HERE WE GO AGAIN

My posting today will report on something that looks curiously familiar.  Remember that photo taken on the last day of the Vietnam War, 29 April 1975, by Hubert van Es when the last American jumped into a helicopter to end our presence in Saigon?  Well, we're doing exactly that again, except now in Kabul.  But first, that Delta variant.  

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  A year or so ago herd immunity to prevent COVID-19 from spreading was anywhere between 60% and 80%.  That means add up the number of people who are mostly immune from having had this ailment, then add those who got safely vaccinated, and divide by 333 million.

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  So far, 11% of Americans have been infected with this virus.  Add the 50% or so who have been inoculated, and you have 61%.  Not bad, actually.
• Last week I mentioned that this herd immunity number is now up to more than 90% because the Delta variant is so much more contagious.  Thus today, if everyone who can get this shot does, we still won't meet 90% because 0-11 year olds cannot today legally be vaccinated, and they represent close to 15% of the population.

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  While government is by nature cautious, I still wonder why it did not approve the vaccines for children at least a month before the new school started.  Because they did not, the combination of 0-11 year olds and those students who did not get vaccinated is mostly responsible for the latest wave.  

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  Republican governors are responsible for much of this freedom of choice nonsense regarding masks and vaccines.  In Honolulu, we have City Council member, Andria Tupola, who someday again will no doubt be a Republican candidate for governor, saying she won't need to get vaccinated.  The reason is she thinks she was an asymptomatic victim anyway and should be immune.  Did she get an antigen check?  Don't know.  Not officially reported.  Not surprising that that her district is especially being affected by the Delta variant.

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  Well, anyway, what I'm getting to is that this Delta variant might have made herd immunity impossible.  You can read this article, for here is a researcher who cranked in all the data, like vaccine efficacy rate, virus effective Reproductive Number, vaccination rate and other factors, and determined that the herd immunity now is beyond 100%.
• In other words, this pandemic might never go away.

Look, this is just one extreme calculation, so don't panic.  I suspect that when the feds allow 0-11 year olds to get vaccinated, a sufficient number of recalcitrant individuals get frightened by the Delta, Lambda and other coming variants be immunized, the booster becoming part of the solution, and sufficient vaccines made available to Africa and other parts of the developing world, some time next year the pandemic will go away.  Unless, of course, the Lambda variant takes over and current vaccines don't work for this mutant virus.

Personally, I don't know one person who even contracted COVID-19.  Many of my friends also can't come up with a name.  We can only feel blessed, for no resident of 15 Craigside has yet been infected.  However, our sister property, Arcadia, last week experienced a new case, resulting in a whole new range of quarantining for both sites, including again having our meals delivered to our rooms.

Now on to our escape from Afghanistan.  At the top I mentioned our embarrassing departure from the Vietnam War.  Well, it turned out that while we seem to be doing this again, that photo above almost totally misrepresented reality.  An article reporting on the experience of Thurston Clarke, who wrote, Honorable Exit:  How a Few Brave Americans Risked All to Save Our Vietnamese Allies at the End of the War, indicated:

• The helicopter wasn't a military craft.
• That was not the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.
• Those streaming up the stairway were not Americans.
• That was not the last flight out.
• The most surprising of all...this wasn't a defeat.

The book is a minute-by-minute account of the U.S. pullout of the Vietnam war, but that photo was of a government contractor hired to fly American troops and equipment out of the country, taking a few panicked Vietnamese away from a chaotic scene.  It wasn't  a particularly momentous moment, but seemed to have symbolized our distressing departure.  Thurston Clark is better known for his book about JFK.

Earlier that month in 1975 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argued that it was America's duty to get the people who believed in us out.  Included were high-ranking officials, translators and others of high risk.  Sound familiar to today?  Further:

Kissinger wired the US Vietnamese ambassador, Graham Martin, that failure to address the “difficult question of evacuation” could result in the loss of American “lives, national dignity, and a common sense of confidence that we can manage whatever crisis the future may hold.”

By April 27, 1975, North Vietnamese troops had surrounded Saigon and it became clear an attack was imminent. Chaos erupted as residents scrambled to flee. They tried to push their way into the US Embassy in hopes of escaping.

All that is happening again, for the Taliban has now gained control over more than half of all Afghanistan provinces.   To the left, the American Embassy in Kabul, which could be only a few days away from being overrun.  Three thousand American troops were suddenly flown-in to get our citizens (as of a couple of days ago there were 4,200 staffers still at our embassy) and allies out, probably into Qatar, which was sent another thousand American military to process them.  Canada, for one, has offered to take-in 20,000 emigrants.

There will be that final photo of the last American plane leaving Hamid Karzai International Airport, which was built by Russia.  Remember?  They invaded the country in 1979 and also got the boot, ten years later.  Japan paid for the international terminal.  Who is Hamid Karzai?  He was the first Afghanistan president in 2001 after we kicked out the Taliban two decades ago.  Anyway, the name has already been changed to Kabul International Airport.  We have already abandoned our military Bagram Air Base.

For those lamenting that the USA has lost every war we've been in since the Second World War, here is a source that says we won many of those wars.  And that 58,365 U.S. COVID-19 deaths shown in the left graphic? The death total is now nearing 700,000!  In our 80 or so wars, the total deaths amounted to 1,354,664+.  Hard to imagine so, but that is about the number of Americans dying from heart ailments and cancer annually.  So here are our debatable victories:

1. Korea.
2. Grenada.
3. Panama.
4. Both Gulf Wars.
5. ISIS Caliphate.
6. 2001 Afghanistan.
7. Technically Vietnam. Most of the fighting there were major Communist offensives that were defeated and new ceasefires were signed. So depending how you count, the US won several wars in Vietnam and withdrew undefeated.
8. Kosovo.
9. Cold War (if you can count it).
10. Ethiopian Civil War.
11. Congo Crisis.
12. Al-Qaeda (all participants in 9/11 are dead or captured).
13. First Libyan Civil War.

About the Vietnam War, the whole purpose of getting in was to stop the takeover of Southeast Asia by Communists...and, you've got to admit that it worked.  While that Domino Theory has largely been discredited, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and most of that region remain mostly democratic.

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Tropical Storms Fred and Grace in the Atlantic, and heading for the Gulf, should not attain hurricane strength.  The East Pacific has had more storms this year, with Hurricane Linda now a Category 4.  While heading for Hawaii, cooler waters will weaken her, and she will take a track north of the state:

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