2024-03-04 22:27:43
On Friday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued new guidelines urging people who are actively sick with Covid-19 to return to their schools and workplaces, thereby infecting their colleagues and the public.
The guidance recommends workers return to work 24 hours after the last fever – a point in time when the vast majority of Covid-19 patients will still be actively infectious.
Such an instruction has no basis in health care. It pursues two fundamental goals. The first is to ensure that workers show up to work even when they pose a major threat to the safety of their colleagues and customers, in order to generate profits for large corporations.
Second, and no less important, the US government, on behalf of the financial oligarchy, is attempting to reduce life expectancy and create the conditions for early death for older Americans and immunocompromised people by allowing Covid-19 to spread uninterrupted.
The CDC policy change comes under conditions where Covid-19 is circulating at higher levels than at the same time in any previous year of the pandemic and under conditions where all barriers to the spread of the virus have been removed. Since surveillance of the pandemic stopped after the Biden administration lifted the Covid-19 public health emergency in May last year, this can only be determined using wastewater data.
US wastewater data from Biobot Analytics showing the current concentration of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater is higher than any other year of the pandemic at this time of year [Photo: Wastewater data from Biobot Analytics]
The new CDC guidance lumps Covid-19 in with other viral respiratory illnesses, including seasonal influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and encourages anyone infected with these pathogens to report to work and resume normal activities to record.
At least a quarter of working Americans do not have sick leave, which is often deducted from their vacation days. In the private sector, only 40 percent of the lowest paid workers have access to sick leave. Now bosses and managers can rely on CDC guidelines to require employees to come to work sick or risk being fired.
Every aspect of the new guidelines contradicts the known scientific truths about Covid-19: without testing, patients cannot determine for themselves whether they are infectious or not; a large percentage of Covid-19 transmission occurs through asymptomatic patients; Fever is just one of more than a dozen Covid-19 symptoms; and more than 20-40 percent of Covid-19 patients are still infectious after five days, some even for more than a week.
The guidelines are in direct contradiction to the basic principles of public health, which aim to limit the spread of all pathogens and minimize the burden of morbidity and mortality on society. Instead of advocating for expanded paid sick leave for all workers, as well as mass testing, contact tracing and other basic health measures against Covid-19, influenza and RSV, the CDC reduced its isolation recommendation for all respiratory viruses to the bare minimum, while for Covid -19 no longer recommends testing at all.
This is just the latest in a series of unscientific policy changes from the CDC that has discredited itself in the eyes of all serious scientists, doctors and Covid opponents over the course of the pandemic.
Dr. Lucky Tran, a science communicator at Columbia University, condemned the change in CDC guidelines and told Forbes: “The CDC guidelines changes are actually the result of political and corporate pressure. It is a dangerous change that runs counter to science, encourages the spread of disease and prioritizes corporate interests, facilitating the exploitation of workers.”
Dr. Ellie Murray, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University’s School of Public Health, told CNN: “This is not good science. It’s not good for public health. It doesn’t provide people with accurate information.”
Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, also told CNN: “The overwhelming body of evidence about this virus over the last four years tells us that it is a far more dangerous pathogen than the flu that has no seasonality , is still evolving, has caused Long Covid in tens of millions of people around the world and cannot be ‘declared to be the flu.’
Indeed, the CDC’s data itself – including the “background” document justifying its recent policy change – makes it clear that Covid-19 remains far more dangerous than the flu, RSV, or any other seasonal virus.
In the first week of February 2024, almost 1,600 people died from Covid-19. Since August 26, 2023, that is, for 24 consecutive weeks or almost half of the calendar year, the weekly death toll has consistently exceeded 1,000. While 5,748 people died from the flu in 2023, more than 77,000 died from Covid-19.
Death rates in the 18- to 44-year-old age group remain 20 percent higher than pre-pandemic baselines, according to data analyst Greg Travis, who runs the only Covid-19 death tracker in the United States. In children under 18, the number of deaths from Covid-19 is five times higher than from the flu. Not only old and infirm people are consigned to death, but also those who are in the prime of their life and those whose life has just begun.
Excess deaths among adults ages 18 to 45 in the United States [Photo by Gregory Travis @greg_travis]
According to the CDC tracker of official Covid-19 hospitalizations, a total of 17,310 people were hospitalized nationwide for Covid-19 illness in the week ending February 24, 2024, far more than any other respiratory virus. The “background” document includes a chart showing that between October 1, 2022 and September 30, 2023, the number of hospitalizations was 250 per 100,000 people, about half that of the same period in the previous two years and continued to dwarf the number of admissions for influenza and RSV.
Hospitalizations per 100,000 population for Covid-19, flu and RSV. The annual information refers to the period from October 1st to September 30th [Photo: CDC]
In addition, SARS-CoV-2 is evolving faster than any other respiratory pathogen and is constantly spawning new immune system-attacking variants, such as the JN.1 “Pirola” variant that quickly swept across the world this winter.
Thousands of scientific studies have shown that Covid-19 is capable of damaging virtually every organ in the body, including the heart, lungs, kidneys and brain, at a rate far greater than flu or other viral respiratory diseases. More than 20 million Americans of all ages are now suffering from Long Covid, plus hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
To justify its policy change, the CDC is distorting the scientific evidence on Long Covid and trivializing the persistent risk of this often gruesome disease, claiming in its “background” document that the “prevalence of Long Covid also appears to be declining.”
However, the latest data from the CDC’s own National Center for Health Statistics, which regularly conducts a pulse survey of US households, shows that the spread of Long Covid has increased during the ongoing winter wave of the JN.1 variant, with which scientists estimate More than a third of the American population has been infected in recent months, rising to record levels.
As of January 2024, 17.6 percent of American adults reported having contracted Long Covid at some point during the pandemic, representing nearly 60 million Americans.
Percentage of American adults who have experienced Long Covid, according to data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics [Photo: National Center for Health Statistics. U.S. Census Bureau, Household Pulse Survey, 2022–2024. Long COVID. Generated interactively: from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/long-covid.htm]
In an article published this week in The Conversation was published, wrote leading Long Covid researcher Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly from Washington University in St. Louis:
[E]There is now considerable evidence that infection with SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes Covid-19 – can affect brain health in many ways. In addition to brain fog, Covid-19 can cause a range of problems including headaches, seizure disorders, strokes, sleep disorders, tingling and paralysis of the nerves, and various mental disorders.
Dr. Al-Aly noted that these dangers persist with any SARS-CoV-2 variant, highlighting studies showing that memory problems are widespread; imaging studies showing brain shrinkage following Covid-19 infection; a study showing that mild to moderate infections result in at least seven years of brain aging; and autopsy reports demonstrating the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in brain tissue. He concluded with alarming results from a recent study that demonstrated significantly declining IQ scores in Covid-19 patients.
Against government inaction and outright criminality, Long Covid patients are organizing a protest at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC on March 15. This will be the first such protest in the US since September 2022, when Long Covid patients and activists took part gathered at the White House to condemn Biden’s lie that “the pandemic is over.”
Die World Socialist Web Site supports this rally that is taking place while the entire political establishment ignores and covers up the ongoing dangers of the pandemic. The only presidential candidate running in the 2024 US election who has publicly opposed the recent change in CDC guidelines is Joseph Kishore of the Socialist Equality Party, who posted a statement on Twitter/X just hours after the new guidelines were released published. Kishore wrote:
Throughout our campaign, @jerrywhiteSEP and I will fight for a socialist public health program that opposes the Democratic and Republican policies of disease, harm and death. We will fight for a huge increase in funding for #LongCovid research, for the renovation of all public spaces to ensure they have clean air, for scientific education of the population so that everyone knows that Covid-19 is through airborne and for a new Operation Warp Speed to develop nasal and other vaccines that provide truly sterile immunity against all variants of #SarsCoV2.
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The CDC’s latest policy change will further worsen the impact of Covid-19 on the U.S. and global population, with the international working class expected to bear the brunt of the damage. Since the United States is the center of world capitalism, the policies pursued by the CDC threaten to be replicated around the world wherever limited isolation guidelines are still in effect. It is vital that the international working class confronts this attack on their right to a safe and healthy environment and fights for a socialist public health program to stop the spread of Covid-19 and all other infectious diseases worldwide.
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