Las desigualdades en salud en Panamá

Abstract

The results obtained provide a valuable starting point for the Panamanian government from which it can identify the most serious inequalities in health and health service provision and develop policies to eliminate or reduce them. They also offer a baseline to monitor changes in the magnitude of these inequalities over time.

COVID-19 basic reproduction number and assessment of initial suppression policies in Costa Rica

“…First, to date the country that has had the best result with the ultimate negative outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic is Costa Rica, which so far, as of April 5th, 2020, only has had two deaths due to COVID-19 when compared with the four reported by Uruguay and 57 reported by Panamá. In a sense, this might reflect structural differences in the health care delivery system of the three countries, where only Costa Rica has a unified and universal health coverage system that increases the likelihood of patients needing healthcare to seek medical services without worries about future debts or lack of access to medical services by lack of service coverage [30,42,53]. The curves also show that the epidemic growth parameter r, was lowest for Costa Rica (Fig.…”

“…Costa Rica's CCSS is in charge of collecting the tripartite contributions to fund the universal healthcare system, in addition to managing and administering all public centers for health care delivery [41,43]. In contrast, Panamá [42] and Uruguay [5] have segmented health systems, where several autonomous institutions are in charge of public centers for health care delivery [43]. To estimate the basic reproduction number of SARS-CoV-2 in Costa Rica we used a SIR model without demography, i.e., assuming a constant population size [2], denoted by N .…”