Covid: “the moon is not a hamster”

Submitted by AWL on 18 January, 2022 - 5:08 Author: Martin Thomas
Chicago school students

As the Harvard University scientist Bill Hanage tweeted in early January: “Omicron is not endemic [settled into being a worrisome but manageable background factor] right now in much the same way that the moon is not a hamster”.

On 12 January Chicago teachers returned to in-person work, after a week in which they had insisted on a temporary online model in response to an Omicron surge, but the city had barred them from logging in.

With the USA’s vax rate lower than Europe’s, Covid death rates in Illinois in mid-January 2022 are comparable to the early 2020 peak and to all but the very worst of the peak in late 2020 and early 2021. (In Britain, though cases have rocketed, Covid deaths in the Omicron surge have kept under one-fifth of the early-2021 high).

The union had already won some measures back in February 2021, including safety committees with a union majority in all school buildings and weekly testing. New measures now won provide for improved masks (KN95), agreed criteria for temporary flip to online (30% of staff off sick or 40% of students self-isolating! the city wanted higher thresholds), and pay boosts for supply staff.

Schools will also be using saliva tests pioneered by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which are not as quick with results as lateral flow tests but are more easily administered.

The union vote to return to in-person work was quite close, and union leaders say they will continue to press for more. On 14 January, Chicago school students organised through the Chi-Rads network walked out of school midday to protest at the Chicago Public Schools office for more say for students in Covid-safety talks.

French teachers struck on 13 January over Covid safety, emphasising that their demand was for “safety measures in schools and educational establishments so that they are open as much as possible”.

The unions reported turnout as 75% in primary schools, 62% in middle schools and general and technological high schools, and more than 50% in vocational high schools. In France, where strikes are often minority actions, that is high. Teachers will strike again on 27 January over pay.

The French unions’ demands include more and better masks, more testing, better ventilation, air purifiers.

In Australia, Covid rates were low by world standards until recently, but with Omicron cases have rocketed and death rates are currently ten times any previous peak, though still low by European standards. Australia’s unions are campaigning for provision of free Rapid Antigen (lateral-flow) tests, improved masks, fixing close contact definitions and restoring support for businesses and workers; and for new risk assessments in all workplaces, for Omicron, in consultation with workers’ reps.

A meat-processing firm in South Australia, Teys, has demanded that even workers who have tested Covid-positive return to the workplace. In many countries, meat-processing factories have been among the workplaces spreading the virus most widely.

World total case counts are about 3.5 times their previous peak in early 2021. Death rates are rising above their April 2020 peak, and about half the early-2021 high. (Case counts vary hugely according to testing policy as well as infection rates. Death rates are undercounted in many countries: The Economist magazine, working from excess-deaths data, estimates for example that the real Covid death count in China has been about 160 times the official figure). In Britain, probably the Omicron surge is ebbing. Case counts are clearly down, and a fall in hospital admissions has followed, tentatively but quicker than I expected. Figures from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, the Netherlands, and Norway, all countries where Omicron hit early but there was high partial immunity (in Africa much more from previous infections than from vaccinations), suggest the ebb will continue.

Limited covid-distancing curbs, of the sort that can be sustained less damagingly and longer than full lockdown, still make sense to push the curve down quicker. And the longer-term, structural, social measures which help virus control (and which the Tories have avoided even when they have spent huge sums on business support and mass testing, and even when they have locked down) remain urgent. Omicron will not be the last variant.

• Full isolation and sick pay for all

• Boost NHS pay; requisition private hospitals and staff to integrate them into the NHS; bring NHS logistics and supply back into the public sector

• Take social care into the public sector, with staff on NHS-level pay and conditions

• Workers’ control of workplace safety; upgrade ventilation

• A crash housing programme to reduce overcrowding

• Requisition Big Pharma, and in the first place its patents and technical know-how, to enable rapid worldwide production and distribution of vaccines for all.

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