Riobard

Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, more federally aligned whereas Butantan is more Sampa-identified, also announced today a similarly feijão-flavoured CoV vaccine candidate in the works to pit against Butantan. Somewhat cloak-and-dagger. I hope they don’t own-goal or cancel each other out in the sandbox of politics and antipathic competition. Due to the apparent secrecy, we may not see much transparency wrt to the earlier phase research that may or may not have been completed by either. Butantan also has to juggle its ongoing CoronaVac trials and the nation relies on China’s Sinovac for the ingredients for CoronaVac’s current ongoing authorized population rollout. Stating the intention to go solo may sour Sino-Brazilian relations and decelerate the present vaccination volume when desperately needed. Barely acceptable efficacy is better than nothing right now.

‘Red emergency phase’ measures are extended to 11April. State case incidence has nevertheless risen by 30% since the decree was enacted 2 weeks ago. Without an offset, the doubling projection is 5 weeks: approximately 30K per day rolling incidence by May. In that event or progressive trajectory, I would not anticipate an alleviation of restrictions. Butantan Institute is applying for clinical trial approval of its own developed and locally manufacturable vaccine candidate: Butanvac.

If Phuket wants to exercise due diligence, based on the more conservative estimates of CoronaVac efficacy for achieving herd immunity, they might be advised to target 1,200,000 doses administered to 90% rather than the planned 944,200 for 70% of inhabitants. Also since much of tourism is sourced from Asia, where the Sinovac product is ubiquitous. Parenthetically China is muzzling and imposing practice sanctions on its clinicians that dare to compare national vaccine candidates with others on the market.

Rescinded ... apologies

@Lonnie, you took the OF plunge? I won’t be. @camsi1975I don’t think there’s a Twitter account for AF. The OF is @adrielfernandess, but you could have found it on Google. For those of you unable to use Dick Tracy playbook methods to trace dick pics, you lack obsessionality. LOL

But it’s the within-region change in testing and tracing rates that poses the difficulty assessing reproduction. As @spoon says, for example, if a reduction occurs. However, if those two metrics are consistent over time the scale of efforts at testing and tracing matters less and epidemiologists can estimate true infection rates, and changes in R, based on proportion of test positives in the context of reported case volume. Mexico is 17th globally in crude CoV mortality (deaths per capita) but the highest in case fatality, 9%. With that disconnect, we know case diagnosis is obviously hugely undercounted ... it’s 156th globally in testing rate. If that undercount bias is stable, changes in attack rate can nevertheless be detected. All that said, the reproduction metric is smoothed out and does not reflect regional case ascertainment differences or infection attack rate differences. As you indicated, Montpelier is not Paris.

The reproduction metrics seem to be easily accessed in google search “Covid R Atlantis epiforecasts” (example), even by province in Canada, so likely states, etc as well as countries. R0, aka Rnaught is pretty much extinct for CoV as it is a basic reproduction number more applicable to early in an epidemic. So you will now see effective R or Rt (aka Rt current time) that I believe accounts for some of the variables already mentioned by @lookin , such as CoV19Classic having evolved to CoV21Variants, rising combined natural and artificial immunity, as well as other factors currently relevant to calculations. I find that the current estimated confidence intervals for R, that is the range within which certainty is good the absolute value is contained by its bookend estimates, are so broad as to render the R metric meaningless, other than how it generally trends, up or down. So the forecasted doubling of incidence estimate for France varies from a week to 6 weeks according to the confidence interval margins. Additionally, the margins of a generation cycle, that is, the average time for the index case to transmit secondary infection, are so broad that it is hard to determine when the endpoint of, say, three cycles where R=1.2 ... 1-> 1.2 -> 1.44 -> 1.73 will have occurred. Then there is dispersion factor: a small percentage of carriers yielding a large percentage of secondary infection. Some epi folks think that R it is too heavily relied on for policy, that it has become a reasonably understood token of the pandemic but overly considered because the absolute value confidence margins are so distant from the number, and there are more complex algorithms that may be under-utilized. A complex exposure risk algorithm is easy to calculate but, oddly, there has not to date been any chatter about arriving at a general consensus of contextual risk tolerability on a 0-100% scale. Such a metric could be held constant as numbers of acceptable community contacts (eg, classroom size, other events) are adjusted against rolling incidence. The accuracy confidence margins of those absolute numbers of people in a given event to maintain a constancy in exposure risk would be much closer to the absolute numbers than you see for R, doubling/halving, what have you. A propos of mid-range ‘herd immunity’, combined natural and artificial, we see that Chile’s vaccination success story nevertheless illustrates the possible tension between growing vaxx uptake percentage and rolling case incidence. The surging case uptick is counterintuitive, even considering it is contemporaneous with Fall school resumption. So many variables ... guard too relaxed?, variant re-infection and contagion? waning natural immunity among recovered cases? a bottom line minimal threshold of community immunity to yield protection? squandering 10-15% of product vaccinating the 10-15% previously recovered when those doses could be steered to greater numbers of CoV virgins earlier to achieve threshold herd immunity faster?

Not Lenten.

I just saw videos from São Paulo and Brasília Bozo-supportive affluent ‘hoods banging their pots & pans, drowning out his broadcast address.

Before A Curfew Kickoff ? ;>D

Such a huge lineup of former and current. I can think of several not included here ...

Michell Santos (SP & formerly BHz) died in October. Rafael Lentz (PA & BC) died more recently.

I have not met any of the four, but saw Lipe on stage when there ... easily found photos of them. GF is the most obscure of the group.

Stricter lockdown March 26th to April 4th, both sides of the bay, but the state governor trying to legally veto the municipality mayors. Nuts.

This Thursday 25March may be a turning point. I am not a ‘techie’ but another similarly themed site has been temporarily kept alive by one of its savvy members during an admin crisis. However, another level of domain registration renewal is set to expire 24March and that may require action by the owner. This may yield an uptick of applicants here.

I would estimate that, for every 5 “conventional” garotos de programa, I have tricked with 1 gogo dancer and that the latter have accommodated about 50% of the time when approached. There are a few related threads on the topic in this sub-forum.

The Pfizer/BioNTech graph on efficacy is meant to be interpreted from Day 28 to Day 88, as the median follow-up is 2 months. Therefore, efficacy is not demonstrated for 112 days. In fact, many subjects in both vaccine and placebo subgroups were not followed for as long as 2 months for this interim analysis for EUA application. That is one reason why you see the placebo group’s infection case volume fizzle out towards the top right; the only other explanation regional background attenuation in case incidence. I have not found any longer-term data even though the cut-off for the analysis was 4 months ago. The analysis is based on total person-years for each group, essentially similar to how many times one individual would experience the target event over thousands of years, in this case infection (though natural immunity not an issue in calculation), because the duration follow-up periods are variable. This method allows for calculating sufficient statistical power for a threshold of case incidence numbers over a potentially short time frame, but does not predict durability of outcome (eg, protective) difference over time. The standard of safety with respect to product adverse events is also based on a shorter time frame, so it does not pressure the research into longer efficacy evaluation time frames. Also, protection from severity of illness was less impressive: 3-to-1. I think that the current Thai decision is simply based on the short-term evidence, including antibody robustness from blood samples that has only been pretty much assessed for the various vaccines up to 3 months following inoculation Additionally, there seem to be some news reports alluding to the reality that the Thai entry expectation is currently predicated on having received all the doses in a regimen, though I have not been able to find formal confirmation of this. Perhaps this suggests that Thailand prefers to stick to the product monographs rather than staying on top of the complexities of deferring and understanding immunity conferred wrt to dose delays. I interpret this to mean, then, that if first dose is March 15th and second dose is delayed, for example, to July 15th, the window for travel entry is 15July-15Oct. That said, I am sure the requirements will have been revised a few times by that point. But for now, it is worth it to check out if J&J is your best option if approved where you are and where you are is delaying second doses, but you need to get to Thailand sooner.

This news has spawned an idea downstream re: capitalizing on the deal ... Guillaume to qualify for gui yu. There’s even a bit of a play on words: gill. A cut above the ubiquitous ‘salmon’, now a lox cause, smoked by the will of competition.

Governor Doria is expected to announce today even more restrictive measures than the ‘red emergency’ phase instituted a few days ago.

New series late Sunday nights about high school kids. The little spitfire scene-stealing daughter of the two gay Dads almost made me wet myself.

... But city hall just wrote me back after I inquired. Nice of them: The curfew was lifted indefinitely. Just observe the basic mitigation protocols.

Sauna Saint Moritz recently activated their Facebook after years of radio silence and is open daily 13:00-21:00. The 22:00 curfew was to be until 28 Feb and the Bogotá city hall Twitter account announced it in January but has not updated restriction renewal or changes ... poor communication overall.

Am I allowed to say yet that I have never considered Fauci a ‘national treasure’ for the USA wrt the novel coronavirus pandemic? In early February 2020 I trekked to Canadian Tire hardware++ store in Montreal and bought out their small supply of N95 masks. I also had an unused supply of surgical face coverings from having worked through the 2003 SARS outbreak in a northern hotspot, though we were gowned, gloved, and fitted for snug N95 masks for months. I had worn the surgical masks outside as they are more comfortable. An American pharmaceutical company sheepishly yet rightfully asked me not to attend a meeting in California on a research project in which I was a co-investigator. At least they acted without excessive worry about erring. Perhaps these factors and experiences prompted me to be very planful and decisive this pandemic around. It’s not that I claim to be smarter or more insightful. It was a healthy respect for microbes garnered from the reality of health care colleagues in my downtown core succumbing to that earlier CoV disease. I wasn’t even on top of the local news, following retirement having paid less attention to media, or aware that Canadian public health officials had also been downplaying the threat. I live near Chinatown and was more cognizant of my neighbours early on cleaning out sanitizer supplies from the pharmacies we share use of. They got and grasped ‘the memo’ right away yet unfortunately often nevertheless scapegoated. I packed the hazard gear for a trip to Brazil planned prior to the WHO announcements throughout January, flying the last day of February 2020 wearing a mask on the flight. There was scattered face covering at P.E. Trudeau Airport. Relaxed the measures for the few weeks during my visit as the index cases in Brazil had not yet been reported. Then was ordered home 16 days later and quarantined. I’m sure I’m not alone, but if everyone had done what I was willing to do from last mid-March forward ...

New York Times put a paywall on their tracker, but here ...