I descended from the upstairs this morning and checked my news feed only to see video of helicopters flying between the US embassy in Kabul and the airport and the news that the Taliban had surrounded the city. I can't get Saigon 1975 out of my mind. The helicopter on the roof of the US embassy leaving scores of Vietnamese behind. That news wasn't enough, though. There are schools going virtual after less than two weeks of in-person instruction. There's research coming out of Finland suggesting that fully vaccinated people can get and transmit covid even when fully masked. Finally, the Ivory Coast has confirmed its first Ebola case since 1994.
After the morning dog-walk, it was time to check out the local and the Washington papers. The day got even better (said sarcastically). Here are the headlines from pages 4 and 5 of the local paper:
- Were 20 years in Afghanistan worth it? / Many US lives were lost, but Taliban now poised to regain rule.
- Afghan women fear return to 'dark days'
- Taliban siege continues / Biden deploys 1,000 more troops to Kabul to aid in evacuation
- Death toll climbs to at least 57 / Authorities dispute social media reports of hundreds still missing (flooding in Turkey)
- At least 304 killed as 7.2 magnitude quake hits Haiti
- COVID-19 claiming more young victims
- 50 sent to hospitals in NY bus crash
There were also some short blurbs with no headlines. These concerned:
- Wildfires out west
- Heat wave in Europe
- School shooting in New Mexico
- Flooding in West Texas
- Storms in the Atlantic
- Attack on a wedding in Pakistan
I wasn't sure I could handle any more bad news until I looked at the Outlook section of this morning's Washington Post. I won't say this article was good news, but it had me happily punching numbers into the calculator on my phone only to be telling The Professor that we really are fucked. I'm something of a numbers nerd, and this gave me something to play with. Remember R0 (arr-naught), the number of new people one contagious person infects? Meet Re (arr-eee), the number of new people a single person infects accounting for precautions being taken and overall immunity levels. Here's the bad news about the Delta variant: Even with full 100 percent immunity (everyone is fully vaccinated) and using 85 percent effectiveness (what the drug manufacturers say holds against Delta), Re is still greater than one. Booster shots aren't worth it in terms of lowering Re under one. Using the current 50 percent of fully vaccinated people, Re approaches five. As the authors put it, "So with half the population in the United States vaccinated, the delta variant is still more infectious that the original variant was last year."
Have a good rest of the weekend. I plan to try to.
1 comment:
That 50% unvaccinated figure will diminish as they get their antibodies the hard way, the issues is whether the healthcare system can cope. We assume the hospital will always be there for us, but if they are full then it's no time to be falling off a ladder or a motorbike.
I keeo telling myself that this time will pass and that we'll go back to normal but once you've looked at strangers as potentiall family-killers I'm not sure that there's any way back from that (especially when "stranger" is "someone I don't live with")
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