by BILL VAN AUKEN
In a speech delivered Thursday announcing that the number of confirmed coronavirus infections worldwide had risen to 200,000, the director of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, stated that “the only way we can defeat this pandemic, as we have always been saying, is through solidarity. Solidarity, solidarity, solidarity … We’re one human race, and that suffices actually. This is an invisible enemy against humanity.”
The solidarity of humanity across the planet is not merely a noble ideal, but a life-and-death necessity in combatting a deadly virus that threatens to infect hundreds of millions of people as its spreads to every corner of the globe. This ideal, however, stands in stark opposition to the reality of a world capitalist society riven by unprecedented levels of social inequality and characterized by the pursuit of geo-strategic interests through the means of murderous violence.
Alongside the “invisible enemy against humanity”, the coronavirus, there stands another quite visible one, world imperialism.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the increasingly desperate conditions confronting Iran and its population of nearly 83 million. The country has the third highest number of fatalities after Italy and China, and nowhere is the mortality rate greater, as the number of infections continues to rise sharply each day.
Iran’s Health Ministry spokesman Kianush Jahanpur announced Thursday that 149 people had died over the previous 24 hours, bringing the death toll from the virus to 1,284. During the same period, another 1,046 cases of infection were reported, raising the total number to 18,407. Both numbers are believed to be serious underestimations of the ravages of the disease.
“Based on our information, every 10 minutes one person dies from the coronavirus and some 50 people become infected with the virus every hour in Iran,” the spokesman said.
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