One million COVID-19 deaths and rising

Editor's note: Radhika Desai is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The US proxy war against Russia over Ukraine has helped the Joe Biden administration. By taking up much of the airtime and content in media news reporting, the American voters have largely forgotten about the damning indictment of Biden's record on handling COVID-19. President Biden has failed to meet the high expectations that his campaign had promised to deliver on in 2020.

Two years into the pandemic and more than a year into the Biden presidency, the graph of US COVID-19 deaths has crossed the one million mark, according to data compiled by NBC News. COVID-19 has reduced the life expectancy in the US by nearly two years. Unlike many European countries, which also experienced drops in life expectancy in 2020, the US never bounced back from it.

Although this is rarely discussed, the staggeringly bad performance could be on account of the "capitalist strategy" on COVID-19 which places capitalist interests above people's interests, ensuring that restrictions are used as sparingly as possible to permit continued capital accumulation and strategies are chosen according to whether they benefit corporations. That is why Biden's strategy focused on vaccines alone.

Apparently, the vaccination circumstances in the US are far from good. A combination of anti-vaccine sentiments have spread to alarming levels, while rich business people, social media disinformation, lack of access and distrust of the mostly private health care system have resulted in about 66 percent of the eligible US population getting fully vaccinated and only 30 percent have received a booster dose. Consequently, COVID-19 continues to rage through the US population, causing high numbers of deaths, illnesses, losses and much grief.

Having refused to adopt China's "dynamic zero-COVID" strategy, and having attacked it for being too costly, and unable to advance even vaccination with any vigor, let alone taking the other steps necessary to curb the spread of COVID-19, the Biden admiration has hit a dead end. All it can do is to urge the people to get vaccinated while it lifts all COVID-19-related restrictions to please employers. The US Center for Disease Control has issued new guidelines dispensing with mask mandates.

What should be a social and government responsibility has been transferred onto individuals. They must, as it is now said, learn to "live with COVID-19." "Die with COVID-19" is more like it. For that is what the working class is subjected to do.

In the new public discourse around COVID-19, many are looking forward to it becoming "endemic." But in fact, that only means it will become another disease of poverty, such as Tuberculosis and AIDS. Thriving as it does in overcrowding, co-morbidities, stress, poor nutrition and other such conditions in which the poor and uneducated people disproportionately live, COVID-19 has already affected these groups the worst. Most frontline and essential workers belong to them. The well-to-do, meanwhile, have already been spared the worst, having better access to COVID-19 protections and treatments.

Accordingly whether and when COVID-19 will become an "endemic" in the US remains unclear. It could remain the leading cause of death for some time to come. And the economic costs would not be small.

Already the labor force has shrunk as some groups have departed from the workforce, unable to commit to jobs given their increased and unpredictable care responsibilities. These have been further increased in many communities where grandparents who provided childcare have fallen victim to COVID-19. This is already driving up labour costs, negatively affecting productivity as new entrants cannot match the productivity of experienced workers and is a major factor in the inflation that has returned after almost four decades in near absence. The ever-present possibility of outbreaks means that disruptions of transport, services and supply chains remain common. A long pandemic – from which health care workers and teachers are more likely to suffer – comes with fatigue, pain and breathlessness and its effects on productivity cannot be underestimated.

The one million mark may be psychologically important, but perhaps the more important thing is that the graph is still headed upwards and new waves of new variants of Omicron are already being warned about.