Thread by @EvanBlake17

Instead of alerting American society to the dangers posed by the deepening surge of #BA2 and the disastrous state of #COVID19 surveillance in the US, every effort is being made to conceal this reality from the public. #CovidIsNotOver 1/
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The official 7-day average of daily new cases was 37,810 on Saturday, an increase of 38% over the past two weeks. According to @IHME, the likely real number of daily new infections in the US is far higher at roughly 270,000 per day. 2/ covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-…

32 states have seen an increase in daily new cases over the past 2 weeks. The Northeast has been hardest hit so far, as BA.2 first became dominant in that region of the US, with New York and other states now seeing a growth in COVID-19 hospitalizations. 3/
nytimes.com/interactive/20…

The surge of BA.2 in the US takes place only four months after the Omicron BA.1 subvariant ripped through the country, killing over 185,000 Americans and driving the official death toll above 1 million, according to Worldometer. 4/ wsws.org/en/articles/20…

During the BA.1 surge, the Biden administration effectively adopted the “herd immunity” strategy of the Trump admin, encouraging states to dismantle COVID-19 data reporting systems and lift all mitigation measures to slow the spread of the virus. 5/ wsws.org/en/articles/20…

Every state has now lifted mask mandates. The CDC justified this with new masking guidelines that weigh hospital capacity over infection figures, emphasizing “individual and household-level prevention behaviors” over basic principles of public health. 6/ wsws.org/en/articles/20…

Numerous states closed COVID-19 testing sites, and testing is now at its lowest level since the summer of 2021. Federal pandemic funding began to evaporate in March, with the result that uninsured people now have to pay $100 for more accurate PCR tests. 7/ wsws.org/en/articles/20…

The White House urged states to reclassify COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths by using the artificial distinction between those hospitalized “with COVID-19” and those hospitalized “from COVID-19,” a talking point of the far right since early 2020. 8/ wsws.org/en/articles/20…

Despite the fact that at least a quarter of all COVID-19 deaths take place over 30 days after infection, in March, Massachusetts adopted a policy of discounting such deaths, retroactively deleting nearly 4,000 COVID-19 deaths from its records. 9/

In a still-unexplained change that took place amid a record surge in child hospitalizations and deaths from Omicron, on March 16 the CDC deleted 72,277 deaths from its Data Tracker website, including a quarter of all child deaths. 10/ wsws.org/en/articles/20…

Despite these data manipulations, these children and adults killed by COVID-19 are not coming back to life. 11/

Outside @WSWS_Updates, one of the few sources monitoring these policy changes has been health care expert @GregoryTravis, who has documented that since December 2021 at least a dozen states have stopped reporting COVID-19 data on a daily basis. 12/
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Over the past week, Indiana, Kansas, Washington & North Carolina all “went dark,” meaning they now report data only twice/week or less. In total, over a third of all states, with a combined population of ~100 million people, have now “gone dark.” 13/

https://twitter.com/greg_travis/status/1515721007096606722

The cumulative impact of this massive data coverup means that the severity of the BA.2 surge in the US will be more difficult to determine than any previous spike since the start of the pandemic. 14/

In all likelihood, millions of Americans will be infected with BA.2 and tens of thousands will die. Based on the experience in Europe, both figures could reach an order of magnitude higher. In the UK >2,000 people were killed by BA.2 in the past week. 15/ wsws.org/en/articles/20…

Speaking on Meet the Press, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha argued that “we’re in a much better place than we’ve been for the past two years, certainly way better than we were in January.” 16/

While silent on the assault on public health in the US, the corporate media devotes ample column space to denouncing the public health measures adopted in China to stamp out the country’s worst outbreak of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. 17/
nytimes.com/2022/04/17/bus…

The most unhinged commentary was written by Li Yuan for the New York Times, absurdly comparing China’s Zero-COVID policy to the 1958 “zero sparrow” policy implemented under Mao Zedong, which in part contributed to the Great Chinese Famine. 18/
nytimes.com/2022/04/13/bus…

Left unstated in the Biden administration’s response to BA.2, but acknowledged in government reports and modeling, is the fact that untold thousands more Americans will die from COVID-19, and potentially millions more will suffer from Long COVID. 19/

https://twitter.com/PPEtoheros/status/1514689280182005765

One of the signs of political regimes in the process of disintegration is that they ignore crises, hide them, and lie about them. 20/

A major event that precipitated the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, which was directly caused by the Stalinist bureaucracy’s mismanagement, coverup and indifference to the safety of the Soviet population. 21/ wsws.org/en/articles/20…

In a similar fashion, the American ruling class and all its political representatives have massively mishandled the pandemic, needlessly killing over 1 million Americans and debilitating potentially tens of millions more with Long COVID. 22/

With a social Chernobyl on its hands, the ruling class is incapable of speaking with any level of honesty to the public. As with the pandemic, the ruling class is also withholding from the public the immense danger that the war in Ukraine could quickly spiral out of control. 23/

Amid open discussion about the potential use of “tactical” nuclear weapons, no officials or media talking heads have stated the fact that the use of such weapons would almost inevitably lead to World War III between the world’s largest nuclear powers. 24/ wsws.org/en/articles/20…

It is urgent that the American and international working class be alerted to the immense dangers posed by both the war and the pandemic, the interconnected crises at the center of the deepening crisis of world capitalism. 25/ wsws.org/en/articles/20…

Both the pandemic and the war have fueled a massive rise of inflation and global food shortages, which are impelling workers into struggle on every continent. 26/ wsws.org/en/articles/20…

On May 1, the ICFI is hosting an online May Day rally to tell the working class the truth & outline a strategy to stop the pandemic & the drive to world war. Register today & build the event as widely as possible at your workplace & on social media! 27/27 wsws.org/mayday