Riobard

Whoops, I guess I am now one of the guilty as charged ...

I’m beginning to feel like what would be the offspring of Chicken Little and Debbie Downer. lol (half-hearted) ... some of this liability is a 24- year clinical history in Infectious Diseases. Are you keeping up with the news? The more contagious P1 variant is gaining traction across Brazil and is believed to be leading to substantial re-infection potential among those with immunity to the original wild-type coronavirus strain. Those earlier antibodies are assessed to be 60% less effective against the more recent P1 spike mutation. Paradoxically, while immune locals had the edge over the vaccinated, given more breakthrough infection for artificial immunity compared to natural immunity, the vaccinated visitors in Brazil may now have the edge given that artificial immunity may be reasonably effective with respect to the P1 variant. In contrast, both locals and visitors with natural early immunity are likely more vulnerable compared to those vaccinated with a product conferring good but less than 100% protection. Best to have recovered from the P1 variant or both the initial strain and that variant. The commercial sex work arena is now likely a major breeding ground for CoV-specific “typhoid Mary’s”. While many of these guys have likely been exposed to the initial strain, a majority of them could be back at square one because the current wave is genetically distinctive. Prez Bozo is, ironically, pretty much the biggest supporter of misguided business as usual. His delusion of being The Tempest in a tempest-in-a-teapot scenario is really very very bad news. https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/03/brazil-covid-global-threat-new-more-lethal-variants-miguel-nicolelis

So far, just for the next week ... the Dance, not the Hammer. I think the Hammer may come into play if and when serious CoV cases exceed acute care capacity and deaths occur due to lack of available health care. Such a scenario is plausible. Keep an eye on mortality. It tends to lag behind case count. Deaths are at a record high. As case counts have been increasing, the lethality rate and absolute daily deaths would not be expected to subside. I don’t know how curfew implementation works for airports, ie, you need to get into town after 23:00, I think that you are not bothered if you are in a vehicle. In fact, I doubt the police care about isolated cases of individuals out in public. In contrast, in Montreal, a huge fine from patrolling cops after 20:00, for weeks now. But the late night arrivals in Brazil tend to be Copa and I think they are cancelling most if not all.

It might have to come to things like this before it’s realized and accepted that you cannot negotiate with a tiger with your head in it’s mouth ... FullSizeRender.mov

[deleted ... ignore]

Commencing this weekend (6th March) Phase Red restrictions state-wide, only essential businesses allowed to operate. Also more bad news on the inoculation front. A new lab study demonstrates that neither convalescent plasma from the original circulating coronavirus nor the predominant and already poorly performing by efficacy vaccine rolled out there, CoronaVac, are effectively neutralizing the P1 Manaus variant. CoronaVac is supplied by China’s Sinovac to 11 countries. Getting the supplies from China to Brazil has already been fraught with problems. Until Brazil’s Butantan Institute acquires production critical mass, Sinovac would need to selectively, for Brazil, alter the inactivated coronavirus vaccine component to reflect the P1 spike mutation. How predominant the P1 strain becomes in Brazil remains unclear. Other countries are very worried about it and are diligently tracking it. Coronavac is also the primary vaccine initiated in Dominican Republic. WTF?! They have a huge contract with Sinovac. There are also contracts with Pfizer and AstraZeneca but delivery is stalled.

Here is the forum heading group that displays on the main page, along with the open access exclusively viewable headings, only if a logged-in registered member, presumably also meeting the minimum posting criterion ...

I note that if you are posting but then wish to go to the forum main page you click the three bars, then Browse —> Forums. Previously you just clicked the bars and selected Forums.

Point 3, not exactly, but the news is still good. In Phase III trials the numbers of overall cases were set at an occurrence threshold to meet bare minimum statistical power for inferential analysis. The severe case counts were too small to meaningful analyze, for example in Pfizer/BioNTech the study had one case in vaccinated group and four in placebo group. So the unvaccinated actually fared quite well in terms of severity but we would not say that if trying to promote vaccination. A handful of severe cases is consistent with such occurrence over a few months in the general population. The efficacy touted in the media regarding severity is, perhaps, selectively cherry-picked to counter vaccine hesitancy and refusal. The follow-up was short-changed by about 80% of the study protocol’s intended efficacy time frame. Unblinding to offer vaccine to the placebo group has also irreversibly compromised more rigorous efficacy assessment. I am not criticizing these decisions but the data distortions can sometimes end up fuelling the anti-vaxxer agenda. Moderna could claim 100% prevention of severe disease because they could not isolate virus and corroborate diagnosis in the one vaccine recipient with apparent severe COVID, perhaps due to timing. 0 cases, 1 case, 4 cases out of thousands ... potayto potahto. Bear in mind that if 10,000 of us used condoms with zero or one HIV infection acquired over one year, and 10,000 barebacked with four HIV infections resulting among them over the same time period, we would not assert that condom use was preventive. But our cocks are smarter than the average CoV denialist and are not easily hoodwinked. Now then ... The real-world Pfindings comparing large swaths of recently vaccinated people in Israel demonstrate a marked reduction in case severity. This from a large vaccine waitlist-control trial there, in which for every eleven severe cases among the not yet vaccinated there was one severe novel coronavirus case among the full dose cycle vaccinated. Technically better than the essentially meaningless 4:1 ratio in the pre-authorization efficacy trial. It stands to reason that you can definitely become infected following vaccination, we know this, though the probability is much less. Since you can also acquire severe illness, I am currently convinced that you would be contagious and can transmit viral particles. This may depend on the viral load and be less likely as you shift on the gradient from severe down to mild or asymptomatic. So Virginia and West Virginia, yes there is a post-vaxx Severity Clause. Being vaccinated will apparently not entirely eliminate the chance of serious COVID disease. ——- Re: Sinovac ... for any vaccine I would assess both statistical efficacy, poor in this case, and immunogenicity prior to embracing it. I would want to know if the clinical production of antibodies meant they were effectively virus-neutralizing, since the ratio of infection cases between vaccine and placebo trial groups suggested poor performance, in Brazil where the study number of subjects supported more credible inferential analysis. For this vaccine I would be more confident once the majority of the population received it.

Don’t y’all hate being overcharged? I commiserate with this Jupiter Boy and would say “sorry you probably feel like you had something unpleasant up Uranus.”

Never mind ... I grasp it now. The downward arrow means ‘blow me.’

Know morr edditt aupchun? [OK I see it now]

What is Downvote emoticon?

RIP Boytoy ...

Quite all right. I myself had to look up Fasano and some readers won’t grasp the cryptic Michelin reference. I thought you are American and would understand related idioms. Parenthetically, the public health guidance in USA and elsewhere is to not yet over-value vaccination protection capacity for yourself or make flimsy assumptions about transmission potential, at this juncture, and to avoid non-essential travel to regions with high coronavirus case incidence and with more contagious regional CoV variants that may escape previous immunity to the original predominant wild type strain of 2020. Powerball is a famous American number-pick lottery, an extension of the winning the vaccination lottery, your own analogy. Playbook refers to the activity plans in Rio, with you apparently likely not considering the kind of pandemic mitigation you may have otherwise followed at home in ... Palookaville, a Marlon Brando partialized famous movie quote (On the Waterfront) that refers to any obscure average place in USA, like I’m from Nowhere, Ontario. The free-style free-basing expressions are colloquialisms for behaving as if there were no recommended advisable restrictions aimed at protecting you and Brazilian locals from a serious contagious disease, notwithstanding you may have the ‘non-home’ visitor partial advantage of early vaccination uptake. You seem, like many, to simplistically equate vaccination in the early stages of minimal overall community immunization as a ticket to unbridled tourist behaviour in a city like Rio that is so poorly organized that COVID mortality statistics are almost as high as daily reports of new infections. The city has pretty much given up on tracking diagnosis. You are basically a desirable commodity there due to your influx of personal resources where locals are in survival mode without the luxury of perhaps fully comprehending or heeding infection control guidance. Affluent visitors break from science-grounded advice for other reasons. Altruism is not one of them. Vaccination is only as good as its sterilizing immunity capacity. It does not have that capacity for novel coronavirus. The threshold for responsible foreign tourism is coming in due course, if you are willing to be patient. It is based on reductions in case incidence as vaccination progressively drives up herd immunity. What is also likely coming eventually is a vaccine nasal spray that complements intramuscular injection because the virus is both systemically and mucosally replicated. Go ahead and ask typical tourism questions, though there is little that in my view hasn’t been exhaustively asked and answered here ad infinitum. But don’t expect wimpy radio silence from everyone here when thinking that the current state of vaccination is a magic bullet that already flings open the portals to safe travel. There is such a thing, maybe still (?!), as common sense steerage to the relevant questions of the day. My eyes are fatigued from constantly rolling them with regard to the endless rampant COVID misinformation and denialism everywhere I look. Exhausting and daunting. Take or leave what I have to offer. If you simply cannot or will not postpone, you can consider some sound risk mitigation strategies when there. As the cumulative infection/recovery rate to date in Brazil is relatively high, perhaps even up to 40% among vulnerable subgroups, many hires will have reasonable CoV immunity. You can try to maintain small social bubbles that still enable you to interact meaningfully. However, you will need to assess a few things, trading off some extra effort to gain health security. This likely means steering clear of congregate sauna/brothel settings. If those settings cared about staff and clients they would screen the trade for immunity in the first place. It is far less onerous than the repeated viral swabs that should, by the way, be a standard of practice as well. Knowledge is power. There are likely as many garotos de programa that have proportionally recovered from infection as the same proportionate venue capacity reduction dictates anyway. You yourself can pay for rapid serology tests for private hires in order to assess for protective antibodies. If they do not meet the immunity criteria, you can give them something for their trouble anyway and they will exit with a possibly valuable piece of personal information. This task will also greatly reduce your potential for carrying and transmitting virus or actually getting sick yourself.

Speaking of the Amazon, 850 new cases daily in the small state of Rondônia, and ...

No petal, 2 days prior, for example do it Wednesday daytime for a Friday 23:30 AA departure. To be within the 72 hours. Bear in mind the new curfew 23:00-05:00 may extend beyond March 14th ... I don’t know your dates. The curfew would affect a plan to go for the viral test late Tuesday night in the above example. I assume you have immunity with respect to novel coronavirus.

What lottery is that now? The playbook sounds like powerballing behaviour at about a 10-fold increase of novel coronavirus exposure risk in one of the riskiest cities worldwide with one of the highest lethality rates and intervention fails, while (presumed format) mRNA vaccination reduces real-world infection risk by about 90%. Any net protective effect of inoculation? ... one minute please ... clickety clack clickety clack clickety clack ... erm, compu-ah says naow. The 90% reduction in chances of acquiring CoV infection is relative only to your baseline exposure risk where you’ve been for the past year or so. If your free-styling in Palookaville approximates the existential free-basing to which we punters are accustomed to in Brazil, then your fortuitous vaccination may offer some comparative benefit.

Clever, well-paced, tightly written French drama mini-series with Omar Sy in the title role. I viewed it in a measured fashion in order to savour rather than binge.

In addition, it appears that since there may be a merger-type ‘handshake’ between the two Latin America fora, when logged in the open forum’s recent posts are not listed in the Recent Updates field on the major page. The login-boundaried forum posts are. When not logged in, one would expect the open forum’s recent contributions to show in the Posts field but they do not, similar to the closed forum version where we were accustomed to seeing those posts signalled in Recent Updates but not Posts.

I noticed that a recent new topic I started in one Latin American forum migrated to the new additional forum, or vice versa, one open and the other login-walled. Therefore, duplicated. Are posts going to automatically copy between the two fora? So far, it seems that my one example depicts twin headings and some overlap of posts, but not all of the posts are conjoined between the duplicates. Tracking topics could pose a lot of hassle. Does not make a lot of sense. I suppose that since the entire board is transferring soon, the complication does not merit much attention or re-adjustment. Nevertheless, I am a bit mystified. I hope this was not a capitulation to the few members bellyaching about the login criteria.

You might consider checking out some penthouses to get good value for the more exorbitant amount of money spent at a luxe grande dame hotel. As they can be buried deep within thousands of rental platform listings, you can consider a Google search: penthouse (or cobertura) Rio de Janeiro AirBnB.

Pour ce que ça vaut, vous et votre invité êtes obligés de porter du couvre-visage dans les zones publiques du CP. Cette seule réalité incitera probablement la direction de l'hôtel à des examens/vérifications plus minutieux et rigoureux. Le personnel peut également observer vos habitudes d'interaction au sein du service de plage intégré, bien qu'il puisse rester inactivé lors de votre visite.