New study doubles global COVID-19 death toll

The number of global COVID-19 deaths is twice as high as officially reported—6.93 million globally, 905,000 in the United States alone—according to a new study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

Yet no alarms were raised either by the White House or the media until March. Instead, plans were developed to protect the world’s markets, not human lives. In the United States and Europe, trillions of dollars and euros were pumped into financial markets, while virtually nothing was being devoted towards minimizing the impact of the pandemic, which at that point had already claimed tens of thousands of lives.

[wsws.org]

The Indian ruling elite’s criminal response to the pandemic—a global catastrophe

Many of you from outside South Asia will have seen or read reports of desperately ill people being refused admittance to hospitals in India’s capital Delhi and financial centre Mumbai due to personnel, bed, drug and oxygen shortages; of patients dying of asphyxiation in hospitals whose medical oxygen supply has run out; and of mountains of corpses waiting for cremation or burial. In Gujarat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state, the metal frames of crematorium furnaces, forced to operate 24 hours per day, are cracking and melting.

[wsws.org]