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The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is struggling to vaccinate its employees. According to the department, an estimated 47% of its members are fully vaccinated under NYPD-administered programs against COVID-19 as of Aug. 24.
Even accounting for a percentage of the NYPD’s force who may have been vaccinated outside work and not provided details thereof—the NYPD is not mandating that its employees self-report their status—that figure likely represents a sizable decrease from the wider vaccination rates across New York City: 76% of all adult city residents have gotten at least one shot as of Aug. 26 and 68% are fully vaccinated. And amid the Delta variant impacting non-vaccinated New Yorkers, the COVID-19 positivity rate in NYC over the last seven days is around 3%.
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On July 26, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio said that all city workers would be required to get vaccinated or get tested weekly from Sept. 13 onwards. And on Aug. 23, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine became the first COVID-19 vaccine to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
But one Brooklyn-based traffic enforcement agent tells TIME they have no immediate intentions of getting the vaccine: “I just don’t feel like I need it yet. I spend most of my time outside and I wear a mask,” the traffic officer says. “For me, it’s about having the choice to take it—and I just don’t want to take it yet.”
(A spokesperson for the New York City Patrol Benevolent Association (PBA), the largest police union in New York City, told TIME on Aug. 25 that they would take “legal action” if there is a vaccine mandate for its workers.)
A 911 operator says they too don’t want to get vaccinated, and they don’t like the idea of being required to do so either. “[I think] people don’t want to feel obliged or forced to get the vaccine,” the operator says. “It’s not like I’m constantly in someone else’s personal space. I social distance and wear a mask. Why do I need to get vaccinated right now?”
TIME has granted the two sources anonymity to allow them to speak openly on the subject of vaccinations due to their concerns of potential reprisals at work.
Both NYPD members say they feel like most of their colleagues take enough precautions; they are aware of working alongside both people who are vaccinated and who aren’t.
“We continue to make vaccinations available at multiple times and at multiple locations to ensure that as many of our employees as possible get the vaccination,” the NYPD said in a statement sent to TIME on Aug. 24.
This issue isn’t unique to New York. Many cities across the country have seen low vaccination numbers amongst their police departments. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) reported on Aug. 16 that they also have a vaccination rate of around 47%, for example, while the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reported that less than 30% of their deputies have been vaccinated.
A 2020 study from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund found that, of all the officer deaths recorded across the U.S. in 2020, nearly half were the result of COVID-19. On Aug. 23, Houston Police Department Chief Art Acevedo tweeted that he had signed, “10 more condolence letters for active-duty officers who have been taken from their families, friends, and colleagues by#COVID19. We are lifting them all in prayer,” though it was not clear during what timeframe the officers had died.
And last week was a particularly grim week for the NYPD as three members of the department died from COVID-19. (60 NYPD employees have died from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.)
“When you look at who is getting sick right now, every story I hear anecdotally, it’s somebody that is not vaccinated,” NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said in a July 27 interview with local news channel NY1 calling for NYPD officers to take COVID-19 vaccines. “God forbid, you put yourself or your loved ones or anyone else at risk. It’s the right thing to do.”
The traffic cop says the deaths are heartbreaking, but they still aren’t ready to get vaccinated.
“I just want to wait a little longer. I follow all the other health [protocols] but before I get a shot I want to know it’s the right thing for my body,” they say. “Getting the vaccine is a decision I should make. Not my job.”
On Aug. 11, California became the first state to require all teachers and school staff to get vaccinated or get weekly testing. In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot confirmed a vaccine mandate on Aug. 25 for all city workers, an announcement which the head of the city’s Fraternal Order of Police later likened to the Nazi regime.
Unions have pushed back forcefully against these steps. In addition to the PBA’s apparent plans for litigation as disclosed to TIME, leaders representing over 300,000 city workers are planning to file a lawsuit against de Blasio for his vaccine mandate, specifically for public school staff.
Both the traffic cop and the 911 operator say that, if it comes down to them losing their job, then they would get their shots.
“If it’s between my job and the vaccine then I would get it. I would try to fight it but, eventually, I would get it,” the 911 operator says.
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Long before a man with a bloody hook tormented the alleys of Cabrini-Green in the 1992 filmCandyman, the Chicago housing projects were understood by many to be a place of horror. For decades, local and national media told stories of murders, rapes, gangs, drugs and poverty run rampant, making it one of the most feared places in America.
But many of the residents who actually lived there felt differently: to them, Cabrini-Green wasn’t just a cesspool of immorality but also a tight-knit, family-oriented community that supported each other in the face of neglect, governmental corruption and police violence. And when filmmaker Nia DaCosta was given a chance to create a sequel toCandyman, she strove to show a different side of the maligned projects; to preserve the scariness of the original film while separating the monster from the community itself. “The original film definitely fed into a fear of the Black community, and the Black man in particular,” DaCosta tells TIME. “I didn’t want to do this approach of, ‘Oh, god, this terrible place where terrible things are happening, because these brutes are living here.’ This is a community that was chronically underserved for a very long time.”
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In anticipation of the film’s release on August 27, TIME talked to filmmakers, historians and community members about the history of Cabrini-Green andCandyman’s role in its lore.
Decades of notoriety
When the Cabrini-Green housing projects started being built in the 1940s, the area’s reputation for violence was long established. In the 19th century, the neighborhood on the north fork of the Chicago River sat next to billowing, stinking gas refineries and factories, and became the landing place for waves of European immigrants searching for cheap housing in the city. The neighborhood soon became known as “Little Hell,” with frequent reports of mafia activity. “There was a mythical quality and almost aCandyman-like aspect of the ways the violence and gangs were described in that time,” Ben Austen, a Chicago journalist who wrote the bookHigh Risers:Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing, says.
In 1937, the Chicago Housing Authority was founded to reform these sorts of slums while also combating asevere housing crisis precipitated by the Great Depression. They would soon embark on an ambitious public housing development project that mostly consisted of extremely segregated high rises, pushing Black families—many recent migrants from the South—into a “Black belt” on the city’s South Side. Further “urban renewal” projects and redlining displaced many other city dwellers and forced them into public housing; a 1955 study found that such projects served the interests of wealthy businessmen and institutions to keep public housing out of their wards.
Cabrini-Green, however, was supposed to be different from the others: an integrated, utopian community with affordable rent prices in the heart of the city, not far from Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. In 1942, Mayor Edward J. Kelly proclaimed that the apartments “symbolize the Chicago that is to be,” adding, “We cannot continue as a nation, half slum and half palace.”
But before long, the 3,600 public housing units of Cabrini-Green would soon become almost entirely Black and poor. Funding for upkeep and social services vanished, leaving buildings rotting and full of broken appliances and elevators. Shoddy construction even meant some apartments connected through their bathroom mirrors (a detail that would show up to grisly effect in the original Candyman). With little oversight, city-wide gangs like Vice Lords and Cobras moved in and warred with each other. In 1982,a study from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Developmentfound that the Chicago Housing Authority was one of the worst-managed public housing agencies in the nation.
It was this Cabrini-Green, in 1979, that the six-year-old Teddy Williams moved into with his mother and siblings. Williams says that the project’s reputation initially made his family scared to move there. He recalls: “The feedback that my grandmother got about Cabrini-Green made her leery about her daughter and grandchildren moving there. We connected with the same fears and were like, ‘Oh my god. Will it be bad?’”
Those fears were assuaged when the residents there quickly welcomed them into the fold. “It was like a little village: everybody knew everybody,” he says. “There was gang activity, but also a lot of structure amongst others that weren’t involved: after school programs where they’d have games, trampolines, screen painting, quilt sewing. We put on dance routines and dressed up like the zombies in theThrillervideo.”
Among the children in Cabrini-Green, there was certainly mythology about menaces, including a crazy man who lived on the otherwise-deserted 14th floor where the elevator would sometimes accidentally drop people off. (“If we had to get off on that floor, we would run really quick before he came out,” Williams says.) But a more frequent threat was the police, who were essentially engaged in warfare with the gangs in Cabrini-Green after two cops were shot dead by a sniper in 1970. “The police were kind of aggressive: I do remember some harsh moments,” he says. “When it came to police presence and gang members, it wasn’t a, ‘Go over, talk to you, and do an intervention’ kind of thing. It was, “We go over there, strong arm you and make you act right.’”
Cabrini-Green wasn’t the poorest, or the most crime-ridden, neighborhood. But its proximity to wealthier sections of the city made it a target for not only the police, but the local and national news. (Its status as the setting of the filmCooley Highand the TV showGood Timesalso increased general interest.) Newspapers and television crews would swarm in, hoping to capture stories of gore and poverty porn—and Cabrini-Green developed a reputation as one of America’s worst projects. OnSaturday Night Live, Danitra Vance, the first Black female cast regular, played a 17-year-old mother of two named Cabrini-Green Jackson. (Vance later quit the show, frustrated after repeatedly being assigned stereotypical roles.) In 1981, Chicago MayorJane Byrneactually moved into Cabrini-Green to signal her commitment to the area—but she moved out within weeks, with the crime rate unaffected, and was voted out of office two years later.
Pix/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)Cabrini-Green in 1966.
The original Candyman and the razing of Cabrini-Green
Cabrini-Green essentially symbolized the plight of the American inner city—and in 1990, the English filmmaker Bernard Rose decided to capitalize on that reputation by transposing a short story by Clive Barker about a monster in the Liverpool slums to Cabrini-Green. His film followed Helen Lyle, a white woman, who ventured into the ghetto to research an urban legend about a hook-handed spirit who kills anyone who says his name five times into a mirror. Rose spoke to residents and actually filmed in Cabrini-Green, and ultimately created an atmosphere in which the streets were lined with garbage, feces was smeared on restroom mirrors, and vicious attackers popped out of the shadows and the walls.
Residents of Cabrini-Green and other low-income areas of the city viewed the film with both reverence and frustration. Some loved it, including J. Nicole Brooks, who would go onto act in the newCandymanand also write a play about Jane Byrne’s foray into Cabrini-Green,Her Honor, Jane Byrne. “It’s like asking a Chicagoan about Michael Jordan,” she says. “It was beautifully shot, thoughtfully done and terrifying.”
Brooks also says the mythology at the center of the film was not dissimilar to stories she heard growing up living right outside the Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project on the south side. “The folklore could actually save your life,” she says. “For example, ‘Do not go under the viaduct west of Comiskey Park unless there’s a White Sox Game.’ You grew up thinking the boogie man was all over Chicago—and for the most part, it was true.”
Others were wary about the way that the film fed into prevailing stereotypes about public housing. “Projects were so misunderstood and vilified,” the Chicago-based author and scholar Ytasha Womack says. “Their vilification was almost a reflection of the failures of social services to help support people when they were put in those places.”
Teddy Williams saw the film while living in Cabrini-Green, and says that conversations he had about the film at the time there were mostly positive. “I think the community was mostly okay with the movie, because it put us on the map again,” he says. “The only thing we would talk about is that Candyman could never live over here and do what he was doing, because he would get f-cked up.”
Candymanopened on Oct 16, 1992. Three days prior, the 7-year-old Dantrell Davis was shot to death by a local gang member in Cabrini-Green while walking to school. The incident made national headlines and shook the community to its core, with local gangs entering a truce. The historian Ben Austen says that the combination of those two concurrent events only exacerbated anxious views from public officials about the inner city that were circulating at the time—and could have played an implicit role in the demolishing of Cabrini-Green. “This is the same time as the crack epidemic, the image of gangs wilding in Central Park, John DiIulio talking about superpredators,” he says. “This mythology takes real world effect and shapes policy—and we get isolation, demolition and mass incarceration.”
In 1999, Chicago Mayer Richard M. Daley and the Chicago Housing Authority kicked off a $1.6 billion Plan For Transformation, in which they sought to rip down public housing across the city, build or rehabilitate25,000 new public units, and turn the land over to eager developers. Daley said that that mixed-income would take the place of slums and said of the relocated, “I want to rebuild their souls.”
But historians and community members say that the transition was mishandled. “It was a human rights disaster,” Austen says. Residents were forced out of the homes and support systems that had kept them upright for decades; the section eight vouchers they received often pushed them to poorer, more segregated areas of the city. And despite all the headlines about Cabrini-Green being an uninhabitable place, a group of residentsactually unsuccessfully sued to stay there.
One of the residents who hoped to stay was Williams. When his tower came down in 2011, he didn’t receive a voucher, since he was living with his mother at the time. Unsure of where to go, Williams says he was homeless for about three years, staying on the couches of friends and family or riding the trains. He got a job as a barber and slept in the salon basement until he was able to afford his own place; he now lives in Oak Park, Illinois. “It was kind of a rough transition,” he says.
The area is now gentrified, covered with gleaming offices and condos and fancy restaurants. While Mayor Daley said that the new developments would include plenty of affordable housing for residents to return to the neighborhood, the 15,000 promised family units in the city overall pale in comparison to the city’s actual need.When the CHA opened its public-housing waiting list in 2010, more than 215,000 families applied.
“It was just like, ‘We’re going to bring upper class people here—we don’t need riffraff around here, causing trouble,’’” Williams says.
Tim Boyle/Getty ImagesResidents walk past one of the few remaining Chicago Housing Authority Cabrini-Green public housing buildings in 2005.
Reclaiming history through film
The filmmaker Nia DaCosta isn’t from Chicago; she grew up in Harlem, and says that seeingCandymanas a child was “the first time that what was happening in a horror film could absolutely happen to me. Candyman was actually just over there, across the street.”
But even though there were similarities between Harlem and Cabrini-Green, DaCosta made it an utmost priority of herCandymansequel to learn about the neighborhood’s specific history through historians and residents. DaCosta says that she and her team talked to dozens of locals about their experiences, who emphasized similar aspects as Teddy Williams did—of pride and community. “We wanted to take that pride and expand it as opposed to chip away at it,” DaCosta says. “We wanted to show this amazing sense of community and the way people took care of each other and looked after each other. And even when we introduceCandyman, it’s not the monster we think it is.”
Candymanwasshot on-location, including in some Cabrini-Green row-houses that are still standing. (They also used CGI to recreate the torn-down towers.) “There are certainly places you can use to fake Chicago, and shoot something that would be more inexpensive,” Win Rosenfield, a co-writer and co-producer on the film, says. “But that was never a question. We always felt it was important that this film, like its predecessor, live in Cabrini-Green and relate to the people of Chicago in an intimate way.”
So, the film’s cast includes local actors, like J. Nicole Brooks; presents explicit conversations about gentrification, erasure and neglect; and also mentions the names embedded in Cabrini-Green’s history, including Dantrell Davis and Girl X, who wasraped and torturedin Cabrini-Green in 1997. Their names are invoked by the character William Burke, who laments how their stories have been forgotten before referring to theCandymancharacter Helen Lyle: “A white woman dies and the story lives on forever.”
“When people think about Cabrini-Green, they think about this fake thing as opposed to the real children who were harmed there,” DaCosta says. “Fiction tends to spread farther than nonfiction—and as a filmmaker, it’s important to be cognizant of not perpetuating the same old stories.”
One way that DaCosta tried to tell a real story of erasure embedded in her genre piece was by shooting at theNorthside Stranger’s Home Missionary Baptist Churchon the corner of Clybourn Avenue and Larrabee Street. It once was a flourishing community center that displayed a vibrant 1972 mural called “All of Mankind” by William Walker, a Chicagoan known as the father of the urban art movement.
But once the neighborhood started to change, the church lost its constituency and was shuttered. In 2015, the lot went up for sale for potential use as a single-use family home, and themural was whitewashed over, to the dismay of preservationists. In 2018 the lot sold for $750,000 to a private bidder. But before it was converted, the new owners allowed DaCosta to shoot inside the church forCandyman’s pivotal scene.
“It was completely rundown and toxic fumes and mold and all this terrible stuff,” DaCosta says. “Part of the reason why we wanted to shoot there was because we’d seen these amazing pictures of the beautiful mural, and people on the right outside in their Sunday best. It really was a symbol of what had been erased. “
DaCosta hopes that her newCandymanwill both provide big scares in theaters while also forcing audience goers to reckon with the impacts of displacement and gentrification. Meanwhile, in real life, some of the old residents of Cabrini-Green have been able to move back into the newly refurbished neighborhood—but say they face discrimination and complaints from thenew, wealthier residents. Many more are still shut out, including Williams, who is holding out hope that he might be able to someday return. “Even though it had rough patches, we had love for our community,” he says. “Even if they didn’t upgrade anything, I wouldn’t mind going back to my neighborhood.”
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Sometimes a movie arrives at just the right time, as if it were reading society’s collective mind. Candyman, directed by Nia DaCosta, and written by DaCosta, Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld, is one of those movies, a story rippling with ideas that many thinking people are already grappling with—or at least have finally become aware of.
This isn’t a remake of the 1992 film, directed by Bernard Rose and starring Virginia Madsen; instead, its creators have called it “a spiritual sequel,” a description that fits the bill. If the earlier movie featured a white woman “trying to understand” certain fears and coping mechanisms in a specific Black community—Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects, whose demolition began in 1995—it was still almost all about her. The figure at the heart of this new Candyman, which uses the earlier film as a foundation, is an up-and-coming Chicago painter, Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who’s struggling to find his voice as an artist and yearning for recognition. His sudden obsession with the urban legend Candyman jolts his canvases to life—though it may not be the kind of life he wants.
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If you’ve never seen the original film, you may have no idea who Candyman is. In that case, the only directive is to never say his name five times while looking in the mirror, or he’ll appear behind you, a murderous-seeming Black man in a long coat, with a hook where his right hand should be. Though this figure is fearsome—invented at least partly, so the lore goes, to keep kids on their best behavior—his story, as Rose’s movie first outlined it, is tragic: He’s the ghost of a man who was murdered by white people in the 1890s because he dared to fall in love with a white woman. The new Candyman expands on that premise: there are actually many Candymen who were similarly murdered, and who return in this particular form to wreak vengeance. As a local laundromat proprietor William Burke (Colman Domingo), who had his own run-in with Candyman as a child, explains to Anthony, “Candyman is how we deal with the fact that these things happened. That they’re still happening.”
Universal PicturesColman Domingo in Candyman
Candyman spins out a lot of ideas at once: Anthony lives with his girlfriend, Brianna (Teyonah Parris), who’s a massively successful art curator. Their home is a jaw-dropping luxury loft that she pays for, and Abdul-Mateen conveys, subtly, how this rankles Anthony’s masculine pride. He wants to make his own way, and he yearns for success—things any artist might want, but a longing that’s likely even more pronounced among Black artists and other people of color.
Anthony’s fame escalates after one of his paintings plays a role in the death of a gallery owner; he knows he’s becoming famous for the wrong reasons, but he’ll take it anyway. And though he’s trim and handsome at the beginning of the story—he has plenty of time to work out—Anthony’s frame becomes more lumbering and twisted as his Candyman obsession intensifies. There’s a fair amount of body horror here, beginning with a bee-stung hand that continues to fester and flake. And if the plot is perhaps slightly overcomplicated, it’s for the most part thoughtfully worked out. It also makes room for actor Tony Todd, reprising the role he played in the earlier film, a respectful nod to the way movies take root in our consciousness.
Periodically throughout the movie, the Candyman legend is unfurled for us in a series of beautifully executed sequences of shadow puppetry. These mini plays-within-the-play, created by Chicago collective Manual Cinema and evoking the bracing silhouette work of Kara Walker, as well as the delicate innovations of animator Lotte Reiniger, are both discreet and direct in the way they depict the atrocities suffered by the men who will ultimately take the form of Candyman. Simultaneously captivating and mournful, they’re so effective they could constitute a mini-movie by themselves. Candyman is a work held together by thoughtful choices, and it has a lot to say. Genre conventions are themselves like urban legends, a framework that each new generation adds to and builds upon. Candyman is just one reason we continue to believe in them.
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We are in a planetary emergency. Horrific heat waves and fires blaze across North America, Turkey and Russia. Extreme floods wreak destruction and cause death from Europe to Africa to Asia. Ocean temperatures and the amount of carbon in our atmosphere have reached unprecedented highs. July was the hottest month in recorded history. Our planet, as the United Nations recently warned, is flashing a “code red for humanity.”
There is no single solution to a crisis this large. Nations must fulfill the commitments they made under the Paris Agreement. Industries need to decarbonize, and businesses—especially the Fortune 1000—need to achieve net zero emissions. We need to empower a new generation of ecopreneurs—entrepreneurs focused on protecting our planet—to unleash innovative climate solutions. In our own lives, we need to adapt our lifestyles and consumption patterns.
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None of these climate solutions are mutually exclusive. We need them all. If we are to save our planet—and ourselves—from irreversible climate change, we need to recruit everyone, everywhere in this mission.
This includes embracing a powerful climate solution that can be delivered by anyone, anywhere: trees.
Trees are our planet’s natural air purifiers—the single most effective “device” we have to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. In the U.S., for example, forests capture and store almost 15 percent of our carbon dioxide emissions every year—equivalent to the annual emissions from 163 million cars.
Tragically, we are losing trees at the very moment we need them most. Every six seconds, our planet loses a football pitch worth of tropical rainforest to deforestation. Forests in colder regions are losing millions of acres to drought, pests and wildfire worsened by climate change, and our rapidly growing cities are often losing the natural cooling of trees.
That’s why, last year, we helped launch a new global partnership with a bold new climate action goal—conserving, restoring and growing 1 trillion trees by 2030. Why a trillion? Because cutting-edge scientific analysis, led by the Crowther Lab, has identified enough ecologically suitable land around the world to help achieve this goal with reforestation. By some estimates, a trillion trees could sequester some 200 gigatons of carbon over their lifetimes—equal to the annual emissions from more than 43 billion cars.
When we announced our trillion-tree goal last year, some skeptics dismissed our work as misguided or unrealistic. But the past year has proven that progress is possible. Great Britain, Canada, the U.S., the E.U., China, India, Pakistan and Colombia have committed to plant billions of trees. Partnerships with indigenous communities aim to permanently conserve the planet-protecting forests and biodiversity of the Amazon Basin and the Sahel. Conservation efforts that have removed the world’s second largest rainforest—the Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo—from the endangered list show what’s possible.
In its inaugural year, the U.S. chapter of 1t.org has secured pledges from more than 70 U.S. cities and states, companies and NGOs to conserve, restore and grow over 50 billion trees in the U.S. and abroad by 2030, and invest billions of dollars in workforce development, carbon finance and technology.
Now, as the world comes together next month for Global Citizen Live to rally the international community to address climate change and defeat poverty, and prepares for the pivotal United Nations climate change conference in November, we have the opportunity to spark a truly global effort.
This is a movement that everyone can join.
Every national, state, provincial or local government can make a commitment, like the State of Wisconsin, which will conserve and plant a total of 89 million trees, and the City of Dallas, which will conserve and plant more than 18 million trees.
Every business, large and small, can take action, like Mastercard, Salesforce and Aspiration, which have each committed to planting or protecting 100 million trees.
Every group that cares about our planet can set a goal, following the lead of Eden Reforestation and Sustainable Harvest International, which will plant billions of trees in developing nations, and diverse non-profits reforesting landscapes across America, from abandoned mine lands in West Virginia to burn scars in California.
Every community group can do something, like Girl Scout Troop 4 in Orange, New Jersey that planted 50 dogwood trees as part of the new Girl Scouts Tree Promise to plant five million trees.
Planting one trillion trees won’t be easy. It will depend on all of us taking action in our countries, our companies and our communities. And at a time when it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the relentless news of our changing climate, it’s something we have the power to do—right now. As the legendary conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall has said, “Now is the time for everyone on the planet to do their part.”
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A suicide attack outside Kabul’s airport Thursday killed at least 2 people and wounded 15, Russian officials said. Large crowds of people have massed outside the airport as they try to flee the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
Western nations had warned earlier in the day of a possible attack at the airport in the waning days of a massive airlift. Suspicion for any attack targeting the crowds would likely fall on the Islamic State group and not the Taliban, who have been deployed at the airport’s gates trying to control the mass of people.
The Pentagon confirmed the blast, and Russian Foreign Ministry gave the official casualty count.
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The explosion went off in a crowd of people waiting to enter the airport, according to Adam Khan, an Afghan waiting nearby. He said several people appeared to have been killed or wounded, including some who lost body parts.
Several countries urged people to avoid the airport earlier in the day, with one saying there was a threat of a suicide bombing. But just days—or even hours for some nations—before the evacuation effort ends, few appeared to heed the call.
Over the last week, the airport has been the scene of some of the most searing images of the chaotic end of America’s longest war and the Taliban’s takeover, as flight after flight took off carrying those who fear a return to the militants’ brutal rule.
Already, some countries have ended their evacuations and begun to withdraw their soldiers and diplomats, signaling the beginning of the end of one of history’s largest airlifts. The Taliban have pledged not to attack Western forces during the evacuation, but insist the foreign troops must be out by America’s self-imposed deadline of Aug. 31.
Overnight, warnings emerged from Western capitals about a threat from Afghanistan’s Islamic State group affiliate, which likely has seen its ranks boosted by the Taliban’s freeing of prisoners during their blitz across the country.
British Armed Forces Minister James Heappey told the BBC early Thursday there was ”very, very credible reporting of an imminent attack” at the airport, possibly within “hours.” Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said his country had received information from the U.S. and other countries about the “threat of suicide attacks on the mass of people.”
The acting U.S. ambassador to Kabul, Ross Wilson, said the security threat at the Kabul airport overnight was “clearly regarded as credible, as imminent, as compelling.” But in an interview with ABC News, he would not give details and did not say whether the threat remained.
A while later, the blast was reported. U.S. President Joe Biden has been briefed on the explosion, the White House says.
Late Wednesday, the U.S. Embassy warned citizens at three airport gates to leave immediately due to an unspecified security threat. Australia, Britain and New Zealand also advised their citizens Thursday not to go to the airport, with Australia’s foreign minister saying there was a “very high threat of a terrorist attack.”
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid denied that any attack was imminent in the wake of those warnings.
Earlier Thursday, the Taliban sprayed a water cannon at those gathered at one airport gate to try to drive the crowd away, as someone launched tear gas canisters elsewhere.
Nadia Sadat, a 27-year-old Afghan, carried her 2-year-old daughter with her outside the airport. She and her husband, who had worked with coalition forces, missed a call from a number they believed was the State Department and were trying to get into the airport without any luck. Her husband had pressed ahead in the crowd to try to get them inside.
“We have to find a way to evacuate because our lives are in danger,” Sadat said. “My husband received several threatening messages from unknown sources. We have no chance except escaping.”
Gunshots later echoed in the area as Sadat waited. “There is anarchy because of immense crowds,” she said, blaming the U.S. for the chaos.
Aman Karimi, 50, escorted his daughter and her family to the airport, fearful the Taliban would target her because of her husband’s work with NATO.
“The Taliban have already begun seeking those who have worked with NATO,” he said. “They are looking for them house-by-house at night.”
Many Afghans share those fears. The hard-line Islamic group wrested back control of the country nearly 20 years after being ousted in a U.S.-led invasion following the 9/11 attacks, which al-Qaida orchestrated while being sheltered by the group.
Senior U.S. officials said Wednesday’s warning from the embassy was related to specific threats involving the Islamic State group and potential vehicle bombs. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss ongoing military operations.
The Taliban have fought against Islamic State militants in Afghanistan. But IS fighters were likely freed from prisons along with other inmates during the Taliban’s rapid advance. Extremists may have seized heavy weapons and equipment abandoned by Afghan troops.
Amid the warnings and the pending American withdrawal, Canada ended its evacuations, and European nations halted or prepared to stop their own operations.
“The reality on the ground is the perimeter of the airport is closed. The Taliban have tightened the noose. It’s very, very difficult for anybody to get through at this point,” said Canadian General Wayne Eyre, the country’s acting Chief of Defense Staff.
Lt. Col. Georges Eiden, Luxembourg’s army representative in neighboring Pakistan, said that Friday would mark the official end for U.S. allies. But two Biden administration officials denied that was the case.
A third official said that the U.S. worked with its allies to coordinate each country’s departure, and some nations asked for more time and were granted it.
“Most depart later in the week,” he said, while adding that some were stopping operations Thursday. All three officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the information publicly.
French Prime Minister Jean Castex told RTL radio his country’s efforts would stop Friday evening. Danish Defense Minister Trine Bramsen bluntly warned: “It is no longer safe to fly in or out of Kabul.”
Denmark’s last flight has already departed, and Poland and Belgium have also announced the end of their evacuations. The Dutch government said it had been told by the U.S. to leave Thursday.
But Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said some planes would continue to fly.
“Evacuation operations in Kabul will not be wrapping up in 36 hours. We will continue to evacuate as many people as we can until the end of the mission,” he said in a tweet.
The Taliban have said they’ll allow Afghans to leave via commercial flights after the deadline next week, but it remains unclear which airlines would return to an airport controlled by the militants. Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said talks were underway between his country and the Taliban about allowing Turkish civilian experts to help run the facility.
The Taliban have promised to return Afghanistan to security and pledged they won’t seek revenge on those who opposed them or roll back progress on human rights. But many Afghans are skeptical.
Ziar Yad, an Afghan journalist from private broadcaster Tolo News, said Taliban fighters beat him and his colleague and confiscated their cameras, technical equipment and a mobile phone as they tried to report on poverty in Kabul.
“The issue has been shared with Taliban leaders; however, the perpetrators have not yet been arrested, which is a serious threat to freedom of expression,” Yad wrote on Twitter.
—With reporting from Joseph Krauss, Sylvie Corbet, Jan M. Olsen, Tameem Akhgar, Andrew Wilks, James LaPorta, Mike Corder, Philip Crowther, Colleen Barry, Aamer Madhani and Robert Burns.
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Aug. 20 was a good day in the pediatric intensive care unit at Children’s Hospital New Orleans. Carvase Perrilloux, a two-month-old baby who’d come in about a week earlier with respiratory syncytial virus and COVID-19, was finally ready to breathe without the ventilator keeping his tiny body alive. “You did it!” nurses in PPE cooed as they removed the tube from his airway and he took his first solo gasp, bare toes kicking.
Downstairs, Quintetta Edwards was preparing for her 17-year-old son, Nelson Alexis III, to be discharged after spending more than two weeks in the hospital with COVID-19—first in the ICU, then stabilizing on an acute-care floor. “Fortunately, he never regressed,” Edwards says from outside Nelson’s room, the door marked with signs warning of potential COVID-19 exposure inside. “He’s progressing, slowly but surely.”
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The nurses and doctors who care for the sickest patients at Children’s Hospital New Orleans (CHNO) have to take the good where they can these days. On Aug. 6, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards announced that more than 3,000 children statewide had been diagnosed with COVID-19 over the course of just four days. That same week, about a quarter of Louisiana children tested for COVID-19 by the state’s largest health system turned out to have the virus.
Kathleen Flynn for TIMEMedical workers line a hall at Children’s Hospital New Orleans. The hospital has hired about 150 new nurses to help manage high patient counts.
Seventy young patients ended up in treatment at CHNO during the 30 days ending Aug. 23. Prior to this summer, the hospital had never had to care for more than seven COVID-19 patients at a time, and usually fewer than that; on any given day in August, that number has been at least in the mid-teens, enough that the facility had to call in a medical strike team from Rhode Island to help manage the surge.
CHNO isn’t alone. The extra-transmissible Delta variant has ushered in a new chapter of the pandemic. For the first time, pediatric hospitals are struggling to treat the number of young patients developing severe cases of COVID-19.A record highof more than 1,900 children were hospitalized nationwide on Aug. 14—and unlike during previous spikes, infections have so far been clustered largely in states with low vaccine coverage, meaning hospitals in undervaccinated states like Louisiana,Florida,Tennessee,AlabamaandTexasare drowning. “Our hospital system across Alabama is beyond capacity. Last week we had net negative ICU beds, and that’s pediatric and adult together,” says Dr. David Kimberlin, co-director of the division of pediatric infectious diseases at Children’s of Alabama. “Doctors are doing CPR in the back of pickup trucks.”
This grim scenario may seem shocking, given one of the pandemic’s long-standing silver linings: that children, for the most part, are spared from the worst of COVID-19. About 400 children nationwide have died from COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and most pediatric hospitals have seen no more than a handful of patients at a time—which makes the current surge in the South and parts of the Midwest especially unnerving.
There is no evidence that the Delta variant is causing more severe disease than previous strains, says Dr. Sean O’Leary, vice chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) committee on infectious diseases. Less than 2% of children who have caught COVID-19 during this wave landed in the hospital—roughly the same percentage as during earlier phases of the pandemic, according to a TIME analysis of AAP and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services data. An even smaller percentage of children die from the disease, though some have gone on to develop complications like the inflammatory condition MIS-C.
Kathleen Flynn for TIMETwo-month-old Carvase Perrilloux undergoes an extubation procedure, taking him off of the ventilator that has been keeping him alive.
The difference seems to be that the highly contagious Delta strain is tearing through all demographic groups at a furious clip, currently contributing to the more than 140,000 infections reported in the U.S. on any given day. It’s a depressing numbers game: If 100 children become infected, one or two might end up in the hospital. Push the caseload up to 180,000—the number of kids diagnosed with the virus nationwide during the week ending Aug. 19—and at least 1,800 are likely to get sick enough to need hospitalization.
Children have also drawn a short straw. Viruses are wily, seeking out and infecting vulnerable hosts at all costs. Without authorized vaccines for people younger than 12, any child who has not previously been infected has no immunity against SARS-CoV-2, meaning the virus effectively has free rein among America’s 50 million youngest residents. Even among older children who can get vaccinated, rates are low: just 35% of 12- to 15-year-olds and 45% of 16- and 17-year-olds are fully vaccinated, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
While each individual child has a low chance of developing severe disease, the current pediatric surge, which has been compounded by an off-season spike in RSV and parainfluenza cases, has grave implications for health care networks. Even before the pandemic, health care access was a struggle in parts of the South and Midwest. In Arkansas, for example, there is only one pediatric hospital system to serve the state’s more than 3 million residents. A rural hospital could have fewer than 10 ICU beds, meaning even a small coronavirus surge could push it beyond its limits. “Down here in the deep South, we are getting slammed to the point where, honestly, our health systems may collapse,” Kimberlin says. “What that means is, if you have a stroke, you die at home.”
There’s a reasonpediatric ICUs are dangerously full in Tennessee and Texas but, at least at the moment, not Maryland and Massachusetts. In each of the latter two states, more than 60% of residents are fully vaccinated; in the former, about 41% and 46%, respectively. States with high vaccination rates also tend to be more aggressive about other precautions, like indoor mask mandates.
There are exceptions—pediatric hospitalizations are ticking up in California (151 admissions this week vs. 68 a month ago) and New York (46 vs. 20 a month ago), two states with high vaccine coverage—and no one can predict what the virus will do in the future. But it stands to reason that more kids are getting sick in states like Louisiana, where only about 40% of the population is fully vaccinated and more than 4,600 new diagnoses are being reported among its 4.6 million residents each day. “Kids don’t tend to drive what’s going on; they tend to reflect what’s going on in the surrounding community,” O’Leary says.
That children are largely at the mercy of the adults in their communities is one of the cruelest quirks of this surge. “It’s hard, because you don’t want to be judgmental” of people who haven’t gotten the shot, says Dr. Michael Blancaneaux, an emergency medicine physician at CHNO.
Kathleen Flynn for TIMEJillian Nickerson tries to fix a stuck door in a newly opened room in the emergency department at Children’s Hospital New Orleans on Aug. 20, while Paul Decerbo from the Rhode Island-1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team looks on.
But it’s also clear, he says, that the decisions of unvaccinated adults are endangering the lives of children who couldn’t be vaccinated even if they wanted to be. While many CHNO staff members are careful to say vaccination is a personal choice, there’s a discernible subtext beneath their politeness: they wish more people in the community would choose to vaccinate themselves and their families. For the doctors who treat young patients—and who are exhausted from worrying about COVID-19 for, as Blancaneaux says, what feels like forever—learning that their families are unvaccinated, or failing to take other precautions, is a bitter pill to swallow, and one that makes it difficult to keep going about their essential work unfazed. Indeed, a sign hanging in CHNO’s emergency-department bathroom directs staff to “wipe away tears” before returning to work.
“How do you try to tell someone why they should care about the life of a child?” Alabama’s Kimberlin asks. “I don’t know.”
Paul Decerbo has been a member of the Rhode Island-1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team for more than 10 years, long enough to become the squad’s commander. Three months out of each year, when there’s an emergency anywhere in the U.S., Decerbo knows he may have to prepare himself and a team of on-call medics, nurses and doctors to ship out to the scene of the crisis for two weeks. Sometimes, that’s the site of a natural disaster. For the last 18 months, it’s mostly been wherever COVID-19 cases are surging and local hospitals are at their breaking points.
Decerbo deployed six times last year. But when he got a call from CHNO this summer, asking for people who could help treat emergency-department patients, he faced a new challenge. He’d need an entire team of people ready to treat COVID-19 patients and trained in pediatrics—something not required during prior coronavirus surges, when the vast majority of patients were adults. Ultimately, he had to look beyond Rhode Island and assemble a squad of health-care workers from multiple states to meet that need.
Kathleen Flynn for TIMENelson Alexis III, 17, undergoes respiratory therapy in his room at Children’s Hospital New Orleans. Nelson, who has Down syndrome, was diagnosed with the virus in late July.
CHNO’s resident staffers weren’t quite prepared for the uptick in pediatric cases, either. “It was a shock,” Blancaneaux says. After a year of few-and-far-between cases in the pediatric hospital, “All of a sudden, eight out of the 20 patients I saw [in a day] were COVID positive.” It’s gotten to the point, he says, where doctors assume any patient who comes in with flu-like symptoms has COVID-19.
The hospital’s quiet atmosphere hides the work happening behind the scenes to keep pace with that increase. CHNO has implemented an incentive program to encourage current staff nurses to pick up extra shifts, and has hired about 150 new nurses to help manage the patient load.
Perhaps more concerning, the current spike began in July, before most schools in Louisiana had started back up. As the school year continues, Delta will almost undoubtedly find new footholds. No one wants to consider what happens if this is the ascent of a bell curve, rather than the peak—particularly since vaccines for the youngest Americans may not be available until late 2021 or early 2022.
Even once the shots are authorized, children too young to consent to treatment will be reliant on their parents’ willingness to get them vaccinated. That’s a troubling prospect since, in a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey, only 26% of parents with kids ages 5 to 11, and 20% of those with kids younger than 5, said they would vaccinate their children right away.
Kathleen Flynn for TIMEA sign inside an emergency-department restroom at Children’s Hospital New Orleans. “Everyone is frustrated and worn out and upset,” emergency-medicine physician Dr. Michael Blancaneaux says.
In some cases, that may be because parents still do not believe young children need to be vaccinated, considering their low odds of dying or becoming hospitalized. But there are always exceptions to rules, and they’re showing up every day in pediatric ICUs. Jordan Ohlsen, a nurse who works on CHNO’s acute-care floor, says some parents don’t realize how serious the virus can be until their child is the one in a hospital bed. “Once the child does get sick, their [parents’] conception of what the virus is [changes],” Ohlsen says. “When they come in and see their kid sick, in their brain it switches to, ‘This is something I should be worried about,’ or ‘I should have gotten them vaccinated.’”
If there is any optimism buried within the current pediatric surge, it’s that perhaps some parents will have that realization before their child gets sick, rather than after. But with vaccine authorization for young children at least a few months away, the immediate battle is in convincing adults to get their shots, thereby hopefully driving down the total amount of virus circulating in each community. Delta seems to be scaring at least some holdouts into action. On average, more than 700,000 people in the U.S. are now getting a COVID-19 vaccine each day, a higher number than the country has reported since June. But there’s a long way to go, and not a lot of time to travel it.
Particularly in areas where infection rates are high, health officials must encourage people to go back to basics, the AAP’s O’Leary says. New Orleans, for its part, has reimplemented mask mandates and now requires proof of vaccination or a negative test from anyone who wants to visit an indoor bar, restaurant or music venue, lending a somewhat subdued air to many parts of the usually buoyant city.
“Use the mitigation measures we know work,” O’Leary says. “Wear masks when you’re around other people, particularly in enclosed spaces….Avoid places where lots of people are congregating.”
Kathleen Flynn for TIMECatherine Perrilloux holds the hand of her two-month-old baby, Carvase Perrilloux.
Unless and until health officials can convince a tired and disillusioned populace to return to precautions they wanted to leave in the past, COVID-19 will keep spreading. A small number of patients, no matter how young, will land in the hospital. And day after day, health care workers will don their gas-mask-like respirators, gowns and goggles to care for them, many worrying all the while about bringing COVID-19 home to their own children.
The staff at CHNO makes a valiant effort to stay positive and keep smiling beneath their masks—a trait, perhaps, of choosing to work in pediatrics. But Blancaneaux admits it can be difficult this far into a pandemic, when the tools for ending it are in nearly every drugstore in the country. “Everyone is frustrated and worn out and upset,” he says. “You feel unsupported by the public because we keep fighting against it. And a large part of it is preventable.”
—With reporting by Emily Barone
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