Coronavirus update, Britain

This 5 May 2020 video from Britain says about itself:

Coronavirus Vaccine: Big Pharma Only Cares About One Thing | Nick Dearden

“Pharmaceutical companies don’t benefit from epidemics, they benefit from people having long term chronic conditions”.

Covid-19 is deadlier in Britain and the US than anywhere – and it’s no coincidence: here.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain, 5 May 2020:

Covid-19 sample couriers face redundancies after risking their lives during the pandemic

COURIERS who have been playing a vital role in transporting Covid-19 material during the pandemic are facing redundancies for their efforts, their union revealed today.

The 10 workers are employed in London by private pathology company The Doctors’ Laboratory (TDL) and are expected to be laid off in a month’s time, according to the Independent Workers of Great Britain union (IWGB).

IWGB said the sackings target individuals who led industrial action last year leading to “historic pay rises and improvements” for workers in the gig economy.

Lift lockdown now and our members will refuse to work. ‘THE GOVERNMENT is trying to say: “You take the risk to the staff, and you take the risk to the passengers, it is on your heads”,’ Mick Lynch, assistant general secretary of the RMT union said yesterday, underlining that train and tube drivers will refuse to work if the Tories attempt to open the transport system to the general public too soon: here.

By Lamiat Sabin in Britain:

Government again fails to hit 100k Covid-19 tests per day target

A coronavirus test

THE government has failed again to hit its target of 100,000 coronavirus tests per day.

At the daily Downing Street press conference on Monday evening, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said that just over 85,000 tests for Covid-19 took place on Sunday.

He announced that the total number of positive Covid-19 tests had risen by 3,985 to 190,584 and the number of deaths was up by 288 to 28,734.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain, 5 May 2020:

‘A national scandal’ — a timeline of Covid-19 failures

Health Secretary Matt Hancock looks confused at the opening of the Nightingale, a desperate measure for a dire situation

SPEAKING on BBC Question Time on March 26 2020, Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal, described the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic as “a national scandal.”

A look at the warnings the government received before the national lockdown on March 23 explains why.

October 2016

Exercise Cygnus, a three-day training on how to deal with a pandemic, is carried out, involving all major government departments, the NHS and local authorities. “It showed gaping holes in Britain’s Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response plan,” the Sunday Telegraph notes. A senior academic directly involved in the exercise and the current pandemic said:

“These exercises are supposed to prepare government for something like this — but it appears they were aware of the problem but didn’t do much about it.”

From daily The Morning Star in Britain, 5 May 2020:

Jeremy Corbyn calls on all to join online People’s Assembly Fight for Our Lives rally this Thursday

JEREMY CORBYN is calling on everyone to join the online People’s Assembly (PA) Fight for Our Lives rally on Thursday to unite the left around socialist answers to the injustices exposed by Covid-19.

“These are unprecedented times,” the former Labour leader told the Morning Star, saying that the inability to hold ordinary meetings didn’t reduce the need to “urgently communicate a response that recognises health and social inequality have made the effects of Covid worse on the poorest. Join the People’s Assembly this Thursday!”

The online meeting hopes to bring together organisations that can put forward specific demands to campaign on coming out of the crisis that can be built into “a tangible left programme we can fight to implement,” according to People’s Assembly national organiser Ramona McCartney.

Teachers warn education ministers against reopening schools too soon: here.