Impact of the COVID-19 vaccination campaigns in Argentina during 2021: An observational quantification of the death probability for confirmed cases in Buenos Aires province.

Background: A SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) vaccination campaign was launched in Argentina in January 2021. The vaccines then available were administered to the population in several different schemes. This observational study presents a quantification of the impact of the different schemes on the probability of death for confirmed COVID-19 cases in Argentina's Buenos Aires Province. The results provide a local measure of the schemes' effectiveness that heretofore has been lacking. Methods: The study's main source of information is the Integrated Health Information System database, which contains 1,538,113 records of confirmed SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) cases reported in 2021 in the Province. To assess the real-world effectiveness of the vaccination campaign, two categorical variables representing vaccination status were defined. Probability of death was formulated as a generalized linear model with a logistic link and includes variables for geography, a socio-economic level index, symptom onset, sex, and vaccination status. The effectiveness level was derived from the death probability estimates. Findings: The study's findings indicated that the most effective vaccine was rAd26-rAd5 (Sputnik), with ChAdOx1-S (AZ/Covishield) and BBIBP-CorV (Sinopharm) following in efficacy, for both single and multiple doses. The effectiveness of a single dose was consistently below 50%, while it ranged from 50% to 90% for two or more doses. Notably, the analysis of variables such as the municipality of residence of the infected persons and the season of symptom onset yielded particularly intriguing insights. The socioeconomic level of a municipality emerged as a moderately strong predictor of the probability of death, which was marginally higher in municipalities with lower-income populations. Additionally, the data revealed an increased probability of death during the winter season. Interpretation: The vaccination campaigns carried out in Buenos Aires Province in 2021 significantly contributed to reducing the number of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) among its population. However, the extent of this impact varied considerably depending on individual characteristics such as age, health status, and vaccination schedule adherence.

Impact of Universal Health Coverage on Child Growth and Nutrition in Argentina.

OBJECTIVES: To estimate trends of undernutrition (stunting and underweight) among children younger than 5 years covered by the universal health coverage programs Plan Nacer and Programa Sumar. METHODS: From 2005 to 2013, Plan Nacer and Programa Sumar collected high-quality information on birth and visit dates, age (in days), gender, weight (in kg), and height (in cm) for 1.4 million children in 6386 health centers (13 million records) with broad coverage of vulnerable populations in Argentina. RESULTS: The prevalence of stunting and underweight decreased 45.0% (from 20.6% to 11.3%) and 38.0% (from 4.0% to 2.5%), respectively, with differences between rural versus urban areas, gender, regions, age, and seasons. CONCLUSIONS: Undernutrition prevalence substantially decreased in 2 programs in Argentina as a result of universal health coverage.

When order matters: last-come first-served effect in sequential arithmetic operations.

Cognitive psychologists have relied on dual-task interference experiments to understand the low-capacity and serial nature of conscious mental operations. Two widely studied paradigms, the Attentional Blink (AB) and the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) have demonstrated a first-come first-served policy; processing a stimulus either impedes conscious access (AB) or postpones treatment (PRP) of a concurrent stimulus. Here we explored the transition from dual-task paradigms to multi-step human cognition. We studied the relative weight of individual addends in a sequential arithmetic task, where number notation (symbolic/non-symbolic) and presentation speed were independently manipulated. For slow presentation and symbolic notation, the decision relied almost equally on all addends, whereas for fast or non-symbolic notation, the decision relied almost exclusively on the last item reflecting a last-come first-served policy. We suggest that streams of stimuli may be chunked in events in which the last stimuli may override previous items from sensory buffers.

Analysis of quality-of-life adjusted failure time data in the presence of competing, possibly informative, censoring mechanisms.

We derive estimators of the mean of a function of a quality-of-life adjusted failure time, in the presence of competing right censoring mechanisms. Our approach allows for the possibility that some or all of the competing censoring mechanisms are associated with the endpoint, even after adjustment for recorded prognostic factors, with the degree of residual association possibly different for distinct censoring processes. Our methods generalize from a single to many censoring processes and from ignorable to non-ignorable censoring processes.