In a matter of weeks, the outbreak of coronavirus centered in Wuhan, China has shut down a major global metropolis of 11 million people, larger than New York City. The outbreak has exposed the enormous vulnerability of contemporary society to new strains of infectious disease, dangers for which no capitalist government has adequately prepared.

Local medical infrastructure at the epicenter of the crisis is being pushed to the brink of collapse, while a total of 15 cities in the Chinese province of Hubei, including Wuhan, have been placed under partial or total lockdown, imposing a quarantine on the vast majority of the region’s 58.5 million people. Videos and photographs posted on social media reveal packed hospital waiting rooms as panicked residents exhibiting fevers and other flu-like symptoms seek medical treatment. Doctors, nurses and other medical staff have been forced to work around the clock in order to treat the infected and diagnose suspected cases, even as medical supplies run dangerously low.

At the same time, the economic disruptions, illnesses and deaths are being compounded by the poverty, social inequality and degraded health care infrastructure in the infected areas. It must be noted that while the situation in China is dire, the so-called first-world countries are no more prepared to deal with an outbreak on the scale currently occurring in Wuhan. Every year, 30,000 people in the United States alone die from influenza, a much less contagious disease than the Wuhan coronavirus.

In the United States, five cases have been confirmed and a further 110 patients remain under observation. These numbers “will only increase,” according to Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, an agency of the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The potential spread of the virus mere weeks after it was identified speaks both to the virulent nature of the virus and the highly integrated nature of modern economic and social life, particularly involving China and the rest of the world. The Wuhan coronavirus is spreading at least four times as fast as SARS and infecting at least five times as many people, in large part a result of the ease at which people can travel to and from the country.

These conflicts are only escalating. At a time when rational planning across national borders is critical to combat the global spread of a virulent disease, the United States and China are locked in a growing trade conflict in what has been called a new “cold war.” Even as new pathogens require the scientific resources of every continent to combat, the countries of the world are building metaphorical and literal walls.

The defense of human civilization against the threat of global pandemics, just like climate change and the growing threat of ecological disasters, requires a level of planning and global cooperation of which capitalism is incapable. Society has outgrown the capitalist system and the arbitrary divisions it imposes on the world. The provision of the most existential social needs requires rational planning. That is, it requires socialism.
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I hope we don't run low on chinks.

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