The effect of altruism on COVID-19 vaccination rates.

Background: After the emergence of the first vaccines against the COVID-19, public health authorities have promoted mass vaccination in order to achieve herd immunity and reduce the effects of the disease. Vaccination rates have differed between countries, depending on supply (availability of resources) and demand (altruism and resistance to vaccination) factors.

Methods: This work considers the hypothesis that individuals' health altruism has been an important factor to explain the different levels of vaccination between countries, using the number of transplants as a proxy for altruism.

Applying the economic concept of profitability to leaves.

Economic principles can be extended to biological organisms as they optimize the use of resources, but their use in biology has been limited. We applied concepts from traditional economics to the main production unit of plants, the leaf. We quantified the profitability (profit/cost of investment) of leaves from seven biomes worldwide and compared those to the profitability of companies.

Predicting mortality for Covid-19 in the US using the delayed elasticity method.

The evolution of the pandemic caused by COVID-19, its high reproductive number and the associated clinical needs, is overwhelming national health systems. We propose a method for predicting the number of deaths, and which will enable the health authorities of the countries involved to plan the resources needed to face the pandemic as many days in advance as possible. We employ OLS to perform the econometric estimation.

Who can go back to work when the COVID-19 pandemic remits?

This paper seeks to determine which workers affected by lockdown measures can return to work when a government decides to apply lockdown exit strategies. This system, which we call Sequential Selective Multidimensional Decision (SSMD), involves deciding sequentially, by geographical areas, sectors of activity, age groups and immunity, which workers can return to work at a given time according to the epidemiological criteria of the country as well as that of a group of reference countries, used as a benchmark, that have suffered a lower level of lockdown de-escalation strategies. We apply SSMD to Spain, based on affiliation to the Social Security system prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conclude that 98.

A consistent decomposition of the redistributive, vertical, and horizontal effects of health care finance by factor components.

In studies on the redistributive, vertical, and horizontal effects of health care financing, the sum of the contributions calculated for each financial instrument does not equal the total effects. As a consequence, the final calculations tend to be overestimated or underestimated. The solution proposed here involves the adaptation of the Shapley value to achieve additive results for all the effects and reveals the relative contributions of different instruments to the change of whole-system equity.