the worrying date when Argentina will complete the second doses against the Covid

The bullets sting so close that we already assume they would have entered. Last weekend, a new case of the Delta variant was detected in a person who returned to the country from the United States. Did he respect the quarantine? The potential community circulation of the Covid of India is today, with the numbers of contaminations in franc low, the biggest threat coronavirus in Argentina.

For every infected they fight in Ezeiza, How many go through there? It has already been officially reported that 4 out of 10 people returning from abroad, residents of Buenos Aires, have not complied with the isolation requirement. Now they say they will fine offenders, but the epidemiological damage this will have already been done. And the problem is, the way Argentines are vaccinated today immunity against the Delta variant, this is not enough.

Several experts have already warned against need to have second dose applied of any Covid vaccine so that immunity is robust. The question is, at the current vaccination rate, when will it happen that people over the age of 18, and especially those at higher risk, will be able to have both doses applied. It’s the full diagram. The answer is disturbing.

Buenos Aires Health Minister Daniel Gollán said on Monday that by September all over 18s will be vaccinated with at least one dose. The problem is that the policy of delaying the application of the second doses by three months could turn, in the face of the new scenario of the Delta variant threat, into a “time bomb”.

Britain, for example, has already vaccinated with two doses per 46 percent of its population and yet it undergoes the assaults of the Indian variant. The situation seemed under control. Now, it is again recording between 9,000 and 10,000 cases of Covid per day. What can you expect in Argentina, with just the 8 percent of the population vaccinated with the two doses?

Today Argentina is one of the countries the biggest lag in the world between the first and second applied dose. He has already passed Canada, with the difference that there they have already vaccinated the 66.5 percent of the population with a dose and 19 percent with two. Ours just arrived at 32 percent with a.

In June, Argentina raised its target for the number of daily vaccinated, building on the arrival of a greater number of doses. With a few inexplicable slowdowns at this height over the weekends, a weekly average of 230 thousand doses every 24 hours.

In the country, a little more than 14.5 million people have received at least one dose of one of the available vaccines. And others 3.6 million, both. The applied doses add 18.2 million. In total, those over 18 represent 30 million people, out of a total population of 45 million.

This creates an absolute need for 60 million doses. And that means that 42 million doses would still need to be applied for the entire adult population to have their full immunization schedule. Then, the time that would remain for this objective to be achieved would be 182 days, which amounts to saying 6 months and 5 days.

It follows that just end DecemberAfter Christmas, the long-awaited goal of having all adult Argentines protected against Covid would be achieved. Meanwhile, it’s unclear what health havoc the Delta variant could cause, or any other variant that appears by this date.

If you wanted to be less pretentious and only put in the reinforced health goal the elderly and those under 60 years of age with co-morbidities, the number of people who still have to be vaccinated in the country would be halved: it is estimated that they are in total approximately 15 million people.

In other words, in this case, a total of 30 million doses would have to be applied and, at today’s figures, it would remain to apply approximately 12 million injections. The time to reach the objective would obviously be reduced: it would be 52 days, with what mid August it could happen with all this vaccinated population with its complete pattern. Will already have passed more than half of the winter.

Health decisionsIn addition to this, you will need to know more about it.

However, for this term to be a palpable reality -and not just a mathematical abstraction- decisions should be made, such as prioritizing second doses from people who have risk factors (without waiting for the three-month interval) instead of continuing to vaccinate with first doses those under 40 without comorbidity.

It’s a crossroads health, because during the second wave the Covid aggressively attacked young people without comorbidities. Although faced with these dilemmas, politics tends to seek statistical and scientific foundations. That is, what is the variable that weighs the most in the assessment of the lethality of the coronavirus.

This date on the calendar will also depend on the availability of the second component of Sputnik V for those who received the Russian vaccine. Today is the other “bottleneck” which no longer depends on President Alberto Fernández, but on Vladimir Poutine. A total of 7,875,585 people have received component one today and only 1,540,160 have received component two. It’s the 19.5 percent.

As for those which have been inoculated with vaccines from other laboratories, such as AstraZeneca or Sinopharm, should not delay the application of the second doses as and when the new batches arrive continues smoothly. This week, it was announced, those stocks will continue to grow.

When the country manages to vaccinate at least 30 million Argentines with both doses it is probably also possible to achieve the long-awaited result “collective immunity”: the immune universe would then reach 66% of the population. According to experts, 70 percent of immune people are needed to achieve the health goal of group immunity.

Then it should be the turn to vaccinate the 15 million Argentines under the age of 18, for which the government has for the moment no answer. The only vaccine available in the world for this age today is that of Pfizer, which has no possibility of reaching the country because the laboratory does not accept the terms of the vaccine law sanctioned by Congress. And the government, for now, does not seem willing to change it.

PS