Riobard

UK, Australia, and New Zealand have reciprocal emergency health care agreements among these 3 CANZUK countries. Canada should be in it, by rights as a Commonwealth country on par in development, but its health care is run by province/territory and even interprovincial coverage can be a headache if you happen to be away from your jurisdiction. By the way, I may as well here disabuse you of the notion that Québecois receive free universal health care. On top of paying about the highest income tax rate in North America, I pay the province close to $700 annually for medication coverage whether used or not (and a substantial portion of prescription meds beyond the annual pharmaceutical fee), $500 annual GP user fee, many lab fees, $180 per consult with a decent urologist, and I have paid $990 apiece for required standard diagnostic MRIs. Travel medical insurance is a lot less than the aforementioned tally. Australia also has agreements with about 10 European countries but they are not uniform contracts and it is still recommended to travel with private insurance. I think the main impediment is that these agreements do not cover everything that is covered locally. Then it comes down to figuring out legally who is, or should be, the obligatory first payer versus residual payer, the government system or third party private insurer. Because residual-needs premium costs are often similar to fully insured private single-payer premiums, why benefit private corporations with savings for them that amount to dollars out of taxpayers’ pockets?

Brazil president reports he is on antibiotics and not fully recovered. He thinks he got mold in his lungs from being confined indoors too long. Eee Gads! My assumption is that if it is fungal it is coccidioidomycosis due to burying his head in the soil ... though he had better hope not. He will only eat his words stealthily crushed up in a spoonful of medicine.

I second this emotion. Also, many of us do not travel with a support system similar to what we may have at home. Power-of-attorney for finances, care, etc, advocacy in the foreign locale, etc. Having had a bad case of dengue fever in South America, I can attest that it is hell-ish to be on your own with a spiked body temperature and other debilitating symptoms.

The 5 states marked with an orange X are excluded from the newly defined international tourist arrivals permission but it is likely that the only relevant city for purposes of this forum is Porto Alegre. I do not know if a foreign national can domestically transfer to one of those state-located airports following arrival at an acceptable city ... my interpretation is that it is allowable. The reopening is also only for one month, to be reviewed. That is how things seem to go these days and it may be advisable to not plan too far ahead of time.

Certainly not a good time to travel, and getting the treatment you can pay for is a potential problem, but insurers now have more info to develop their price/profit algorithms and are opening up policy options. One popular Canadian company is offering full winter season locked-in rates for the many elderly retired ‘snowbirds’ that stay in southern USA ... no need to remind what’s happening there. For every 3 Covid-19 deaths in Brazil to date there has been 1 non-SARS-CoV-2 influenza/pneumonia death. And the latter has vaccination options to mitigate incidence. Let’s assume for the sake of illustration that medical costs are fairly equal pre-mortality for the two disease scenarios. Has your insurer ever asked about your vaxx uptake? Mine hasn’t. You will probably pay more currently but if there is money to be made by companies at a time when sales are low they will chase the almighty.

The months-long entry ban was not renewed and air borders are now open, counterintuitively given the CoV incidence rate. It has joined a few other nations, however, in the requirement of health insurance to cover medical costs that could arise.

Saskatchewan is trending like Spain, adjusted for population size. A global region that was already hit extremely hard is understandably going to apply strict measures in an attempt to bypass a repeat of earlier catastrophic and exhausting proportions.

I read that home confinement in Barcelona is strongly encouraged yet voluntary, but there are other specific rules that are subject to fines. As such, Thermas is now open 12:00-0:00 and by appointment only, presumably to comply with gathering and capacity regulations.

Thailand is one of a few countries that now requires proof of medical insurance that includes coronavirus coverage in order to enter. As I think that applies to the few non-citizens granted entry under exceptional circumstances, as there is otherwise a strict travel ban, it is something that should be checked if and when foreign nationals can travel there.

“This ISH”? ... scrambling letters to meet General Audiences rating, Sir? On this Message Board, Sir? Now we know it’s ‘end times’, and not the end times of yore that maintain sanity. LOL

In neither scenario, current closure status nor prospective opening, can many parents return to work outside of the home in a sustained way, without a back-up plan for when getting the dreaded call over and over “Sorry, the class is down until further notice”. I assume that one positive school case will result in a stay-at-home and testing order for the collective, as is occurring in day camps that recently commenced in Quebec? I am not sure whether in Europe or elsewhere the school re-opening is plagued with the same unpredictability by way of episodic shutdown protocols. For the dozens of countries with open school status there is not one standardized way of handling infection control when a case comes to light, but for the most part it has not been a dismal failure. However when overall case incidence is low it is easier to reasonably attribute a blip in new infections to a defined lockdown ease of a few weeks prior. In places with exponential infection growth such as USA it is a big challenge to tease out the school factor in the prevalence metric. It may be more anecdotal and rest on the tolerance for isolated cases here and there being the determinant ‘face’ of it. A teacher will die and that will be it. Those fresh pristine September school supplies will have barely seen the light of day. These other locations do not want Trump to compare his orange to their apple. They are quick to underscore their context for opening academia was markedly different.

Condoms and tampons ... Too late for one of these cuz I’m post-menopausal. The other item not needed too soon cuz not nearly post-men-on-pausal.

I knows it; wood of a perfect age, LOL. A dude in Dominican Republic had major surplusage of his dick. Guys paid it much homage but barely could manage to take it as it was so damn thick.

Montrealer retrofits some of his dispensing machines with surgical masks. Required in indoor public spaces but some folks leave home without a supply. Obviously may as well convert condom dispensers as well.

I think “wagon” is slang for ass, particularly a ‘big booty’, as it is a load carried behind you. “Asset”? Not sure ... maybe a play on ‘ass’, especially if both words are used together?

I thought we were being a bit tongue-and-cheek about this recently, but it is becoming all the rage and has drifted up to British Columbia’s infection control playbook. https://apple.news/ABRZN8SWGTmGSSyu585N8fw

Happy for you that you could spread some wings & legs and fly. My very recent Roche antibody test for CoV was negative. Is “16” now the legal age? Kidding.

Current pop-adjusted mortality projections for USA and Brazil [below]. Brazil a higher total by November with larger area under the curve of daily deaths. There is mounting evidence that the Y-axis denominator should be 1 million, not 100,000 as in the graphs. By November, Canada is projected to have higher per capita daily deaths than either USA or Brazil. I hope we know by then a lot more about true natural immunity duration and longer-term infection clinical effects. If current USA incidence is closer to 40 million, it essentially had doubled from 20 over the past 6 weeks. It had also doubled from 10 to 20 over the 6 weeks prior to that period. If the doubling rate persists, herd immunity threshold (circa 60%) could be achieved by winter, of course no iron-clad guarantee of anything because of what remains unknown. Anything seems weirdly possible. Reaching community immunity prior to a viable vaccine roll-out. A tobacco-based vaccine candidate rising to the top; there are 2 in development in North America. Trump winning by a landslide.

Actually, a smarter Trump with a more skilled consult team could have backed up his claim and done it in a fairly incontrovertible manner. No region has better attempted to estimate a truer mortality rate than New York, and that could be reasonably extrapolated broadly in the USA since rising prevalence elsewhere justifies New York as a comparator. Other jurisdictions are trying to do this but are lagging behind large-scale representative antibody assessment as a surrogate marker of disease prevalence. Researchers in New York vastly inflated mortality by adding both probable CoV deaths and a proportion of excess deaths (year-to-year period referencing) reasonably attributable to CoV. That makes USA potentially look worse than currently. However, researchers during May peak also antibody-tested 15,000 people, finding a 12% state prevalence and 20% NYC prevalence. That drastically alters (reduces) mortality to a little more than 1% because the denominator reflects a much larger absolute number of presumed recoveries (deaths of course factored into both numerator and denominator). This ascertainment bias adjustment could put all global regions in a better light but I think the assertion that USA has a relatively low (lowest-ish) death rate could have been one pulled over on Wallace. I doubt he grasps the more advanced mortality algorithm any better than his interview opponent. Trump lost his prime-time shot to convincingly reduce the mortality rate to at least 25% of the current figures, as reflected in the graphs, thus dropping USA death rate to the bottom of the global pack; to boast about the sophisticated way in which he assesses mortality (without under-counting deaths absent an official diagnosis!); and to offset to some degree, particularly with his naïve base, the alarm created by rising case incidence by significantly and accurately adjusting the ratio of CoV mortality to overall crude mortality. In reality, the USA reported mortality rate is about the same as globally, with many countries reporting better or worse than the global average. There is lacking a standardized method for calculating this metric.

[I could only write outside the quote box in ‘edit’ format for some weird reason, and now cannot seem to rectify it]

Just catching a bit of the CW (Fox News) and DJT interview as clips are folded into Trevor Noah’s Daily Show. Not that Trump gets anything right, not defending him, but I note that Fox criticizes him for choosing a mortality chart that omits Russia (better) but includes Italy (worse) and Spain (worse). However, Fox pulls out their own chart to make a point. It entirely omits continental Europe and, therefore, bumps USA up in the rankings! By excluding Spain, Italy, and other European nations with high mortality rates they are doing the exact same ‘cherry-picking’ manipulative move they accuse the White House of. A smarter Trump staff would have included more European nations faring worse on lethality. That may have made Trump’s assertion a bit less embarrassing. Yet a more more honest and objective Fox production team would have included ANY European nations as mortality comparators. In fact, those are likely more accurate and reflective of the norms of fatality to date because mortality further in the trajectory of incidence has caught up to morbidity and yielded an overall recovery:death ratio. I mean, I’m not upset that they appear to score one in his net but I despise shady journalism.

“Why yes, you may try on the slippers for a spell, Guv’nuh, but 1st the ice bucket challenge.”

Evidently somebody is right on, and imposed right on, Covid according to that somebody’s graphic ‘beautiful mind’ ...

Apart from basic information ignorance and character flaws, this crisis draws authentic mental illness out of the wordwork. If you are out and about circulating among 157 people, at the best of times the odds are 50% that at least one will have an underlying psychotic illness. We are going to see these tussles and standoffs culminating in violence towards others, as well as injury/death indirectly brought on self for escalation leading to law enforcement intervention.

“within 16m of” should be “in addition to”, lest people think the spacing is 50 feet. LOL