The past three weeks have been depressing as COVID-19 numbers in Victoria continue to rise without the slightest sign that they will ever fall. Yesterday – a day of reduced testing as is supposedly typical fo weekends – there were 73 cases in the community, and there is not the slightest sign that mystery cases are falling. What is worse still is that there is no academic study of why Victoria’s lockdown has failed, and I am quite suspicious academics attempting to do so will say something politically taboo (as I will discuss later).
It is virtually certain that this lockdown, originally scheduled for a week. is likely to be indefinite and most likely to last for a year or longer, with catastrophic effects on all but the biggest businesses. COVID case numbers are almost certain, as one commentator on Twitter said, to rise far above the present horrific 1,218 seen in New South Wales yesterday. The predicted number by November – when the state came out of a lockdown against a much less contagious COVID variant that was caused like the present one by a negligently prematurely easing restrictions whilst COVID was abundant in the community – is over 2,000 per day. However, with numbers doubling every week or so under restrictions similar to last year, COVID numbers in Victoria would actually reach 23,000 cases per day by the end of October!
Politicians are repetitively saying that the government is doing its best, despite the fact that personal experience says clearly that rules are not being enforced and that there is inadequate effort to test residents as soon as COVID-19 is detected in wastewater. The number of people lying around parks that are supposed to be closed is quite alarming, and what is needed is to have steel fences so that people cannot lie around parks. Reports I have read say that closed parks have been bound with tape and plastic that people can cut in the simplest manner with household scissors!
The belief is that once the supply of vaccines against COVID is improved, then restrictions will be able to be eliminated and businesses return to normal. However, Red Flag (the current version of Socialist Alternative, which I read extensively as a student two decades ago) and the World Socialist Web Site here and here have demonstrated that it is a lie that the government is doing everything possible. The WSWS demonstrate that vaccines will be at best a very short-term solution as increasing resistance and an increasing number of even more virulent and contagious strains means that in a very short time numbers will rise even more rapidly than they are today, at least under imperfectly enforced lockdown measures without full wage payment to all workers. Without full wage payment until COVID is eradicated, it is difficult or impossible for workers to get test before they have spent multiple weeks infectious in the community. Commentators much more conservative than Red Flag or the WSWS have argued that the abolition of Jobkeeper this very month may be an important factor preventing numbers going down.
The WSWS demonstrate that if all resources held by the richest 1 percent were transferred globally to eradication of COVID at a global scale, such eradication could easily be achieved before even more potent, contagious and vaccine-resistant strains emerge. The WSWS demonstrate that there is no way strains even more contagious and potent than the currently dominant Delta will not emerge. As Red Flag said in the aftermath of the Trump victory in 2017, public support for much higher taxes, possibly even for expropriation, of the rich has zero effect on policies that are entirely controlled by business. Red Flag show that the only way the immense majority can have their voices heard is by
“...revolutionary organising centres, where striking workers and mutinying soldiers can coordinate their defiance, robbing our exploiters of the ability to wield economic and political force against us [workers]”
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