to learn more, visit safetyactioncenter.pge.c >> this is pbs newshour weekend, captioning sponsored by wnet >> hill: on this edition for saturday, august 21: evacuation efforts in afghanistan continue. the northeast braces for severe weather. and, a week after the deadly earthquake in haiti, survivors seek relief. next, on pbs newshour weekend. >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: sue and edgar wachenheim iii. bernard and denise schwartz. the cheryl and philip milstein family. the anderson family fund. the estate of worthington mayo-smith. leonard and norma klorfine. the rosalind p. walter

foundation. koo and patricia yuen, committeto bridging cultural differences in our communies. barbara hope zuckerberg. we try to live in the moment, to not miss what's right in front of us. at mutual of america, we believe taking care of tomorrow can help you make the most of today. mutual of america financial group, retirement services and investments. >> for 25 years, consumer cellular's goal has been to provide wireless service that helps people communicate and connect. we offer a variety of no-contract plans, and our u.s.-based customer service team can help find one that fits you. to learn more, visit www.consumercellular.tv. additional support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the american people. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

>> hill: good eveng, and thank you for joining us. i'm michael hill. harireenivasan is off this weekend. day, the u.s. state department advised americans in afghanistan not to travel to the kabul airport unless contacted by the u.s. embassy, citing potential security threats outside the gates. but evacuations, including of americans, are continuing. in the week since the taliban took control of the country, out 17,000 people have been airlifted, including about 2,50americans, according to pentagon officials. outside of the airport's gates, thousands of afghans have crowded the area, looking for a way out of the country. as chaos around the airport and evacuations continue, taliban co-founder and political chief mullah baradar is now in the afghan capital. a taliban spokesperson said he is in kabul to begin talks about forming a new government. >> hill: i spoke with newshour correspondent jane ferguson earlier today-- it was after 9:00 p.m. in afghanistan.

she is reporting from kabul, with the support of the pulitzer center. jane, the u.s. allowed you in on their side today. what did you see there? >> they wanted us to see with our own eyes, people were boarding these flights, and with relative regularity. so we saw people lining up as they were getting onto the c-17s on the tarmac. we also saw some pretty remarkable and touching, and quite sad scenes of young children that had been separated from their parents, and that were basically being-- were in the care of the u.s. military. and this has been an increasing problem because of those chaotic scenes of crowds, of people, some getting trampled, some families getting separated. outside of the compound, an increasing problem is children just being found by soldiers, by american soldiers, or people handing their children to a soldier, to get them out of the crush of the crowd. and so they end up with-- with children, from anything from tiny tots to teenage boys, where they just can't find their parents. we were basically brought

through to a medical facility where we were looking at what facilities they had, and the capabilities they had to treat the injured. whenever we came across a bunch of little kids who were in the care of the u.s. military, on the backs of their hands, they had in black marker "u.s.a." written on them. but they were frantically trying to find their parents, and they believe that their parents may have already been basically shuffled onto a flight and they are either en route to the united states or there already. so now they have the task of trying to reunite these children with their parents. and one of the most tragic scenes i've seen today-- on some of the wire fencing that has been put up, a missing sign with cell phone numbers and a picture of a little girl. so that's one of the reasons that people are becoming more cautious about whether or not they should come. they call us before they come, saying, how dangerous is it? can i bring my kids? because people are getting separated from them and struggling to find tm.

>> hill: jane, we also have been hearing that the u.s. embassy had instructed americans not to go to the airport unlesshey were instructed to go. >> that's likely in response to exactly those images and that situation that-- that is there. it's just not safe. you've got bullets being fired in the air, you know, tear gas, smoke bombs. panicd, panicked civilians, many whom are being personally attacked by the taliban. their way of crowd control seems to just be simply lashing out and beating people with sticks and whips. and so it is the kind of nightmarish, almost combat-like situation in the street. but what's most dangerous is humans being crushed by other humans. it's effectively the kind of crowd control nightmare of people being suffocated or tramed. that's a very serious threat to people there. so it makes sense that the u.s. embassy would say, you know, come whenever you're asked to come, because they're desperately trying to control the flow of people. but, of course, that's just

pushinback against a very natural sense of panic that people don't want to miss the last flight out. >> hill: i'm curious, what are the expectations for the next couple of days,he next few days? >> i don't think anybody's expecting this to wrap up anytime soon. whenever you look at the crowds that are outside and the people that are begging for help and who are genuinely showing up with evidence of having worked with foreigners, i think that-- that these flights are likely to have to continue. it seems as though there's still a degree of cooperation between taliban fighters, or commanders, and the u.s. and nato allied forces here, so, that does bode well for these flights to continue. i saw myself today, when i was up on the road where people were coming in, and we saw massive crowds of people desperately trying to get into the airport. i saw one taliban commander come over and stand for quite a long time, having a heated discussion through an interpreter with a british commander, discussing what's the best way to do crowd control. and so these are bizarre and

surreal scenes, but they're certainly important to making sure that the kind of cooperation that is needed continue so that these flights can continue. so i think there are definitely, at least for the next few days, going to continue like this, and potentially for longer. >> hill: and jane, is there any sense that more relief is coming, more flights, more evacuations, to get more people out of harm's way, and sooner? >> i think what's one of the major-- major priorities right now is figuring out where people will go. you know, there were reports not too long ago, earlier this morning, that effectively, the flights that were stopping in qatar-- in the qatari capital of doha, where people were being sorted, many of them before they went on to the united states-- that they no longer had the capacity to really hold any more people. so i think that's wh's going to be the top priority right now, is going to be, how, where are we going to get people out to, wherever we just need to get them off the ground here? and once that has been resolved, then, yes, you're likely to see more flights, especially if the

landing strips and the tarmac remains clear of people. >> hill: correspondent jane ferguson for us this evening in afghanistan. thank you. >> thank you. >> hill: for more national and international news visit www.pbs.org/newshour. >> hill: the northeast is preparing for hurricane henri after it was upgraded from a tropical storm this morning. according to the national hurricane center, henri is expected to make landfall somewhe between long island, new york and southern new england tomorrow with heavy rain and high winds predicted. parts of new york and connecticut are under hurricane and storm surge warnings, with some areas in new england under surge and tropical storm watches and warnings. in mexico, hurricane grace hit the country for a second time in two days, as the category 3 storm battered the gulf coast with torrential rain and strong winds. the national hurricane center said grace made landfall early

this morning packing sustained winds of 125 miles per hour. by mid-morning, grace had weakened to a tropical storm as it moved west. forecasters expect the storm to dump between six and 12 inches of rain bringing the risk of flash flooding and mudslides. a week after a 7.2-magnitude earthquake hit the caribbean nation of haiti, residents are still reeling from the devastating disaster that killed more than 2,000 people. crowds gathered around distribution sites athey waited for the delivery of desperately needed food supplies. aid is trickling into the hardest-hit southwest region, and on friday, some residents were seen taking food out of trucks before they reached distribution sites. those injured by the earthquake are still being brought into hospitals. some medical centers, overwhelmed by the number of patients are ferrying patients to the capital port-au-prince. >> hill: for more on haiti's efforts to assist survivors of the earthquake, newshour

weekend's ivette feliciano spoke with dr. jean pape, director of the gheskio center, who has been on the front lines of many of haiti's calamities. >> reporter: dr. pape, since the 1970s, you have been on the front lines of haiti's ever-changing public health crises and climate disasters, from the early days of the aids epidemic to the 2010 earthquake. how do those experiences help you and your team at gheskio in a moment like this? >> i think it's been very helpful. it's unfortunate for our country; it's another very sad day for haiti. but for us, it brought a lot of experience, because every single time there's been a catastrophe, we have learned from it. we've learned, for instance, that you need to bring surgical services as early as possible. that's essential. u'll have critical bone fractures. you will have head fractures of

multiple head trauma. you'll have abdominal trauma. and you need to take care of those very, very, very fast. so the other thing that's essential is the fact that you have a lot of people who have lost their home and they have no place to go. so when you admit them in a hospital, you care for them. then after that, they cannot go anywhere. they have no home. and what we did at our site, where i'm talking from right now in port-au-prince, was that we had a structure for recovery. and we help people stay there a little longer than they would normally, but enough so that we could, in the meantime, arrange for them to have a decent place to stay. >> reporter: dr. pape, i know that your team works very closely with the immaculate conception hospital in les cayes, which is the largest public health hospital in the region that was most

impacted by the earthquake. what are you hearing from your contacts on the ground, and what's the suation there right now? >> well, i think that they have done a fantastic job. the first two days were hectic because they were-- they were having a lot of people coming in and they were short of staff. but since they've had 12 orthopedic surgeons that have been coming and they are helping to treat hospitals in the area, that has helped a lot. now, the situation, as you know, is the fact that they are having aftershocks. and yesterday there was one that was particularly violent, because i felt it in my office in port-au-prince. so, when you have that situation, people had to evacuate all the buiings. and because of tropical storm grace, many people could not stay outside in the rain. they had no shelter, so they had to take a chance to get inside a

building that could collapse. so those are the dangers. >> reporter: this is all happening during a time of political instability as well as the coronavirus pandemic. what are your top concerns in this moment? >> the political concern, of course, is important. but fortunately, i would say that i would like to do after the 2010 earthquake or concentrating on helping the victims. so this is good and i hope it continues. in aition, i think that we have a good prime minister who happens to be a neurosurgeon, so he is well aware he's been very active in the 2010 earthquake. so people are going to continue to operate for people, for us for free. so hunderstands the situation so i think he's leading the country in the right direcon. i hope people in the position

will join with them so that we have more stability. >> reporter: how can people outside of haiti, particularly in the u.s., help to provide survival support during this time? >> they are serious organizations. i think the university of miami that has been supporters of gheskio during the 2010 earthquake is again doing a good job. they have every day 4:00 p.m. through conversation where we talk with everybody and we are able to assemble air support. a lot of companies, like ups, are helping food for the poor, et cetera. so it links everybody together. that's a great way to help. if you go to their website, you can find ways to help institutions that are credible, that are going to help directly the people who are impacted. >> reporter: dr. jean pape of gheskio, thank you so much for

joining us. >> thank you, ivet. very nice seeing you. >> hill: the delta variant >> hill: the delta variant continues to drive up the rate of new coronavirus infections, and hospitalizations and deaths are also steadily increasing. the "new york times" tracking project shows more than 90,000 patients are hospitalized nationwide, and more than 900 deaths from covid-19 are being reported on average each day-- twice as many as at the beginning of this month. many states with low vaccination rates are reporting the highest number of new cases. vaccinations are effective at preventing and limiting symptoms. globally, the covid pandemic is surging to its highest levels since may, with an average of more than 650,000 new cases repoed daily over

the past week. in australia today, protests against lockdowns turned violent. the measures are in effect in several regions where coronavirus cases are rising. several thousand people clashed with police in melbourne, and there were hundreds of arrests. der australia's restrictions, people are mostly confined to their homes, and allowed only limited social interactions. >> hill: in may, the centers for disease control and prevention made a decision to reduce the tracking of breakthrough covid infections to on those involving hospitalizations and deaths. that leaves public health officials without the full data that can answer questis as the new delta variant spreads. i spoke with jessica malaty rivera, an infectious disease epidemiologistnd research fellow at boston children's hospital. jessica, thanks for joining us. you used to work with the covid tracking project. when you hear the c.d.c. is no longer tracking all of these breakthrough cases, what do you

think of that? >> to be completely honest, it's heartbaking. by not tracking breakthrough data with as much granularity as we would hope, we are just basically creating blind spots in our understanding of the true impact of the virus, especially the variants that are circulating so widely in the united states. >> hill: why did the c.d.c., as best you understand this, adopt a policy like this? >> you know, i don't know. actually, i've yet to see a really explicit explanation. i've heard rumors of things like lack of resources, lack of funding, lack of staff. but to me, iseems pretty-- from an epidemiology standpoint, not defensible. >> hill: is there something that should be done, such as encouraging people perhaps to self-report? if they do, to whom? >> you know, i'm aware of a few research groups and a few universities that are still tracking that information, and it's better than nothing. but at this point, one of the biggest issues that we saw throughout the pandemic was the lack of data infrastructure, and even systems that can collect this data and speak to each

other, so that we can have a kind of broad understanding of what's happening. if you look back at how states were tasked with collecting covid-19 data, they all kind of had to fend for themselves. they all had different systems of reporting. they all had different dashboards with different formats. so wre dealing with once again between vaccine data and breakthrough data, very, very disparate systems of data collection and data reporting. >> hill: what are we missing here? what are we missing out on? >> we're missing a lot of details. we're missing a lot of opportunities to get ahead of new variants that are emerging. we're getting so many questions from people anecdotally about their experiences with breakthrough infections or breakthrough transmission, which is not actually that surprising. i mean, we knew that the vaccines were not 100% effective. breakthrough infections were expected. so we could have had a chance, though, to get ahead of that. we could have also had a chance to get ahead of some of the policy shifts that kind of set us back a bit. and i'm thinking specifically back in may when we kind of prematurely encouraged folks who were vaccinated to take their

masks off. and i think if we had this kind of data, if we had this kind of detail to what we would expect with regard to transmission, we could have calibrated everybody's expectations a bit better. >> hill: explain what your work at the tracking project, the covid tracking project, did. and, does that make you feel even more strongly now that all of these cases at least make an attempt to track them? >> you know, the covid tracking project was a really remarkable group of mostly volunteers who collected testing, case hospitalization, and death data from 56 states and jurisdictis. and it was done manually. we would collect that data from state dashboards. we would synthesize it, analyze it, and report it and share it freely and publicly, because we felt very strongly that this data belonged to the people. and we did that kind of in the absence of that detail coming from the c.d.c.we have since stopped that data collection as of march 7. and there are many of us who are alum of that network who are aggrieved by this kind of repeat situation that we're in. we started because there was an

absence of data, and here we are again, over a year later, with yet another absence of data that is causing us to kind of operate in the dark. >> hill: does this leave us, then, with a lack of understanding of this virus? >> it really does, because we know that viruses mutate, we know that variants can emerge, and we know that that can especially happen in the context of having a large percentage of the popution unvaccinated. we've just hit the 51% mark of people in the united states being fully vaccinated. that presents a vulnerability for us. and we know that variants like delta emerged in the absence of vaccines in india, and we expect for that to continue to happen. and so, in an effort to get ahead of new variants that are emerging, in an effort to understand kind of the continued efficacy of these vaccines, we need that data. now, we do have some data that has proven that these vaccines are still very effective against the delta variant. but now, as you've seen in the headlines, we're talking about boosters because we want to ensure that we are not allowing people who get vaccinated to have any possible additional risk of having severe outcomes.

>> hill: why were we dropping mask mandates when we knew that these breakthrough cases were happening? >> it's a great question, michael. i wish i had an answer to that that made sense. i think in many ways, some of these public health policies are intended to kind of reward people for a job well done-- getting vaccinated, bearing through this really difficult time. but it was premature. i will stand by that forever on that statement, because i do think that we have to recognize that public health mitigation is never one thing. it's never a silver bullet solution. and we've failed to recognize still that we can't even look at vaccines that way, too. it's always additive. it's always layered. so it's vaccines plus masking, plus distancing plus reducing your risk. plus recognizing that individual choices have community consequences sometimes. so i think we've learned that lesson the hard way and we've had to kind of backtrack on those messages. and you're seeing a lot of policies change on small levels and even possibly national levels to kind of mitigate that

premature decision. ill: jessica malaty-rivera is an infectious disease epidemiologist and a research fellow at boston children's hospital. thank you very much. >> thanks, michael. >> hill: that's all for this edition of pbs newshr weekend. for the latest news updates, visit www.pbs.org/newshour. i'm michael hill. thanks for watching. stay healthy, and have a good night. captioning sponsored by wnet captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: sue and edr wachenheim iii.

bernard and denise schwartz. the cheryl and philip milstein family. the anderson family fund. the estate of worthington mayo-smith. leonard and norma klorfine. the rosalind p. walter foundation. koo and patricia yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities. barbara hope zuckerberg. we try to live in the moment, to not miss what's right in front of us. at mutual of america, we believe taking care of tomorrow can help you make the most of today. mutual of america financial group, retirement services and investments. additional support has been provided by: consumer cellular. and by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, a private corporation funded by e

american people. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. you're watching pbs.

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