Concerns for global spread of Zika mean Rio de Janeiro Olympics must not proceed | Hacker News Reader

Concerns for global spread of Zika mean Rio de Janeiro Olympics must not proceed

harvardpublichealthreview.org

432 pointsbd202 comments

This article is idiotic if the main reason for cancelling the game is actually some "global spread" of Zika.

Rio is not some city in the middle of nowhere from which no flights are coming in and out of, and now suddenly this massive international influx of visitors will come in -- it is a world-class city, a financial hub of the largest country in the continent.

If we take London 2012 as a benchmark, estimates there are that the olympics yielded a 13% increase in foreign visitors from the previous summer. And that is London, a place where access from other destinations is cheaper, the infrastructure better, and a lot more appealing to U.S. visitors (due to some of the things cited above). It is completely reasonable to expect that the delta in Rio should be roughly the same, if not smaller.

The fact is that the"impact" on travel due to the Olympics will be negligible in a city like Rio -- and the economic impact is CERTAINLY negative, unless you are drinking the Kool-Aid of organizers.

I'm fine with cancelling the games, but claiming that not doing so will lead to a much riskier global health situation than the one we are already living is hogwash.

I would expect the differences you mention to result in a higher delta for Rio, they would contribute to a lower base rate of travel making the event travel relatively larger.

When I wrote my original comment I certainly had a model that the base rate of travel was pretty comparable to LDN, but I looked at actual figures from a few years ago and saw that it is in fact 5x smaller.

Nevertheless, the 500,000 figure cited would represent a ~25% bump in the number of visitors (if we use 2012 figures). If you consider the area in Brazil most affected by Zika (which would include São Paulo), then this drops to 10%. You then also have to realize that a lot of those visitors displaced people who did not travel to Rio because of the olympics, which is an effect that is widely documented. Taken into account, I think it is plausible to suggest that the real impact of travel that we'd be seeing would be in the low teens or single digits.

But I think it is certainly debatable, and I guess this is the only point I really wanted to make in my comment -- that THIS is really the focus if you wanted to argue that the games ought to be suspended, but that the article doesn't address it in the least.

>You then also have to realize that a lot of those visitors displaced people who did not travel to Rio because of the olympics

If, as seems to be the case, you're looking at the anticipated percent increase in travel, then you've already included this displacement.

True, but how do you know how they reached their 500,000 figure?

I suppose neither of us can assume.

Agreed - I really wish they had made it the focus of their article.

Open water swimmers will be swimming in dirty water, sailors all ready have been. The Guardian wrote: Rio 2016: 'Chance of infection very likely' after tests show extent of pollution...

Maybe the tourists won't swimming in stagnant water where mosquitoes breed but tourists will be attending nearby while athletes swim in it.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/dec/02/rio-olympics-2...

London has the most tourists of any city in the world.

No, it's not the same.

I looked up the actual figures after posting -- seems London has about 5x as many international visitors, so you are absolutely right.

But, I think in Rio there is also an argument to be made of how many of those "estimated" visitors are actually simply displacing people who would otherwise have travelled to Rio. To your point, if Rio is in fact no set-up to accommodate as many people as London, then a lot of the effect of the games will simply be substituting regular travelers with Olympics watchers.

Either way -- the only point I guess I was really trying to make was that the variable of interest is the delta in the actual visitors to Rio -- you want an economist making this argument, not a health expert

Most people are probably going to stay at Air BnBs. There literally aren't enough hotels there to support the influx of people there. It was a mess during the world cup and that was held throughout the entire country. The only place I could find to stay during the world cup there was an overpriced AirBnb.

It was totally worth it, but I've been wondering since how the hell the city is going to handle that many people there at once.

"you want an economist making this argument, not a health expert"

You probably want both.

Good point. I agreed with the author until I looked up Brazil's tourism. 5.6 Million people per year in 2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Brazil).

If you're looking at the chart, that's 2012, not 2015.

I'm surprised that people need to look up such a thing. Brazil is a hot tourism destination, especially from other South American countries. It's also has a huge economy and has excellent manufacturing capabilities.

The bulk of the tourism to Brazil is either from Central & South America, which already has the virulent strain of Zika, or it's from Europe and northern North America, which does not have the Aedes Aegypta mosquita.

Olympics tourism will be much more widespread, including many from vulnerable areas in Africa and Asia.

And the OP does not say that it will prevent the spread of Zika, only slow it. Even a few extra months could be valuable -- lots of effort is currently being spent looking for a vaccine.

5,677,000 tourists to Brazil in 2012. So 500,000 is an 8% increase, correct?

Well you have to be fair that that is taking ALL of Brazil into account, and some regions are unaffected by this virus -- but the largest builk of it (I think around 80%) are the cities of São Paulo and Rio, which are affected by the virus.

> the largest builk of it (I think around 80%) are the cities of São Paulo and Rio

That's only slightly more than the share of the population their region concentrates.

Yes, there are places where the disease wasn't identified yet. (Is it because of lack of cases? Who knows?) But those are mostly empty places insulated by bad transportation networks.

Right, over the whole year not so substantial. Assuming an even distribution of tourism per month (false, but I lack a better model), that's about 500,000 per month. This is essentially doubling the tourism during the events.

As the article says, sending tourists into an outbreak of a new virus does not seem prudent.

Yes, Rio sees many visitors regularly. What Rio does not see is an influx of visitors from nearly every country on earth. It's that spread that is the problem. The financial impact on hosting the games is already negative for host cities. That's no longer debatable without ignoring fact. Your argument that all the experts studying the Zika epidemic and drawing the ever more cemented conclusion that this is a very serious problem are wrong is what is hogwash.

But will you at least concede that THIS is what should have been the focus of the article? While perfectly valid, all of the scientific discussion around Zika is mostly irrelevant to the point the author was trying to make -- the true variable of interest is how the games shape the quantity of visitors and the distribution of those visitors around the world. But there's hardly a line in the article about that -- just the 500,000 number is thrown around with absolutely no citation.

Instead,the article does some of the worst things we'd expect from scientists with sentences like "All it takes is one infected traveler" -- this is fear-mongering and irresponsible and the author should be ashamed of that comment.

I maintain that it is not a careful, reasoned argument about the issue.

I'm sorry, but there seems to be a bit of a logical disconnect here. This looks like a knee-jerk pattern match on the "all it takes" phrase. My understanding is that this is factual in this case. That is how it works with a lot of diseases -- with many kinds of self-replicators -- all it takes is one. That is how it works with various insect and fungal blights that have ravaged California forests. A public awareness of the relative risks is a public good.

Single patients flown to the US from the Ebola stricken regions did not spread infection, because of the particulars of infection mechanisms. Zika can be spread by mosquito. If the Olympics increase the traffic to resource-thin countries with populations of the right kind of mosquito, this should be considered carefully.

sorry but no, Rio sees visitors from most countries out there. it's not an even spread like it would be in case of olympics, but not that far from it.

Actually RJ does have an influx of visitors from nearly every country on earth.

source (see page 97): http://www.dadosefatos.turismo.gov.br/export/sites/default/d...

So sending an even larger influx into an outbreak is good... why exactly?

Its like arguing that some subset of people drive drunk right now, therefore it would be a great idea if more people would drive drunk this summer.

No, it's like arguing that some people get into car accidents, so more people driving is a bad idea.

On the surface that's not a bad argument. It becomes a bad argument at certain scales though -- the difference between a 1% and a 100% increase matters. The point at which it matters depends in part on the transmissibility of the disease, which is low for zika.

Yes, yes it is.

Yes. It's why that argument is made about airport security all the time, for instance by BloomBerg: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-18/airport-se...

Devil's advocate: I think the argument is that the damage of the disease is disproportional to the people exposed, because the increased pairs of interactions are what can make it spread fast.

So doubling the number of people congregated in Rio won't just double the danger, but quadruple it. If car accidents obeyed a similar dynamic -- where they increase (much) more than proportionally to the number of vehicle-miles driven, we should be similarly more cautious about additional drivers.

Aren't those pairs composed of a foreigner and a contaminated native? One of those populations is staying constant.

That’s a pretty reasonable argument. Building better train networks between economically linked cities, getting people to choose other forms of transportation for their commutes, giving buses/light rail their own lanes, designing infrastructure to better segregate drivers from pedestrians/cyclists, encouraging car-pooling and use of smaller lighter cars wherever practical, and in general trying to slow down the speed of automobile traffic (ideally all urban driving would be <30 mph if not slower) would save a lot of lives.

Automobiles, while often convenient, are one of the leading causes of death, and we should try to organize public policy around reducing their use and the deaths they cause to the extent possible without overly compromising their convenience.

Reducing the number of automobiles would also have a big positive environmental impact, and reducing the number and widths of roads and parking lots would free up a lot of space which could be used for other purposes. Other forms of transportation also scale a lot better with population density, and denser cities use a lot less other infrastructure per capita.

Once self-driving cars become effective, I have high hopes that they will replace a large proportion of current human drivers, something else which should save many lives.

Well, it's a matter of cost vs benefit - while it may be valuable to take some costly, unpopular measures if that would have a meaningful change in spread of Zika, I'm not convinced if it's worth doing such things only to achieve, say, a 8% reduction (some of estimates here on impact of Olympics to tourist traffic) in risk of spreading the disease.

Those numbers aren't particularly compelling, especially for the countries the author listed as not having the resources to deal with an outbreak:

Nigeria: 265

India: 4,522

Indonesia: 0

Considering the number of olympic athletes from these countries, what evidence there is that these numbers will increase?

There's a good point. The number of visitors from those countries actually remained typical or declined in London for 2012. It is conceivable that the increased hotel and airfare costs actually deter travel from poorer countries.

http://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/number-international-visit...

As an Indian I can tell you even a few infected people can come into the country and cause an outbreak here.

Its not like in US, the sewage infrastructure in India is very bad. There are open air sewage drains, mosquito infestation is every day life and in cities people live in very densely crowded homes. All of this contributes to a rapid spread in case of a outbreak.

In fact dengue outbreaks are common in India every summer, or a few months.

The negative financial impact of the games comes mostly from building and maintaining the Olympic infrastructure. Cancelling the games doesn't solve this problem, on the contrary as it denies the country the income and touristic reputation boost. Public health concerns go first of course, but it's not gonna be a financial win.

This is the claim: Scientists can disagree on how much the mass migration of 500,000 foreigners will accelerate the virus’s global spread and make the pandemic worse—but none can possibly argue that it will slow it down or make things better.

Agreed -- but this should have been the focus of the article, which it wasn't, and that's why I think it was irresponsible and poorly written. How much is 500k compared to normal travel to Rio, or to areas of Brazil and the rest of LatAm affected by Zika? What is the geographic distribution of Olympic visitors compared to regular tourists to Rio? What measures has the city taken to curb the impact of Zika that it may not take if the Olympics aren't held? etc.

Clearly you have to inspect that 500,000 number carefully, and that's all that matters for this argument. That would've been an honest discussion on this issue, but it is not what the authors chose to concentrate on.

It is only idiotic if you ignore the emotional response. The author is very afraid of this strain of Zika, they recognize that world wide distribution is inevitable but they seek to address their fear by advocating an action they know "could" be taken, to cancel the games.

Ill panic once Madaagascar closes its ports.

port

I think claims as strong and vehement as yours ("hogwash") should be backed up more and better than in your post.

Brazilian here, Ive been in Rio a couple of times (living in Sao Paulo right now, who also has problems w/Aedes Aegypti):

Come to Brazil if you wish, but take care. The Aedes Aegypti mosquito is all around and can spread not only Zika, but Chikungunya (kindly named "chico cunha") and Dengue.

Make good use of insect repellent, watch your stuff when walking on beaches (don't forget robbers and thieves) and think twice about trusting someone.

As someone said before, every city in the world has its problems and brazilian cities have them also.

Personally, I will not go to Olympics just because hotel prices on Rio skyrocketed and are almost impractical.

> every city in the world has its problems and brazilian cities have them also.

At the same magnitude?

It should be considered, dont know if it makes sense but the pros and cons should be weighed and respected international health organizations should weigh in.

Overall though, think given the fact the facilities have not been fully constructed, the Brazilian government is on the verge of collapse, and the risks of being a major disease vector is plausible...

Should definitely consider delay or moving

I've thought this too. They pick some of the weirdest places to try to host this stuff. I guess they're trying to bring the areas up or something but if the place can't handle daily life what makes anyone think they can handle a big event like this?

Nobody else is willing to do it/bribe the IOC sufficently. I'm really glad Boston bailed.

How is Rio a "weird place"? They're in a bad situation right now, as any city with an outbreak of a virus and with a political crisis would be, but it's major world metropolis of 12M people with plenty of international business visitors and a GDP of 200 billion USD. They accommodate 900k tourists during Carnival alone.

I presume that the parent is referring to the locations of the Olympic venues around Rio, which are scattered around the outskirts of the city.

> the Brazilian government is on the verge of collapse

Don't believe those news. The government will change today, nothing will collapse. There will be some roads closed (until the police gets there), and some brave discourses on the media, and that's all.

The government attempt a coup Monday - everybody just carried on.

Ever since the news of Zika causing microcephaly came up I have been wondering whether it's a net benefit to humanity/homeostasis if we were to exterminate Aedis Aegypti. Can Zika spread among humans already? It would seem like a huge risk to the future of humanity if this infectious disease interferes with reproduction.

What's the worst-case scenario for letting Aedis Aegypti live? Is it better than the worst-case scenario for exterminating the species?

Zika is a big threat to fetuses that are gestating while the mother is infected. After a woman gains immunity, there is little threat to any babies she might carry.

So it is a very serious concern at the moment, but it is not any sort of existential problem. It will likely not even be a medium term problem (there is early research towards vaccines).

> After a woman gains immunity, there is little threat to any babies she might carry.

It is way too early to make that claim.

You're also ignoring the Guillain–Barré cases that are suspected to have been caused by Zika.

I think the concern would be dominated by the side-effects of the method we use to perform the total extermination, rather than the side-effects of Aedis Aegypti being extinct.

I vaguely recall hearing about an effort to release sterilized males that would effectively reduce the population local to where they're released. That seemed to be a very safe way to change the environment. The only difference might be the scale by which we could execute that method.

article suggesting that, and lots of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536074

is this link actually confirmed yet? from what I heard, other nations which Zika has spread to have not seen an increase in the rate of microcephaly.

(I was curious what the status was so searched)

The CDC has weighed in:

http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2016/s0413-zika-microcepha...

Thanks. will read

Seems to still be doubt though ... https://twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/728035459574710272

Just to clarify, the parenthetical that I had searched was meant to point to my not being especially informed, not a complaint about you asking or anything like that.

No worries, I took it as such.

I was wondering about whether this would happen. I am not enough of an expert to make a call on this either way of course, but if experts decided this was the right call would it even be possible to cancel/reschedule the Olympics? Imagine the financial impact on Rio.

I imagine Rio would be given the 2020 Summer Games. And then Tokyo would be moved to 2024 and so on. Just my guess though.

Well, the fair outcome would be that Tokyo was cancelled altogether, if the allegations of corruptions [1] are true.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/may/11/tokyo-olympics...

Wow, Japan is generally known as being clean and corruption free. I can only imagine the type of bribes Brazil and Russia handed out.

clean - yes, but corruption free? corruption is everywhere. if you have powers and decisions making you'll get corruption. look at lobbying in US - that's pretty much buying decisions. huge corps giving money to presidential candidates in US now - are there no strings attached and no further expectations?

> Wow, Japan is generally known as being clean and corruption free.

Huh? This is the home of the keiretsu and the yakuza, you know. Corruption among the political elite is a standard assumption among the Japanese.

Imagine the potential global financial impact of all of the visitors (and athletes) contracting Zika and bring that home with them to spread.

Tough call...

Why is the FINANCIAL impact the biggest one to be considered?

Because it's an objective unit of measurement. You can't objectively measure (or assign a value to) human suffering.

It depends what you are measuring. If a city could increase its financial prosperity at the expense of poisoning its population (fracking may be a good example) would they do it? After all, if money is the only thing that matters then human health only matters insofar as it affects the flow of money. And if other factors compensate to preserve "financial health" then human health outcomes become expendable.

If you could produce more meat cheaper at the expense of keeping animals in terrible conditions on factory farms, would you do it? After all, if money is all that matters the animal's suffering doesn't even enter the equation.

How about increasing financial gain at the expense of destroying the natural environment (eg overfishing, dumping plastics and releasing all the carbon from the ground)? Grandchildren may have to pay the bill, but what if you had perfect knowledge and knew they'd be economically richer, but with worse health outcomes and lots of species gone exinct?

Measuring implies a model, and the model makes assumptions about the world that may not be true, and the whole combination can be extremely harmful. Not to mention very human-centric (and "us" centric). As the Native American chief said:

When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Money

Except that we do. We assign monetary values to human lives in actuarial models every day. The statistical value of a human live in the Netherlands when considering traffic safety was E700k in the last project I worked on, but this varies by purpose and over time. Furthermore, there are several international standard methods of quantifying the burden of disease, like the DALY and QALY.

So yes, we can and we do 'objectively' (as in, per a standardized methodology) assign value to human suffering.

Yes, by using a model. The assumptions of the model are subjective in the sense of making judgments about what's important. For example, they don't take into account catastrophic collapse of the environment (overfishing, species extinction, ecological collapse eg from bees dying out, acidification of oceans from CO2 release). They also make assumptions about people's utility functions -- the famous example by Bill Gates that baldness has much more more research being done on it than malaria relative to the suffering, because people with more money speak with a larger economic voice and skew the results.

In your model, given certain starting conditions, can you ever get a positive value for human suffering? For example if rich people are willing to pay to see gladiators fight animals to the death, or just to see the poor people subjugated as slaves. I am pretty sure you assign positive financial value to animal suffering because factory farms torture animals to save a buck and therefore in purely economic terms they are doing "better".

You mean, assign FINANCIAL value.

Right, for some reason I thought the gp said monetary and I was keeping with what I thought was the terminology of the thread.

'Tis a good question, and one I keep noticing on HN in particular. It feels like there is a small trend that primarily views world issues via an economic lens.

It's pretty common thing around here to see "the business case for doing [ethical thing]", as if being good business is a prerequisite to ethical behavior. It's particular disconcerting when it's applied to widespread problems.

Basic workplace safety is good... because it leads to higher returns on investment.

Discrimination is bad... because there's more money in equality.

Don't fuck over your employees... because you get better productivity that way.

It's a point of view that's pretty foreign to me.

Because we like to assume that the people we talk with are basically good people who aren't just looking for an excuse to twirl their moustaches. So you assume that you're arguing against "I would like to do this, but that threatens my ability to maintain my business and the jobs that depend on it. This evil act is the least-bad option."

Because the parent comment asked one to consider the financial impact to Rio if the games were cancelled/boycotted. Nothing more...

As the number of all the visitors (and athletes) of Olympics is far smaller than the number of "normal people" currently traveling to those areas, and we've yet to see any Zika cases outside of Brazil, then this means that it's quite likely that the actual impact of that will be zero.

Yes, it's likely that someone of them will contract Zika and bring that home with them to spread - but it's more likely that it will not happen, and the effect is dwarfed by the chances that the spread will be caused by the ordinary flow of people, and cancelling the Olympics will have no effect on that.

Wikipedia lists the only previously cancelled Olympics as 1916 (WWI) and 1940 and 1944 (WWII).

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cancelled_Olympic_Gam...

So it's happened 3 times out of a possible 30. Doesn't even seem that dramatic when you put it that way.

It's pretty well known and well documented at this point that the host cities for olympic games see no financial benefit at all, and in fact they lose money. Most recently, look at the Sochi games, which cost $50+bn. There is a 0% chance that the games brought in that much money. The entities making money are the IOC and the broadcast companies, NBC being the primary. It would be sad if the games were cancelled, but at the risk of a global pandemic it's hard to see how people can argue in favor anymore.

Agreed that the Olympic games do not have financially benefit the host city. But, Rio has probably already spent a lot of money on the games. Not hosting them would probably hurt, financially, even more.

Please note I am not arguing that the Olympics should continue in Rio. We should do what is best for world health, even if that negatively impacts Rio financially.

But that is nonsense for Rio, which has already spent its capital outlays for the games. Overall Rio may and probably will lose money, but if the games were cancelled, it could be financially catastrophic.

You're right that it isn't a question that should be determined by finances, but that's a different issue.

    >It would be sad if the games were cancelled, but at the risk of a global pandemic it's hard to see how people can argue in favor anymore.

The corruption, bribery, and kick backs that go into selecting host cities means that short of a host city being wiped off the map by a nuclear bomb, the games will go on.

I wonder if the medical community is also working with the state department, airlines and travel agencies to make sure people get a stern warning before they buy plane tickets to Brazil and an even sterner warning when they get back.

Considering the political forces that need to be involved in moving (or not) the games it seems foolish to not have a safety net if "please move the games" doesn't work.

The Ministry of Health in Brazil has been getting a new head of department every few months, depending on the backstage deals the president has had to make in order to keep her government in place. So no, I wouldn't count on any coordinated actions being spearheaded by the government. They are pretty busy running around like headless chickens, which means insisting in inneficient methods to eliminate the mosquito (e.g. fuming).

Some airlines have been allowing passengers to refund tickets to areas affected by Zika [1].

I think every decent travel agency should worry its customers that traveling to Brazil at this time is not a good idea.

Besides the health issues, Brazil is ousting its president today and most leftist parties and unions have vouched to stop the country with strikes, blockades and protests. You may get stuck in a 2-hour traffic jam on your way to the games.

1 - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/zika-virus-m...

Zika is already in Houston, Dallas and other Texas cities. I dont know if it is tourism that brought it here or not, but it has enough transmission vectors that its only a matter of time before its everywhere.

What will prevent the outbreak is the weather in Rio. The Zika mosquito takes 3 to 4 weeks to reproduce http://www.denguevirusnet.com/life-cycle-of-aedes-aegypti.ht... and it loves hot and wet weather.

The autumn in Rio is the coldest and driest in a long time http://g1.globo.com/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2016/03/outono-no... When the Olympics arrive, the mosquito will be in their lowest population count.

If you consider that the Olympics tourists are rich ones, that will spend most of their times in air conditioned environments, the risk is really very low.

Serious question: Has anyone seen an article or study about the microcephaly effects on pregnancy where the main population studied was not in brazil?

I have yet to see a study that links it to microcephaly for anyone who has not been in brazil for a long time. I realize the mosquito isn't common, but brazil also does things like: "secretly spray tons and tons of pesticide on their populus", etc.

Given these are all correlative studies, i'd love to see something from a country where there aren't a ton of possible other variables.

(especially given zika has been around and even common forever and it's only now that this seems to be an issue)

You know, before the tourism economies of all of these other countries are completely destroyed.

Yes, microcephaly from Zika has been detected in many south american countries. CDC supports the link, as does scientific consensus: http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2016/s0413-zika-microcepha...

It's the fat cats who don't want to move/postpone the Olympics most. They have the most to lose.

The evidence is not compelling: https://twitter.com/WLTSchirano/status/728917519457787904

Why are there hardly any cases in Colombia?

Thanks, this is incredibly helpful.

The article linked in the original post refers to a retrospective analysis in French Polynesia (the source of the virus in Brazil) that found a huge increase in Zika-induced microcephaly there as well.

Article said the virulent strain came from French Polynesia (aka Tahiti).

French polynesia is not tahiti. Tahiti is one of the islands (rangiroa, moorea are other examples). Tahiti is the most populous, but if you read the study, it does not say tahiti.

Most of the other islands are remarkably small.

Note also that the methodology used in that study (http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...) is a retrospective analysis of data that uses somewhat ... almost laughable assumptions-

Modelling assumptions for estimation of risk of microcephaly associated with Zika virus infection: ...

•All microcephaly cases in the study period have been identified

•The birth rate is constant during the study period and can be estimated from official statistics

•The number of Zika virus infections in a given week is proportional to the number of consultations for suspected infection in the same week

Note the last one: They are estimating actual zika infections not from zika infections, but from consultations of people suspected to have zika and the percent who were later found to have zika.

So how accurate is such a "suspicion based consultation"?

By the end of the outbreak, public health officials had recorded 8750 suspected infections with Zika virus, of which 383 (4.4%) were confirmed in the laboratory.

At this point, i'm going to suggest maybe their assumptions are not quite as strong as they think they are.

....

What? Are they planning a culling, on which they will blame Zika and the Olympics? Otherwise, this make zero sense.

Despite all the hype, Zika is not the end of the world. Most people who get it hardly notice and get over it in rather short order just as one gets over a cold.

What about the microcephalic babies born to people infected with Zika? That's not exactly a hardly noticeable side effect...

So does "fold" just mean "times"? I always thought it meant 2^x times.

Yes. It's quite commonly used in British English afaik.

You can say "This brought a twofold increase in clientele", "We saw a threefold weight increase in affected mammals". I've never seen it used passed "fourfold" though.

"Tenfold" seems common enough.

According to Google Trends (which only shows five at a time), these are the top five *folds between two and ten, excluding sevenfold which is off the charts because of Avenged Sevenfold: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=twofold%2Cthreefold%...

Yep, N-fold = N times

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tenfold

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/twofold

I guess I got confused since it seems to be used for emphasis, as though tenfold really meant more than 10x. Anyway, glad to get that straight.

That's cute, haha!

That's not going to happen -- not when their economy is in a nosedive and they are embroiled in impeachment proceedings.

At most they'll spray and fumigate the skeeters for the few weeks the activities take place and then go back to "normal".

Could people accidentally bring back live mosquitoes in their luggage and such that are carriers?

If so, could spread the world at lightning speed.

I think there is also concern for the athletes in that the water is absolutely filthy there.

The mosquito already lives in every place the climate does not kill it.

It's the spread of the virus that's scaring everybody.

Come to Rio - watch the Olympians swim in the very dirty water they promised to clean but didn't! Catch zika, then fill out the police and insurance forms after you get robbed! Seriously though, Rio is a very very dangerous place to visit even for brasileros, let alone tourists, and the zika and chinkungya virus outbreaks are not helping either.

Watch it on TV, from far away.

As a middle-income tourist who has had multiple holidays in Rio, the closest I've come to being robbed was by a taxi driver that wanted $200 to travel from Corcovado to Pao de Acucar.

Seriously, it's like any other city in the world. If you walk around a dodgy area talking on an iPhone, by yourself, especially late at night, then you're asking for trouble. Be sensible and cautious, and Rio is a lovely place to go on holiday.

EDIT: I guess I'm attracted to cities with higher crime rates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if6GLohPq8k

Not that incidents like this don't occur in other cities in the world, but it shows that avoiding dodgy areas at night might not be enough.

Copacabana is a dodgy area already and Zona Norte is a warzone.

Imagine further out like Nova Iguaçu, I must have to go there with War Tanks at least so I can comeback alive!

You can probably imagine where these people are going in 5, 10, 15 years - worse and worse offenses. Sounds like whoever will replace Dilma needs to legislate firing squads, or conceal carry.

That video is pretty bad. One, it looks like the same kids over and over so the cops clearly do not care. Two, I was wondering what the gun laws were there until some guy chased them with a hand gun. If someone is looking to go have some fun fighting it seems like walking around with a cardboard iPhone might be the ticket. I'm only sort of kidding. I know if some kid grabbed my wife while we were walking down the street there would be a fight.

The only other place I have seen it like the above is the gypsy kids in Rome. Even then though they were more slight of hand pick pockets than the blatant assault in the video.

My colleague had his phone stolen as he was talking on it by two guys on a moped - that was in Bond Street, London.

I did not mean to imply it could not happen anywhere. Only that this was exceptionally bad, and Rome was the only other place I had seen with the swarms of kids blatantly stealing.

Lol indeed. I witnessed a lady with huge shopping bags in Bloomsbury getting her iPhone stolen from a bicycle. The guy acted like it was the most normal thing in the world, just snatched the phone while speeding down a cycle lane. Tons of other cyclists around, going as fast as this guy, and nobody cared.

A few years ago, a coworker was talking on a Motorola Razr when a thief tried to steal it at a run... he ran with the top half and left my coworker with the lower half :P

I've had a phone pickpocketed from me too.

>... what the gun laws were ...

Almost 60,000 people were murdered in Brazil in 2014, most with guns. While some Latin American countries have higher per capita murder rates, in absolute numbers, Brazil is the deadliest place in the world outside Syria.

Brazilians are far more likely to be shot to death than Americans, a more populous country where there are about 8,000 to 9,000 gun homicides each year.

...

Right now, Brazil actually has tough gun laws.

More here: http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/03/28/472157969/b...

They should just add some more laws, that will clearly solve the problem!

Pass new important law

Hold press conference about it and pat self on back

Fail to enforce the law uniformly -- or at all

Shield politically-favored violators of law

Get re-elected because you're tough on crime

Society remains unchanged

"Law abiding citizens are disarmed, crime increases"

A lot of them are killed buy the police. Your chance of being killed in a high income area is really low.

In Brazil, if you are under 18 and get caught for theft, robbery, or even armed robbery, you will probably be out of jail by the next day.

I guess many officers think arresting someone underage is not worth the trouble, unless it is some life threatening situation.

The only difference between this and what happens to you in NYC is you don't notice.

talking on an iPhone, by yourself, especially late at night, then you're asking for trouble.

Please don't apply your standards other cities of the world. What you described does not happen in my (capital) city. In fact if you drop something, you will likely get it back.

He said in a dodgy area.

Pray tell what is this magical city you live in that does not have a single dodgy area.

If by dodgy you mean areas where people regularly steal and harass, then no, we don't.

OK, I'll rephrase to "a lot of other cities in the world" - London, New York, Paris, Warsaw, Berlin, Rome. All of them have their fair share of dodgy places that you should approach cautiously.

What city do you live in, by the way? The only city I know of deservedly with this reputation is Singapore.

> Warsaw

I'm deliberately singling this one out as a point of pride:

Where in Warsaw can't you walk down the street reading your iPhone?

I'll concede pickpocketing can be an issue on buses, and racism is very much an issue in present times. Issues with muggings, though?

I didn't get mugged, but I was getting a coach to Radom, and the bus station didn't feel like a crime-free paradise. That said, I've spent quite a bit of time in Poland as well (mostly in Kaszubia), and the only trouble I had was in Krakow (and it was me being stupid that led to it). So no complaints about Warsaw at all, just pointing out that most of the time, I didn't feel any more or less safe in Warsaw than Rio.

Under USSR rule, many cities like St Petersburg were extremely safe and children would roam the streets even at night.

They indeed would roam the streets, but to claim safety you need reliable statistics which didn't exist in USSR. So, your safety claim is likely overstated

I can't think of a place in Ottawa that I wouldn't feel comfortable wandering around late at night with my phone out.

I'd say the same for Vancouver or Victoria.

too many bicycles are stolen in vancouver to wholeheartedly agree with you on that one.

Property crime is commonplace in Vancouver, given that we've always been the heroin capital of North America. Violent crime like muggings, however, are very rare. The addicts are not confrontational.

I grew up in Ottawa and was going to try and name a place but couldn't think of one either.

Yet to find a dodgy area in Singapore. I think they don't exist.

One of the smallest and most richest countries in the world, the city of Rio de Janeiro is bigger in size and in population, just the city.

Not even Geylang?

Not even Geylang. It has more character than the rest of Singaporean neighbourhoods for sure but hardly qualifies as dodgy. It's tame compared to even the best parts of Johor for example which is just across the water.

Singapore, probably.

I'm not sure about the tone of that message, but I have lived in several cities where this was the case: Oslo, Singapore, Helsinki, Stockholm come to mind as places where even “dodgy” areas have had until recently very little instances of systematic robberies.

Can't say about the others, but I didn't feel much safer in Stockholm when I worked there for a couple of months in 2005. I didn't think it was particularly dangerous, but I would say the same of Rio.

I probably should have referred explicitly to that experiment: http://www.rd.com/culture/most-honest-cities-lost-wallet-tes... It came out when I was living in Helsinki, and my colleague first concern was to find out what could have happened to the twelfth wallet. I asked if anything would come back intact, and their response was telling: “Not phones. If a phone is found lost, I would upgrade software: you don’t want to risk security. Then find the owner.”

One anecdote that might be telling: someone left their wallet in front of me in Stockholm metro. I was concerned, trying to imagine a way to get it back to him; the Swede sitting opposite me was surprised that I didn’t know I could hand it to any employee of SL safely.

The chance to be involved in an armed robbery are small in every big city in the world. Based on anecdotes people will always over or under exaggerate the chances.

Just to give a counter example: I lived in Brussels, Philadelphia, Oslo, Sao Paulo... the only place about which I have a first hand "armed robbery" story was in Oslo of all places: a coworker got actually shot in the back when he bravely (but stupidly) turned his back and said "no, you are not going to shoot me".

He was lucky and was only a couple of weeks out but he carried his X-rays of the bullet with him because nobody would believe him otherwise.

Most if not all of Switzerland is the same.

There are still some incidents that happen from time to time. In Geneva I've heard of someone going out for a smoke from a hotel accros from the main train station, and getting everything robbed; I've also heard of someone being beat up to the point of loosing an eye in Nyon (a town near Geneva). We also had the famous case of a guy who picked up hitchhikers, assaulted them before killing and abducting their bodies. Did so 11 times before he got caught [0].

[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Peiry

That's a far cry from being unsafe cities :)

Sure, there are isolated anecdotes like the ones you quote - but there is not a single area of either Geneva or Nyon where I wouldn't walk around with an iPhone at night (I grew up in the Nyon region, then moved to Geneva's as a teenager FWIW). The worst that you can expect is someone trying to sell you drugs, or begging, or getting into a drunken argument (like basically anywhere in the world where humans live)

Not to mention, that's probably the "worst" region of the country - I live in Bern now and you'd be hard pressed to find someone who would not bring your iPhone back to you should you leave it on the sidewalk at night.

This must be Scandinavia...

Not that I don't agree with you... I do. But, being brazilian, the idea of walking around at any time with my iphone out makes me cringe. I love my country, and I think everyone should visit it, but just keep away your iphones and anything of value while walking about, and you'll be fine!

Yeah, I lived in BH - I have blonde hair, so I didn't need an iPhone to say I was a rich gringo.

My entire family has blonde hair and they are from Brazil. They're from Florianopolis though.

I keep on walking around with my iPhone everywhere in Rio, so has my wife. Never been stolen! I use it everywhere, it's my only phone. Maybe it's because I'm a big guy, the thiefs might be afraid to steal a big guy? but what about my wife, she's tiny.

This is not how statistics work. You can't generalize from just your personal experience.

"Seriously, it's like any other city in the world. If you walk around a dodgy area talking on an iPhone, by yourself, especially late at night, then you're asking for trouble. Be sensible and cautious, and Rio is a lovely place to go on holiday."

I generally espouse this view ... that being sensible and street smart are the important parts to visiting different cities and that, in general, they are all fairly safe.

However, I also would describe Rio and Sao Paulo as a little further along the danger/risk meter.

You know all those warnings and rules of thumb that people pass on about pickpocketing and scams and tricksters and so on ? And they never really pan out or materialize ? In Rio, they do.

I would feel more safe (than Rio) in Shanghai or Shenzhen, less safe (than Rio) in Tijuana.

Shanghai feels incredibly safe and i've walked around in a lot of places where my colleagues thought it was dodgy (it wasn't; just poorer). I have not one time felt unsafe in Shanghai and I go there a lot. That's quite different from say, Fort Lauderdale, which was the first time in many years I really felt threatened when we stupidly went to a very dodgy gas station. Actually that was second time in that same business trip when actually on the Orlando Disney area in one of the Disney hotels two crackheads got in the lift with us, pretended not to know eachother and followed us to our room.

Never had anything remotely look like violence, robbery or even weirdos like that in Shanghai/Suzhou.

The time before this US thing (where nothing happened but it made the hairs on my neck stand up and we did realize we were close to getting robbed) was about 10 years ago when I got robbed at knife point in a small town under Barcelona. While feeling completely fine walking through weird neighborhoods in Belize. So you never know...

When I was around 8 my teacher in school said 'if you go to Amsterdam, you die; this city is so dangerous that when you go there, you will most surely get robbed, raped and murdered'. Apparently in a certain part of the Netherlands this idea was prevalent as when, 10 odd years later, I went to the university of Amsterdam my grandparents had something like 'Ok, this is it, this is the last time we saw him. He dead.'. Then I lived there and I actually lived in the neighborhood which was 'known' to 'everyone' that you will die there; de Bijlmer. Ofcourse, it was great; all these murderers and thieves offered me beer and food before going to uni in the morning; they invited me to the bars under the flats at night. I walked through that place (and other 'you'll die' places) in the middle of night and never felt anything resembling fear.

I want to go to Brazil and I will because of a client soon, but he, born and raised in Sao Paulo, says even he doesn't like it because of the crime. And he knows this city well. I'm not sure what to believe but we'll see... Not bringing any iPhone that's for sure.

> two crackheads got in the lift with us, pretended not to know eachother and followed us to our room.

Wow, what did you do? Keep walking? back in circle? If they get to your room it's game over...

I was with my wife; we looked at eachother and ran to your room as soon as the elevator opened (they were much slower); called the desk and looked through the peephole. They didn't see which room we went in (it was one of those huge Disney things with many hallways) and saw them walk by. We didn't see them after that but it was really scary; I have seen flaky people before but these were completely out of place. And definitely out to do something with the 'rich tourists'. Then again; you never are sure; maybe they wouldn't have done anything and it was all a coincidence but we both felt the same and the fact they had rotten teeth, bad gums, holes in their faces and yet pretended to not know eachother ('what floor are you?' ; both clicked another floor than ours and yet walked out with us which was when we bolted).

It's Central Florida they could have been in town for the Meth conference down the block

In my experience, a lot of Brazilians talk about crime in the same way that the British talk about the weather. There are more dodgy areas in Sao Paulo than there are in London, and what happens in those dodgy areas is dodgier than what happens in the dodgy areas of London. But the safe areas still dominate the city, and it's worth going to see them.

Stay out of the dodgy areas, don't walk the streets by yourself at night, and avoid standing out. I was there last month, I got buses, had lunch in a typical Brazilian cafe, went to the coach station. No problems.

But still, that doesn't sound... Great. If that makes sense? I'm a night person and in countries where the weather is nice (like in South of Spain where I live) I like to to walk outside and sit in bars working and chatting until 3-4 am. I do that here, Amsterdam, London (not that it's often possible in the latter two) but also Shanghai, Beijing, Bangkok etc. Seems there is no problem doing that all the time while in Brazil it seems not an option? It is not a big loss per-se however it doesn't feel too nice to have to think like that. In South Africa or even Venice Beach I had that as well and it just doesn't feel like you can be yourself if you have to actually be warned by police or bar owners to get out of there at sundown by cab or you might have an issue.

Given that you don't know how to spell brasileiro I'm guessing you are not a local and don't even speak portuguese, so I'll take your opinion with a grain of salt.

I agree, the waters are dirty! Specially in Lagoa.. it's awful, cannot imagine water sports there!

Rio IS dangerous. Anyone claiming otherwise is either a "patriotic" Brazilian or is trying to generalize from personal (lucky) experience.

There are obviously many factors that come into play. The biggest ones are not what you expect: how "gringo" (foreigner) you look, and are you walking around with Brazilian friends? Negatives on both counts will increase your odds of "bad stuff" happening to you dramatically. Also, if you come from a safer place where people do stuff such as routinely leave cars and homes unlocked, casually hail any cab anywhere and walk around with expensive phones(or cameras), you're in for a big surprise.

The best safety advice I can give is: assume there is no police whatsoever in the country and act accordingly, even if you do happen to see police around. They are unlikely to do anything to help you. May not even investigate if you die.

You should still be mostly OK, statistically speaking. The problem is that, when bad things happen, they tend to be really bad. You are very very lucky that if if is something simple as a purse snatching (as I have seen in other comments). Still very lucky if there's a knife involved. Expect multiple armed thugs in motorcycles, even if you can't see everyone involved, assume there's backup for the criminals.

One thing that many have overlooked in the comments is that for Rio and Sao Paulo, the crime trend is down. In São Paulo particularly, I've even seen people casually browsing on their iPads while sitting at bar tables next to a busy road, or people talking on their iphones in barely lit streets near the city center. That was unthinkable a few years ago.

However, the trend for other regions is that crime rates are rising dramatically. Some regions, in the Northeast particularly, are worse than some war zones. Avoid, specially if you have no Brazilian friends.

Disclaimer: I am Brazilian, lived for 30+ years in the northeast. Fled to the very south, to a very good neighborhood, wife witnessed a drug-related execution in front of our building the week we arrived. Nothing came out of it btw, didn't even make the news. Where I used to live, 20+ violent deaths in a weekend are not worth newspaper pages anymore. Then fled to the Bay Area.

It's kind of a shame that there is probably a solution to Zika sitting there waiting for regulatory approval in Oxitec's GM mosquitoes which were first successfully trialed in 2009. Maybe after another one or two million people have caught Zika they'll get around to using it.

I am mixed about this whole episode, at one level there is bias against developing countries. On the other end, Brazil did not do any favors for itself, with zika, political turmoil etc. But they did pull of a FIFA world cup, so I am a bit more optimistic.

Good luck on that. People in dissonance don't want to hear about it.

Thanks to this article I am now aware of a man named Dick Pound.

The show must go on.

Just wanted to reply to all and say: If you are afraid of Zika, Dengue or whatever the mosquitos transmits, don't get out of your houses! I will go after those bastards!

Best to all, Signed: The mosquito killer! :p

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