Covid Vaccination Argentina

I agree with Dr. Quirós re: the "intent to reach 70% of the population with the two doses before masks are no longer required" in light of the near future advancement of the Delta variant here. In any case, I would have continued to wear a mask even if it was no longer mandatory.

But there would not be the need to have this discussion now if it were not for the negligent actions by AF/GGG/Vizzotti and others at the national level in the mishandling of the purchases of sufficient vaccines from any of the sources that became available to ARG in December, 2020.
Do you have a reference for a 70% 2-dose requirement? Otherwise, well, I'm afraid Quirós is just picking numbers out of the air. Oh wait, I found the "plan", it's not anchored to any actual numbers, milestones, or targets, but that's par for the course in CABA, it just grandly proclaims:

“En la etapa 4 vamos a dejar de usar el tapabocas. Solo va a ser obligatorio en los lugares cerrados y en el transporte público. El transporte público para ese momento va a estar abierto para todo el público general y se levantarán las restricciones del subte. Los comercios van a trabajar sin restricciones y los encuentros tanto en el espacio público como en los domicilios también van a ser sin restricciones”.

So I guess Quirós wants to skip over point 4 then? Or only pick the parts of it that suit his politics right now. Right. Hoist on his own petard, what a clown.

And, well, as we know there weren't any vaccines available in quantity in December 2020, any country planning for a vaccination campaign had to place bets on unproven vaccines mid 2019, as Argentina did. Some bets paid off, some didn't. Alleging negligence is a bit silly, really.
 
Arg is where the US was in March of last year. A nice sweet spot of liberty and openness before the delta wave comes to kill the party.
 
I agree with Dr. Quirós re: the "intent to reach 70% of the population with the two doses before masks are no longer required" in light of the near future advancement of the Delta variant here. In any case, I would have continued to wear a mask even if it was no longer mandatory.

But there would not be the need to have this discussion now if it were not for the negligent actions by AF/GGG/Vizzotti and others at the national level in the mishandling of the purchases of sufficient vaccines from any of the sources that became available to ARG in December, 2020.
It does not give me much confidence these new decrees are based on medical advice if on Monday they cancel the lifting of quarantine for business travellers because the country is not quite yet in the sanitary conditions to permit it, and then on Tuesday they lift it because it suddenly is in conditions to permit it. It also does not give me much confidence when these restrictions will be lifted in more vulnerable communities in provinces with far lower rates of vaccination, remembering there are 16,000,000 as yet totally unvaccinated Argentines.

It sounds like more of the same old political improvisation that has contributed to many of the 115.000 registered COVID deaths to date. But I guess if they make it to vote in November and are happy at the "vuelta a la normalidad", what happens to them after does not concern a populist government.
 
....And, well, as we know there weren't any vaccines available in quantity in December 2020....
21 December 2021
Colombia to receive 1.7 million doses of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in February.

7 January 2021

....Peru is expecting to receive its first batch of coronavirus vaccines this month to launch its long-awaited immunization program. President Francisco Sagasti announced on Wednesday the government purchased 38 million doses from the Sinopharm laboratory of China, with the first 1 million doses arriving this month....

22 January 2021

ASUNCION (Reuters) - Paraguay signed agreements with two pharmaceutical companies to buy 3 million doses of coronavirus vaccines and plans to start vaccinations in the second half of February, Public Health Minister Julio Mazzoleni said on Friday. The names of the firms will be released in the coming days when the contracts are signed, the minister added....

Sunday, January 24, 2021

Uruguay....On Friday (January 22) evening Lacalle Pou tweeted his government had reached an accord with the US/German Pfizer-BioNtech and China's Sinovac for the purchase of two million and 1,7 million vaccines against the Covid 19 virus. The Uruguayan president on Saturday said the deal with Pfizer-BioNTech involved two million doses and the first 200,000 should be arriving in March, although he did not discard the possibility that the delivery could be brought forward to the end of February. Likewise with Sinovac the deal involves 1,750.000 doses with a first batch of 200,000 to begin with the inoculation plan with a similar date to that of the US/German vaccine....

20 February 2021

Chile....Buying vaccines early and often. First, it inked early deals with several vaccine manufacturers, including China’s Sinopharm, US-based Pfizer, and British AstraZeneca. Chile has now ordered enough doses to vaccinate its population twice. “Our strategy does not rely only on one vaccine, so that gave the country a wider variety of options to vaccinate,” said Juan Carlos Said, an internal medicine specialist at Hospital Sótero del Río, outside Santiago. “We signed those deals early during the pandemic, so we received the vaccines earlier than other countries.” He pointed out that Chile also agreed to host vaccine trials for Sinopharm and AstraZeneca, which gave political leaders extra leverage in their negotiations to secure early doses....
 
Rather than a link dump, consider this chart:

Vaccines.jpg

Nothing happening in December 2020. No vaccines available in quantity then. Only Chile gets started mid-February (with "leaky" vaccines, as it turned out, "first" and "most" do not necessarily equate to "best"), and other LatAm countries mid-March. Note that Argentina (blue curve) is one of the better performers, and has used demonstrably better vaccines than other LatAm countries. Still no negligence in evidence, you can forget about that one.

Chart from here: https://www.as-coa.org/articles/cro...-camino-hacia-la-vacunacion-en-america-latina
 
I agree with Dr. Quirós re: the "intent to reach 70% of the population with the two doses before masks are no longer required" in light of the near future advancement of the Delta variant here. In any case, I would have continued to wear a mask even if it was no longer mandatory.

I feel there is much misinformation. It is not that masks are no longer required. And I agree with you that all those new measures are the result of the election disaster for the government.

But ... if I walk alone or with people from my household outside (e.g. in a park) a mask makes no sense. If you look at other countries (including those that managed the pandemia way better than Arginina) you will notice that most have not had a mask requirement outside for a long time. Why? Because you don't get the virus from somebody walking by.

Of course if there are crowds then you need a mask even outside.
 
Masks do make some sense outdoors. Once we are pulling them on and off, sticking them in our pocket etc, they soon become contaminated and probably next to useless. That's one of the reasons I will be keeping mine on. It's just simpler and easier to manage.

Of course, if I were only going to be outside in the fresh air (and knew with some certainty that I wouldn't be sidetracked the middle of the walk into some other activity that will require it to come out of the pocket onto the face), then I might just leave the mask at home, in its little bag. But those situations are rare.

On the other hand, it has always been quite absurd the way we have been obliged to put a mask on to, for example, walk to a restaurant, and then been free to take it off when we go inside that restaurant. Perhaps the change to the rule will help ingrain the habit of making personal judgements about risk, instead of slavishly following rules that make little sense.
 
IMO the main thing the mask rule does is create awareness that risk of infection and transmission is still a thing that everyone needs to cooperate with.
When we see and use masks less, we get more relaxed especially “behind closed doors” such as social and work gatherings where most infections occur in the first place. Can also imagine more people “forgetting” to wear them on trains etc because they were not wearing them on the platform.

I do agree (and see daily) many/ most people already don’t wear masks when walking around a park or sparsely occupied street as it doesn’t make much sense, but at least many/ most do still use them on busy streets or open air malls etc where in closer proximity. Wouldn’t it have made more sense just to say no masks needed in parks or outside of main thoroughfares/ “mask required zones” so as not to loose the public conscientiousness altogether? Especially in cities/ provinces with lower vaccination levels than places like CABA or La Pampa?
 
Unfortunately, they do want to the public to lose consciousness. They want people to feel good for a few weeks.

This is exactly the problem that we have seen in countries like Australia, where, having won the early battles against the virus, instead of telling people they had merely gained a stay of execution and should use the time wisely to prepare for the inevitable, they chose instead to encourage people to believe that the virus had gone away forever, that they were safe, and that they should feel good about themselves...and vote the government back in. And almost everybody fell for it. And many of them are paying a high price now. Some are still falling for it.

Here, the ploy is soooo obvious, and the wounds from the plague still so open, that I imagine people will be more alert to it.
 
Yes that is exactly what they are doing. After PASO, the amount of tests dropped off. The ministry of health no longer report the daily change in testing.

It’s like the inflation and poverty indexes under CFK - when they (or voters) don’t like stats, they simply stop asking and turn them off in order to paint a better picture. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
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