Enfermedades contagiosas
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Item The Effectiveness of Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccines to Prevent Severe COVID-19 in Costa Rica: Nationwide, Ecological Study of Hospitalization Prevalence(JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, vol.8(5), 2022) Rosero Bixby, LuisBackground: The Costa Rican COVID-19 vaccination program has used Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines. Real-world estimates of the effectiveness of these vaccines to prevent hospitalizations range from 90%-98% for two doses and from 70%-91% for a single dose. Almost all of these estimates predate the Delta variant. Objective: The aim of this study is to estimate the dose-dependent effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines to prevent severe illness in real-world conditions in Costa Rica, after the Delta variant became dominant. Methods: This observational study is a secondary analysis of hospitalization prevalence. The sample is all 3.67 million adult residents living in Costa Rica by mid-2021. The study is based on public aggregated data of 5978 COVID-19–related hospital records from September 14, 2021, to October 20, 2021, and 6.1 million vaccination doses administered to determine hospitalization prevalence by dose-specific vaccination status. The intervention retrospectively evaluated is vaccination with Pfizer-BioNTech (78%) and Oxford-AstraZeneca (22%). The main outcome studied is being hospitalized. Results: Vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization (VEH) was estimated as 93.4% (95% CI 93.0-93.9) for complete vaccination and 76.7% (95% CI 75.0-78.3) for single-dose vaccination among adults of all ages. VEH was lower and more uncertain among older adults aged ≥58 years: 92% (95% CI 91%-93%) for those who had received full vaccination and 64% (95% CI 58%-69%) for those who had received partial vaccination. Single-dose VEH declined over time during the study period, especially in the older age group. Estimates were sensitive to possible errors in the population count used to determine the residual number of unvaccinated people when vaccine coverage is high. Conclusions: The Costa Rican COVID-19 vaccination program that administered Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines seems to be highly effective at preventing COVID-19–related hospitalization after the Delta variant became dominant. Even a single dose seems to provide some degree of protection, which is good news for people whose second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was postponed several weeks to more rapidly increase the number of people vaccinated with a first dose. Timely monitoring of vaccine effectiveness is important to detect eventual failures and motivate the public to get vaccinated by providing information regarding the effectiveness of the vaccines.Item The mathematics of the reproduction number R for Covid-19: A primer for demographers(Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 20 (online first), 2022) Rosero Bixby, Luis; Miller, TimothyThe reproduction number R is a key indicator used to monitor the dynamics of Covid-19 and to assess the e ects of infection control strategies that frequently have high social and economic costs. Despite having an analog in demography’s “net reproduction rate” that has been routinely computed for a century, demographers may not be familiar with the concept and measurement of R in the context of Covid-19. This article is intended to be a primer for understanding and estimating R in demography. We show that R can be estimated as a ratio between the numbers of new cases today divided by the weighted average of cases in previous days. We present two alternative derivations for these weights based on how risks have changed over time: constant vs. exponential decay. We then provide estimates of these weights, and demonstrate their use in calculating R to trace the course of the first pandemic year in 53 countries.Item A population-based serosurveillance of syphilis in Costa Rica(Reprinted from Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Vol. 18, no. 2 (april-June 1991), 1991) Larsen, Sandra A.; Oberle, Mark W.; Sánchez Braverman, Juana M.; Rosero Bixby, Luis; Vetter, Kathleen M.As part of a case-control study to investigate the high incidence of cervical cancer in Costa Rican women, the seroprevalence of the trepnematoses, in particular, syphilis was determined. In each age group, women with a history of two or more sex partners were two to four times more likely to be seroreactive in tests for syphilis than women with zero or one sex partner. The highest percentage of reactive results in the microhemagglutination assay for antibodies to Trepnema pallidum (MHATP) was seen in samples from women aged 50-59 who had had two or more lifetime partners (23.8%). Three observations from our study support reactivity due to syphilis rather than yaws or pinta: ( /) a similar percent of reactive rapid plasma reagin (RPR) card test results among MHA-TP reactors in the two age groups of women who were surveyed (42 vs. 49%) was observed; (2) women who were seroreactive in the MHA-TP had multiple risk factors for STD (low socioeconomic status (9.4%), urban residence (22.8%), first intercourse under 16 years of age (14.1%), and multiple sex partners (26.3%)|, and (j) only sexually experienced women had reactive results in the MHA-TP test.