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Riobard

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Everything posted by Riobard

  1. Reminder that the name may be confused with Encontru’s, gay complex closer to the ferry terminal. Don’t know if it formally has trade. Free entry for “boys” this coming Friday may be a clue, but other references are about “interactive boys”, so it may be about sex shows in the open. Somebody will have to take one for the team and report back, does not need to be a Sunday afternoon. I emailed out the critical question and will update if I get a response. Eventually this venue may be posted elsewhere here, so as not to highjack the thread. I put it here in case somebody plugs it into Über by name rather than specific address and ends up at the wrong destination.
  2. Seems like, outside of quarantine requirements I have not investigated, it’s either a 2-dose regimen necessitating a longer stay or two separate visits, or J&J single dose.
  3. It is known from preliminary lab studies that the level of antibodies generated against the P1 variant by the mRNA vaccines is lower compared to original wildtype virus strain. The clinical implications are not known. Chile likely has P1 fairly predominant and just reported real world effectiveness for about 4.5 million complete dose2of2 CoronaVac inoculations. As they have data for about a half million full vaccinations with Pfizer’s BNT162b2 we may see some effectiveness metrics against the backdrop of some degree of P1 proportionality. Chile seems to have a very sophisticated database of infection surveillance, natural immunity, and vaccination uptake by product. The USA CDC will apparently soon be only monitoring vaccine breakthrough resulting in hospitalization or death. Chile is all in with CoronaVac and now with Sputnik V, siding with Russia against Brazil’s Anvisa rejection of the latter, but with enthusiasm in common with that of Brazil for the former. This could result in bypassing BNT162n2 as a product comparator if there if is not going to be much further use of it, a lost opportunity given that large scale mRNA vaccination where P1 currently predominates is unlikely elsewhere. I think that what is more relevant is, one, the relative vulnerability of being partially as opposed to fully vaccinated with either of the two mRNA’s. There is a significant gap in protection comparing dose1of2 and dose2of2, and many nations are delaying full vaccination. And, two, the known potential of vaccine breakthrough infection increasing with community case prevalence. The rolling incidence in Brazil is 7 times that of Dominican Republic.
  4. I’ll plunk this news here, as it may be relevant for choice of accommodations. The country’s automatic CoV-inclusive med insurance for visitors arriving by air and going into hotel accommodations just expired, but is under review for temporal extension. If not extended, likely does not matter how digs are chosen. If extended, and if the incentivizing of free insurance provision by your host destination is important to you, you may wish to select hotel accommodations that are covered by the plan.
  5. Or simply “Bubbles” if it was carbonated.
  6. There is a precedent for Hispaniola being split down the middle.
  7. Apparently about 93% of the consumers are Brazilian, so I don’t think that the site is ‘cleaning up’ viz foreigner use, depending on the relative proportions. Non-Portuguese speaking users may prefer sites that don’t come with quirky translation mishaps. Though I doubt that the proportion of English speakers using Chaturbate is as low as 7% and I cannot comment on text-chat translation quality there. At first glance, however, CameraPrive has a lot more providers that appeal to me.
  8. WHO reviews Sinovac’s CoronaVac today and makes its recommendation for granting emergency use listing. Fingers crossed.
  9. Thanks. Up to you, but I would advise you not rush in to openly share any of your social media account information here in the forum ... just yet. Maybe behind the scenes in DM. Take some time to get the lay of the land. You don’t have to find a middle ground for disclosure simply because you have been pressured and may feel a bit that you are withholding, thereby not being a ‘good sport’.
  10. That amounts to a 75% mark-up for my CameraPrive beef compared to a 34% mark-up for a Big Mac in Canada relative to its price in Brazil.
  11. Yaaaas, you classy Pontifical forum bouncer, you ...
  12. Post, don’t post. I’ll read whatever is added, but don’t expect Pom-Poms or backflips for encouragement. If I like it I’ll indicate same.
  13. Guys, perhaps I’m mistaken, but I took this to mean a slew of direct messages put him off, with an indirect way of saying second thoughts about continuing the report. You’ll need to scroll up, the quote content keeps disappearing when I try to snip out the non-relevant part.
  14. Dumb question here. What’s the currency denomination? A few years ago I was in Brazil and looked into registering, had a bit of back and forth texting with admin. The fees were, for example, 15 reais for Brazilians for a ‘15’ charge, but as a foreigner it was going to be $15 USD, though that would mean even more in Canadian dollars. I wasn’t complaining, just inquiring, but the person got all defensive, suggesting I had it better and should be willing to pay multiples more. I don’t think they grasped the global Big Mac Index, where that burger costs only a bit less in USD in Brazil compared to America. Anyway, if I spring for, say, a ‘5 whatever’ or ‘100 whatever’ charge for one provider photo or chat listed at those ambiguous prices what exactly is the charge going to be on my statement? One reason I am extra curious, having written it off at that time when there were few guys on the site, is that a few lads I follow obsessively on social media, not strippers or escorts that I knew of, are now showing up!
  15. I’m frequently now seeing on social media recognizable Brazilian guys, including those in the ‘trade’, showing up in the Mexican Riviera. Because it’s one of few countries they can currently visit? Any idea what their typical flight path is between Brazil and Cancun area?
  16. I just assume there is always an element of risk, of lack of control over the privacy aspect of what I post, and that I don’t exclusively own my content. However, there is content I likely would not have posted if not retired, financially independent from employment connections, and essentially untouchable in terms of my professional affiliations being bitten in the ass. Similarly, I have posted content on these sites that I might not have written if an American residing in USA ... I realize that might be a bit of overkill in terms of worry.
  17. Anvisa just gave it a resounding thumbs-down, did a very thorough, scholarly review that may ripple through global locations using it out of desperation. It won’t be entering Brazil’s orbit.
  18. Is it just me, or do some of these media articles not seem to go in convoluted circles? If caution is to legitimately be exercised, pending the progressive emergence of reasonably incontrovertible science-driven guidelines, the suggestion is that both viral burden and replication potential for those vaccinated that nevertheless acquire breakthrough infection is on a gradient based on degree of symptoms. (Not to be dismissive of its confounding transmission considerations, but let’s leave the variant aspect out of it for now, as well as the sound notion that widespread population immunity will take care of a lot of this.) The concern is that asymptomatic infection would be the most problematic because it would be supposedly under the radar, albeit less transmissible, according to its lacking symptom profile correlated with fairly insignificant levels of virus that spew forth from one’s orifices. One might think that it would also possibly represent the lion’s share of breakthrough cases due to the salutary aspects of vaccination itself. Yet a recent study testing testing testing a cohort of mRNA vaxx recipients to flag any CoV infection revealed that the majority of breakthrough cases were accompanied by discernible symptoms. Again, testing as per protocol, not based on symptom triggers. Of apparent lesser concern would be somewhat symptomatic infection following vaccination, though viral burden and contagion, if at all in fact genuine, are presumably greater than among the vaccinated that acquire symptomless infection, because ... in real life as we know it everyone that has been vaccinated and feels somewhat unwell is going to confirm their status with repeated testing (that lower viral levels may elude), dig in, and quarantine themselves off from everybody else?! And to repeat, these folks represent the lion’s share of breakthrough infections that evaded the 90% reduction metric. There seems to be this naïve middle ground clinically that would lead some people to assume that in between the polarized domains of non-symptom and obvious ‘run-for-the-hills’-grade manifestations of classic symptom severity (though rare among those with immunity) lies a category of extremely conscientious folks able to function OK in spite of breakthrough post-vaxx infection but that would be completely transparent about being moderately ill and would be diligently 100% protective of all categories of people with whom contact occurs. Like that has been the trend since the pandemic commenced.
  19. Apparently it has just been formally ruled that a condo corporation can restrict unit owners from renting their property on Airbnb, etc. Parenthetically, this same rule was recently incorporated into my building’s bylaws; it is not a new trend. My sense of this for Brazil is that it is up to each building to decide whether to invoke the restriction; meaning, pistols at dawn following condo syndicate’s meetings and voting process. Word to the wise aspect: check that your host can confirm he\she is being transparent about the status of their building while not banking on their guest(s) flying under the radar. Be aware of the laws at the time you book ... the Airbnb site is usually up to date on the rules by country. Bear in mind that these rulings can jump back and forth. About 18 months ago for the same case it was ruled that such rentals were not prohibited because they did not constitute commercial activity. Does it mean advertising on a rental platform in a case where the building involved upholds the restriction is prohibited? I do not know. I would think it is the actual physical follow-through of taking a guest that is disallowed. In that case, one might inadvertently walk into a hassle.
  20. It is, obviously, but we are at this juncture dealing with the bigger picture globally. I think that most people by now are aware how 67% effectiveness stands up compared to 90+%. And that if you can snag a product of that lower efficacy caliber purely in terms of its capacity for case and severity reduction when nothing else is available you take it. Low levels of vaccination hesitancy somewhat compensate for lesser efficacy, as does the ability to avoid delays in follow-up booster doses within the initial vaccination cycle. Chile is using as much of 3 of the vaccines you listed as it can get. Should it have waited to administer approximately 90% of vaccinations, the percentage attributable to CoronaVac given over the past few months, and substituted them with products with greater than 67% effectiveness yet some with complex cold-chain logistics, whenever they trickled in over their Autumn, trading off lives for snubbing a product that is now showing well above the threshold of efficacy for authorization? I don’t think so. I believe the take-home is that you need vast inoculation uptake, combined with their approximate existing 20% natural immunity within the population, in order to see results, outcomes that are likely already unfortunately compromised by immunity-escape and more contagious variants. Chile also tests at quite a high level, so the average true degree of case severity decreasing is not necessarily reflected in rolling new case incidence; reduced hospitalization and mortality is essentially a surrogate marker for vaccination apparently reducing symptom burden. Moreover, vaccine effectiveness calculations are often artificially lowered by relatively high levels of natural immunity in the population, as is the Chilean case. The true effectiveness is probably better than the recent 67% reported. Similarly, CoronaVac effectiveness is a metric comparing infection case variables between those inoculated, and not, with CoronaVac. Since close to 5% of the population not vaccinated with CoronaVac is partially or fully vaccinated with products clinically higher in efficacy rankings, the true effectiveness of CoronaVac in isolation is, again, artificially deflated because the two groupings do not start off with the same proportions of baseline immunity.
  21. Based on the long thread there, now gone unless the sites boot up again, on what could go wrong and hypotheses about how to deal with an intestate situation and salvage the sites, it’s head-spinning. But there was a basic contingency plan for some involved to maintain communication and continue problem-solving attempts behind the scenes if the sites were to go dark. Moderators of sites like this would do well to have a simple mostly inactive social media account (Twitter the easiest because you can create as many accounts as you like without revealing your true identity), for backup communication about what is happening.
  22. They are not incidence rates. They represent the amount of reduction in incidence for the vaccinated compared to the non-vaccinated for millions vaccinated thru Feb and Mar. Effectiveness is a calculation much like efficacy, the latter in a controlled research trial, the former applied in the real world setting. If somebody showed you these metrics and you were asked to try to explain the differences in incidence (per 100K population) between Chile and Brazil, without knowing their vaccination status history, it would be reasonable to assume that Chile had a far more advanced vaccination campaign because the new case incidence is similar but reduced mortality, a primary desired endpoint of inoculation, is quite pronounced for Chile. It is about half, two-fifths that of Brazil, with almost identical current infection case incidence trend. Brazil’s and Chile’s case fatality rate historically tracked similarly to their respective incidence rates but now Chile’s mortality relative to case incidence is considerably lessening. These are more crude comparisons that corroborate more systematic epidemiological research.
  23. Things move quickly. That report is already outdated. Here are the recently updated data. ‘Partial’ means prior to second dose of CoronaVac. The counterintuitive rise in case incidence is an artefact of reckless behaviour, among the approximately half of population not yet fully inoculated; and for those vaxx’d, with the standard period required for individual immunity buildup following inoculation not yet achieved, in context of more contagious P1 variant. Otherwise, CoronaVac is having a positive impact, poses minimal adverse events, and is welcomed by the people. CoronaVac was never intended to be single (partial) dosing. The results underscore that the full dose cycle is imperative. [Similarly, complete municipal vaccination of Serrana using CoronaVac, SP, BRZ is yielding dramatically beneficial results] [The article uses the term ‘the Chinese vaccine’, conflating Sinovac’s CoronaVac with another company’s product, that of Sinopharm, being utilized and now manufactured in UAE.] CHILE:
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