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Hard Numbers: Afghan carnage, Biden's (small) steps to family reunification, UK and Israel's shrinking COVID caseloads, BJP loses West Bengal race

May 03, 2021
Gabrielle Debinski
Boys walk past burnt fuel tankers after an overnight fire, on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan May 2, 2021.

27: At least 27 people, mostly students, were killed in a suspected Taliban attack Friday outside Kabul. The truck bombing came just days before May 1, the deadline for a US troop withdrawal originally set by the Trump administration. The Biden White House recently pushed that back to September, angering the Taliban.

4: The Biden administration will reunite four families in the US who were separated in 2017 under the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy. There's still work to do: since 2017, around 5,500 children have been separated from their parents while trying to enter the US.

0.2: The UK and Israel have two of the highest per capita vaccination rates in the world, and the results are paying off: both have recently recorded a rolling 7-day average COVID-19 positivity rate below 0.2 percent, amongst the lowest in the world.

80: Despite a heavy push by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, the PM's BJP party won just 80 legislative seats in the 294-seat assembly of West Bengal, a state currently run by a prominent BJP critic. Experts say that Modi's massive election rallies in West Bengal, India's fourth most populous state, contributed to the current explosion of COVID-19.

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