergency measures to tackle the outbreak, but two weeks ago he was arguing that this was too high and it was three times the amount he was asking for.
The most glaring omission of the US system is its failure to ramp up the production and use of testing facilities. Epidemiologists argue that the single most important tool in monitoring and therefore managing the epidemic is testing, but the US capacity to do that is woefully weak. The USA, as of Thursday, had only tested 6,000 people out of a population of over 320 million. In contrast, the Netherlands, with only 17m people, is testing that many every single day. South Korea, with 51m people, is testing 10,000 every day. The shortage of testing kits is entirely down to years of neglect by federal governments in an age of generalised austerity.
The US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) was once a world-leader in its technological and administrative systems. No longer. Years of austerity have bled it dry. Between 2010 and 2019, the CDC’s funding was cut by 10 per cent in real terms, according to figures from the Trust for America’s Health (TfAH). Until Congress passed its emergency funding, the director of TfAH reckoned that “most states did not have enough money to continue to fund a significant surge in capacity beyond a relatively brief period.”
Fully-functioning health system
Zeke Emmanuel, professor of health-care management at the University of Pennsylvania, outlined the problem: “one of the things we learnt from Ebola is that you have to have a fully functioning health system going into a crisis, you can’t rely on one springing up in the middle of a rapidly-moving disease…it is becoming clear to us now what happens when you don’t have a fully-functioning CDC.” (Financial Times, March 13).
Another health expert, Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, estimated that the USA is five weeks behind where it should be at this point in the pandemic. What is particularly galling to US health professionals is that the biggest obstacle they face in educating the public and offering advice in what best to do is the President himself, whose offerings on Twitter and in press briefings are leaving the experts shaking their heads or holding their heads in their hands.
Only phone if you think you’re dying
What is happening in the USA is mirrored exactly in Britain, where Boris Johnson may as well be issuing wartime posters saying “Keep Calm and Carry On”. The British government has given up any pretence at testing at all – the official policy is to leave it to the general public to self-diagnose and, if necessary, to self-quarantine. What they really mean to say is, “You won’t get a test, so don’t ask. Oh, and you only need to phone for help if you think you’re dying.”
What is true of the American CDC is a hundred times more true of the NHS. According to figures from the OECD, the UK has one of the lowest figures for the number of hospital beds per 1000 of population. Look at the data: Japan – 13.0, Korea – 12.2, Germany – 8.0, Austria – 7.3, Hungary – 7.0, Czech Republic – 6.6, Poland – 6.6, France – 5.9, Belgium – 5.6, China – 4.3, Australia – 3.8, Norway – 3.6, Portugal – 3.4, Netherlands – 3.3, Italy- 3.2, Spain – 3.0, USA – 2.7. Britain is among the lowest per 1000 population, at 2.54.
Ten years of the most vicious austerity has drive the NHS to the edge of collapse. It has not been helped by the policy of PFI construction, so beloved of the Blair/Brown ‘New Labour’ period, which has replaced older hospitals with newer ones with fewer beds at astronomical cost to the NHS. The Blair/Brown policy of introducing the ‘market’ into the NHS and allowing creeping privatisation has been picked up on an even greater scale by the Tories and Lib-Dems from 2010 onwards.
Long-suffering NHS patients and staff
The payments for PFI hospitals and the ongoing parasitism of the private sector have created a river of money flowing out of the NHS week-in and week-out. The cost has been carried by patients and the long-suffering, over-worked and under-paid NHS staff. Labour should demand that this river of money is dammed now and PFI contracts are cancelled and all privatised services brought back in-house.
We must be clear about this issue. The coronavirus pandemic might be the most serious challenge faced since world war and is certainly the most significant public health crisis in a century. Here in the UK, it will give the NHS its most serious challenge in its entire history. But it is not an issue that is ‘apart’ or ‘above’ politics. Whatever the origins of the virus, the development of a pandemic and the mismanagement of it are tokens of the inability of capitalism to solve the problems of life for the big majority of the population. It is a part of the generalised crisis of capitalism.
Labour must not let the Tories get away with the pretence that “we’re all in this together”. They must not be allowed to forget that they have run the NHS down. If the health service is on its knees and in danger of being overwhelmed, if the adult social care system is falling apart – it is the responsibility of Tory austerity in the last ten years.
Guarantees must be put in place
If this is a public emergency – and that is how it is shaping up to be – then Labour must demand that it is treated as a public emergency and that emergency measures are enacted. There must be no question, under any circumstances, that working people are financially penalised for quarantine or illness. Guarantees must be put in place in relation to pay, rents, mortgage and utility payments, free school meals, welfare benefits and other means, to make sure that the livelihoods of all are maintained.
It should increase the resolve of Labour activists to fight for genuine socialist measures that would benefit the whole of the population and not a vanishingly small minority. The public ownership of the main levers of the economy, including the entire pharmaceutical and health sectors, is a necessary pre-requisite to tackling public health properly. Faced with the Covid-19 crisis, we should commit ourselves even more firmly to a socialist programme and a new social system.
If in the end, the Tories fail to introduce policies that protect the lives and securities of the majority of the population, then millions, including many who voted for them three months ago, will turn against them. December last year seems a long way off. Then, the Tories were ringing the bells. By December this year, they will be wringing their hands.
March 13, 2020
