The Director General of the Ghana Health Service, Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, has announced that government will soon be deploying vaccines to targeted areas where the virus is still spreading across all 16 regions.
“We have received about 1.3million Moderna vaccines and some Johnson and Johnson, we are expecting about 1.5million doses of AstraZeneca and a few others that will be coming so we are going to deploy it nationwide but we still going to follow the epidemiology so that for example if we deploy the vaccine in Western Region, the region will ensure that where the covid-19 case is highest, that is where the greater concentration will be because that is the only way we can control the generation and spread of the virus”. – Dr Kumah-Aboagye said
He added that the nationwide vaccination will focus on places where the risk is high across the country. The GHS director general also assured that gradually the vaccines will be made available for everybody to be inoculated.
The Ghana Health Service’s boss also attributed the current dip in the number of Covid-19 active cases to the government’s vaccination drive.
“We were doing well until the new delta variant came in which is a more efficient transmitter, and of course adherence to the protocols dropped then to about 5 per cent so it was quiet easy for the new variant to spread and that was what led to the surge but some of the interventions put in place to control the virus were scaled up like contact tracing, case management, surveillance and of course risk communication to ensure people adhere to the protocols especially at the work place and most importantly the introduction of vaccines which we concentrated more in the 48 districts where most of the cases are coming from in Greater Accra and Kumasi”. He said
Dr Kumah-Aboagye also attributed the reduction in covid-19 active cases to adherence to the protocols and urged the public to maintain the adherence to see a further downward trend.
“We expect that if adherence is maintained and people take the vaccines, we should see a further downward trend, and as more vaccines come in, we hope that we will be able to bring the surge to the barest minimum but the best armor that we have apart from the vaccine is adherence to the protocols so that we can limit the spread”.
The current active case count stands at 4,358. The Ghana Health Service is yet to provide an update on the number of persons vaccinated after the recent round of vaccinations.
Cumulatively, Ghana has recorded 124,404 cases of the virus with 1,111 deaths. So far, Ghana has 1.2 million Moderna vaccines it received from the US government on September 4, 2021.
The country is expecting an additional 1.3 million Pfizer vaccines by the end of September 2021.
Ghana has already made use of 177,600 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine it received recently. Overall, Ghana has received a little over 3.2 million vaccines since February 2021.
