A school email perfectly demonstrates the government’s shambolic handling of coronavirus
Eliza Egret, The Canary, Nov 3 2020
A leaked email shown to The Canary clearly demonstrates how, by keeping schools open, the government is spectacularly failing to protect us from coronavirus (COVID-19). The email was sent by a school in Cornwall on Oct 31, and was given to the parents of children who take a school bus. It told the parents that a child who takes the bus tested positive for the virus on Oct 24. But the school was only informed on Oct 30, and parents were told on Oct 31. That’s a whole week after the child tested positive for the virus. The email said:
we need to inform you that someone on the … coach tested positive for Covid 19 last Saturday and we know that this person was on the bus on Monday 19th October when they would have been infectious. Unfortunately, it took some time for this information to get to us, but we are passing this onto you immediately so that you are aware.
This period fell within half-term, with potentially infected children enjoying a week off, seeing family and friends, or even going on holiday after being exposed to the virus. Therefore, they could have been unknowingly transmitting the virus to others for days. On 31 October, they were told to self-isolate, but only for a couple more days:
We ask that those students who are not displaying any symptoms (loss of taste or smell, raised temperature, new and persistent dry cough) should return to school on Tuesday 3rd November when the 14 day isolation period is over.
This letter perfectly shows why coronavirus rates are skyrocketing in the UK. It also shows just how incompetent the government’s system is. It’s unclear who was to blame for the long delay in giving parents the vital information they needed: whether it was the infected child’s parents, the local authority, or Serco’s Test and Trace system itself, which should contact those infected with instructions on what to do next. But it does show, yet again, that the system is broken. As the government tries to keep capitalism going as normal, by keeping kids in schools and therefore keeping people working– it is prioritising the economy over lives as usual. As we prepare to go into a second national lockdown, it is nonsensical that schools and universities will remain open, only for the virus to spread in the classrooms and lecture theatres, and on school buses. The National Education Union (NEU) stated that:
NEU analysis of [Office for National Statistics] figures shows that virus levels are now 9 times higher amongst primary pupils and an astonishing 50 times higher amongst secondary pupils.
One angry parent tweeted:
Meanwhile, others are worried about the school cleaners and teachers who have no choice but to go into work:
https://twitter.com/SocialistGeek/status/1323185657838227456
The NEU is calling on everyone to contact their MPs, demanding that schools close. It says:
The new lockdown rules are just the latest in a long line of failings by the Tories. The government is likely to face court over its disgraceful Test and Trace system. And let’s not forget that its original plan, way back in March, was to let the virus “move through the community.“ It even removed coronavirus’s classification as a high consequence infectious disease. By partially locking down the country for a month, the government is just paying lip service to scientists and critics. To the more cynical among us, it seems that herd immunity is still its unspoken method of combating the virus.
National Education Union belatedly begs Johnson government to close UK schools during lockdown
Robert Stevens, WSWS, Nov 3 2020
The National Education Union, the UK’s largest teaching union, has called for a temporary closure of schools. Johnson continues to insist that all nurseries, schools, further and higher education must remain open during the lockdown. A few hours before Johnson’s widely-trailed announcement last Saturday, the NEU put out a press release. The NEU’s Joint General Secretary Kevin Courtney advised the Tories:
Close schools and colleges as part of national lockdown. Ignoring the role of schools and colleges in the spread of the virus is likely to lead to the need for even longer lockdowns in future. It is clear from Office for National Statistics data that schools are an engine for virus transmission. It would be self-defeating for the government to impose a national lockdown, whilst ignoring the role of schools as a major contributor to the spread of the virus.
Virus levels are 9 times higher amongst primary pupils and an astonishing 50 times higher amongst secondary pupils. To put that level of infection into context, there are 8.89m pupils in 24,360 schools in England. The number of pupils in state-funded primary schools is 4.71m, with a 1% infection rate equating to 47.1k with the virus among that age group. A 2% infection rate among the 3.41m pupils in state-funded secondary schools means another 68.2k children are infected. This means that in English primaries and secondary schools total infections are over 115k. In the London borough of Havering, parents of a child at one school were informed Sunday:
Over 50 schools have been affected by the impact of the virus and many more than once.
This is the majority of schools in the borough with a population of nearly 260k. The NEU call has nothing to do with organising a genuine fight aimed at keeping schools closed in the middle of a pandemic. The union bureaucracy fears above all that it will no longer able to control the disaffection that has building for months among teachers and other education staff opposed to being railroaded to work in unsafe schools. An indication of the strength of feeling is the massive response to the NEU’s petition campaign calling for school closures, launched along with its press release. The petition was signed by 150k teachers and support staff in less than 48 hours. Another petition created Sep 22 demands, “Reclose schools and colleges due to increase in COVID-19 cases,” aiming “To protect teachers and pupils and their families,” passed 334k signatories on Monday. The other main teaching unions, NASUWT (313,565 members), National Association of Head Teachers, and the Association of School and College Leaders, continue to back the government keeping schools open, with the caveat that there should be a few safety measures in place. Teachers and parents have taken to social media to vent their anger. One teacher posted a Twitter comment Saturday:
I am a member of @NASUWT and I have zero faith in them or any other union as they have proven to be completely ineffective against our ridiculous government.
The unions have been aware since the start that schools are an “engine for virus transmission” and that the government has ignored every request to make schools safe. This exposes the fraud of the NEU campaign, which is opposed to mobilising the collective strength of its more than half a million members. It instead centres on “calling for an amendment in Parliament to the lockdown bill to include schools and colleges.” Those signing up to the NEU’s petition are invited as the next step to write to their MPs, the government and the Labour Party opposition, who both insist that schools remain open! The NEU continue their treacherous role in propping up the government, albeit with a change in rhetoric. The Tories could never have enforced their schools reopening plan, to get parents back into workplaces as the basis to reopen the wider economy, had it not been for the role of the education unions. As the pandemic hit, opposition among millions to schools staying open forced their closure even before the national lockdown was imposed Mar 23. In May, the NUE, in line with government moves to lift the lockdown, wrote:
We want to begin to reopen schools and colleges as soon as we can.
But the union had to respond to teachers and staff, who knew schools were unsafe. The NEU called for “Five tests for Government before schools can re-open,” which included the R rate being below 1, and testing, track and trace being fully operational. These conditions were all junked. The NEU has been forced to call for school closures not only as a result of the pressure of their own members, but due to the fight waged by the Educators Rank-and File-Safety Committee and campaigns waged by parents and teachers. The committee, founded in September and initiated by the Socialist Equality Party, has given a political voice for teachers, parents and students who are demanding the closure of unsafe schools. Educators and parents cannot entrust the trade unions with their fate and lives of their families. All non-essential production must cease during lockdown. Children of key workers and vulnerable children remaining in schools during this period must be provided with full protection, with the necessary levels of social distancing imposed. Parents must receive full wage replacement while they care for their children. Poorer families must be given special support and receive high-quality equipment for digital learning. The Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee calls for teachers to act immediately to halt the government’s murderous herd immunity policies of keeping schools open. Emergency meetings must be called in all primary and secondary schools. These must establish rank and file safety committees, independent of the unions, to ensure for the immediate closure of schools. Educators must prepare a national strike, organised through rank and file initiatives, in opposition to the government’s policy.
Europe’s COVID-19 pandemic spirals out of control
Alex Lantier, WSWS, Nov 3 2020
Yesterday, teachers walked out of classes in dozens of schools across France as students returned from holidays to the first classes since Macron announced a new lockdown. It has not taken long for the political fraud of the lockdowns now being declared by governments across Europe to become apparent to broad layers of youth and working people. Announcing the lockdown last week, Macron said elementary and middle school students would continue attending school so their parents could continue working. As the health ministry estimated that two-thirds of transmission clusters are at school or work, Macron pledged that reinforced security protocols would limit the spread of the virus. This pledge was worthless. Current security protocols insist that social distancing be implemented only “to the extent that it is possible,” and that it is “not required for students in the same class or year level.” And so, as a quarter million new cases of COVID-19 are found each day in Europe, with 52,518 in France, 22,253 in Italy, 21,926 in Switzerland, 18,950 in Britain, 18,340 in Spain, 15,578 in Poland and 13,125 in Germany—teachers and students are still crammed 30 to a classroom in schools. Students in France are joining high school students in Greece and Poland who have launched mass school occupations and protests. Youth across Europe face a political struggle.
European governments are acting with contempt for the lives of the population. Even after Macron said that 400k Frenchmen could die of COVID-19 if emergency measures were not taken, Paris, London and Berlin all implemented lockdowns which, unlike lockdowns this spring, demand that children and non-essential workers keep going to school and work to be infected. France’s Scientific Council estimated Friday that such lockdowns cut COVID-19’s reproduction rate (R0) to only between 0.9 and 1.2, meaning the number of daily new cases will fall only very slowly, or even keep growing exponentially. Scientific Council member Simon Cauchemez warned:
There is great uncertainty on the effectiveness of the new, less stringent measures.
With France’s ventilator beds already half full with COVID-19 patients, Spain’s a quarter full, and the rest of Europe only a few weeks behind, a breakdown of the health system is looming. European governments’ pretensions to have handled the pandemic more intelligently than the Trump administration have been exposed as a cynical and deadly fraud. European heads of state did not, perhaps, act with quite the same crass arrogance of America’s billionaire real estate speculator president. They did not refuse to wear masks, compare COVID-19 to the flu, or boast after catching the virus of the exceptional quality of the medical care they received compared to that available to the overwhelming majority of workers in their countries.
Behind the appearance of competence, however, there was lying on a massive scale. Sweden’s “herd immunity” policy—letting the virus rip through the country, hoping the population would eventually become immune—led to a death rate nine times higher than neighboring Finland. Yet this policy was was adopted by all the European governments. Like officials across Europe, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell denied he was pursuing a herd immunity policy. Yet in a subsequently declassified Mar 14 email he sent to Finnish officials, Tegnell argued for “keeping schools open to reach herd immunity more quickly.” That is, like the Macron government today, he was advocating keeping schools open so that the virus would spread among teachers and students and then the broader working population. While Britain’s chief scientific advisor Sir Patrick Vallance said:
It’s not possible to stop everyone getting it, and it’s also not desirable.
Angela Merkel’s Interior Ministry secretly reported that the unchecked spread of the virus could cost 1m German lives in 2020. Yet “Mommy Merkel,” as the press markets her to the German people, went before the public and blandly predicted that 70% of the German population would become infected. The crisis of the pandemic cannot be resolved simply by removing Trump or another individual capitalist politician from office. The European governments all pursued essentially the same policy as Trump, but paid somewhat more attention to skillful political deceit. And today, around 2.5k people across Europe die of COVID-19 each day, 1k more than in North America. What compelled the adoption of lockdowns in Europe was the intervention of the working class. In March, a wave of wildcat strikes demanding a shelter-at-home policy in auto, steel and engineering plants across Italy, initially the worst-hit country, spread to Spain, France, Britain and beyond. Europe’s capitalist governments, on the other hand, tried to encourage as much complacency as possible, pushing for a premature return to work and to school even before the number of new cases had fallen to zero. The disastrous consequences of this policy are now apparent.
Workers and youth entering into struggle against Europe’s murderous COVID-19 policy should reject with contempt the argument that there is no money for a shelter-at-home policy, the only way to contain the virus and avert a meltdown of the hospital system. The EU adopted a €2t bank and corporate bailout scheme, and Britain a £645b bank bailout. There is, in fact, plenty of money to spend on ensuring that workers, the self-employed and small business owners can shelter at home while maintaining their incomes and livelihoods. The inability of governments in Europe, as in America, to act decisively to stop the pandemic reflects the bankruptcy of capitalism: such action would cut across the material interests of the ruling class. The EU governments, like Trump and the Democrats, intend for these resources to go to bail out the stock portfolios of the billionaires and boost the profits of big businesses, not to save lives. A slice of these funds was filtered through countless corporate works councils and foundations to union officials and their political allies so they would help implement back-to-work policies. And this fall, as the number of cases surged, public anger mounted and pressure grew on governments to implement lock-downs, the unions and their allies organized no action. Even yesterday, Spain’s “left populist” Podemos party, in a coalition government with the social democrats, rejected calls from Asturias regional authorities for a shelter-at-home policy.
The way forward for workers and youth against the pandemic is to form their own rank-and-file security committees in workplaces and schools, independent of the union bureaucracies, to monitor health and safety at work and prepare a broader struggle. Fighting a global failure of the capitalist system that threatens a catastrophic loss of life requires the mobilization of the collective industrial and social strength of the working class. The European sections of the IC4I have advanced the call for a European and international general strike. To prepare such an action, however, means to take up a political struggle for socialism. Only the impounding of the ill-gotten wealth of the super-rich and the struggle of the working class to take power and organize economic life on the basis of social need, rather than private profit, can avert a health catastrophe. In Europe, this means supporting the struggle of the working class to bring down the EU, take state power, and build the United Socialist States of Europe.
Teachers strike across France against first day of deadly school reopenings
Will Morrow, WSWS, Nov 3 2020
As schools reopened across France yesterday after the holidays, mass opposition among students and teachers at the Macron administration’s deadly school reopening policy is growing. Assemblies of teachers met at schools yesterday morning and resolved to strike against the lack of safe conditions to prevent the spread of the virus. Images are being widely shared online showing students crammed like sardines into hallways, classes and cafeterias. The government is reopening schools despite a second wave of the pandemic that its own scientific council has warned will likely be larger than the first, which killed more than 30k people in France and 200k across Europe. More than 37k people have now died from the virus in France, with another 416 deaths reported on Monday. Despite the government’s cynical claims that it is determined to protect students’ psychological well-being, the school reopening is driven by entirely different concerns: to ensure that parents can continue to work, and that the corporations can continue to obtain profits throughout the pandemic, regardless of how many lives are lost as a result.
A Twitter account reporting on opposition among teachers to the Macron government reported dozens of local strikes by teachers organised in assemblies at schools across France on Monday morning. At the Balzac de Mitry-Mory school, 24 teachers organised to strike at 8 am yesterday. At the Romain Rolland school in Clichy-sous-Bois near Paris, another 22 teachers voted to strike. In the Feyder school in Epinay-sur-Seine near Paris, 47 teachers voted by 100% to strike at 8 am. Classes were held for 60 students out of 1,600 enrolled. At the Berthelot school in Pantin, north of Paris, 28 teachers resolved to strike against the demand that they return to classes “as though nothing was happening.” At Bachelard school in Chelles, 20 staff lodged their “right to strike” with the direction due to unsafe conditions caused by the pandemic and “non-respect of the health protocol.” At the Jean Jaurès school in Clichy, teachers walked out, and the administration told families that the school may be forced to close. At Von Donghen school in Lagny, classes were cancelled after teachers threatened to strike. At the Flora Tristan school north of Paris, half of teachers supported a strike at 8:30 am At the Joliot-Curie school in Nanterre, teachers voted 53-3 for a strike at midday. At the Olympe de Gouges school in Noisy-le-Sec, over 30 teachers voted to strike in the morning. At the Eugène Hénaff school in Bagnolet, 18 teachers voted to strike. At the Alice Guy school in Lyon, the student body reportedly refused to enter classes, and there were reports of further strike action by teachers in Montpellier and Marseille, as well. Safety protocols inside schools are essentially non-existent. One teacher writing into Le Monde stated:
I feel humiliated. While in the media there are grandiloquent statements to support our teachers, in reality there is nothing. The health protocol is the same as before the holidays! The students continue to change between classes, with 30 crammed into a class. We have not received disposable masks since the beginning of the confinement! We have the right to only two masks on Sundays!
Existing protocols state that social distancing must be respected “to the extent that it is possible.” Given the overcrowding of schools, this simply means they do not apply anywhere. Parents are advised to “take the temperature of their children before they go to school” and to “keep them home” if they have a temperature of over 38 degrees. Since it is well known that many cases are asymptomatic or exhibit symptoms after they have already been contagious, this will do nothing to prevent the spread of the virus in schools. The protocols state that “social distancing is not required for students in the same group (class or year level) either in closed spaces or the exterior.” Students aged over six are being made to wear masks, contradicting the government’s earlier lies that young students were neither contagious nor in danger from the virus. Haydée Leblanc, a primary teacher in Abbeville, told France3:
It will be very difficult for them to stay six hours a day with a mask, while on the street, they don’t have to wear one. Then they will spend their time touching the mask! Before, we were told that wearing the mask for young children was counter-productive, because they could actually spread the virus faster with their hands. Apparently the doctrine has changed.
Noting that it was a public relations stunt, she stated:
It’s above all to add something to the health protocol, to reassure families.
The Macron administration is pursuing a policy that it knows will cause thousands of additional cases and deaths. Schools will act as vectors for the transmission of the virus, countless children will become infected, and will infect their family members and friends. The school reopening takes place as reports by the government’s own scientific advisory bodies make clear that the partial confinement of the population, while keeping non-essential business and schools, will not significantly cut the spread of the virus. The Pasteur Institute estimated that the partial confinement would bring the rate of reproduction of the virus to 0.9, with the “pessimistic scenario” that it would be brought down to only 1.2 by the government’s measures, meaning a continuing exponential spread of the virus. Children will also fall sick and die. Official claims that youth are not in danger from the virus are lies. French health authorities report that 170 people aged under 19 are currently hospitalised with COVID-19, of which 23 are in urgent reanimation care. The long-term health impacts of the virus on youth are still unknown.
France’s corrupt union bureaucracies are hostile to a struggle against school reopenings. They have been in continuous discussions with the Macron administration on its reopening policy, and have done nothing to mobilize the mass opposition among teachers and students. On Oct 30, the unions cynically published a notice authorising strike action between Nov 2-7. But its aim was only to provide some means of maintaining control over the growing opposition among teachers. The growing strike movement among teachers and students must be unified and organized. For that, teachers need their own organizations, rank-and-file school safety committees, independent from the trade unions. The struggle to close non-essential industries and let workers and youth safely confine at home requires the mobilization of teachers and broader layers of workers in mass strike action. The best allies of teachers and students in France are their counterparts in Germany, Britain, and across Europe and beyond. These forces can fight to prepare and mobilize workers for a European general strike and a struggle for the working class to take state power and impose a scientific policy against the COVID-19 pandemic.
Niqnaq 