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The Ghana Health Service’s Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI) says it will expand the ongoing vaccination exercise for health workers to key service providers in the western, central and eastern regions.
Dr. Kwame Amponsa-Achianoo, EPI Program Manager, told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in an interview in Accra that expansion had become necessary because the three regions were identified as hotspots after the regions from Greater Accra and Ashanti.
He said Ghana received 160,000 doses of Covishield, the COVID-19 vaccine from Oxford AstraZeneca on Tuesday.
The doses are part of the vaccine donations made by MTN to support the government in the ongoing vaccination exercise.
The COVID-19 mass vaccination exercise began on March 2, 2021, with population and geographic segmentation in Greater Accra and Kumasi and some districts of the Central region.
Currently, vaccination is ongoing for healthcare workers, key public officials, and people with underlying health problems in 217 districts across the country.
Dr. Amponsa-Achiano said that the initial plan to vaccinate people in segments had not changed and that the EPI was working according to the expectations of the arrival of vaccines in the country.
Commenting on adverse events in the ongoing vaccination exercise, he said that the EPI had recorded around 1,600 adverse events under the Food and Drug Authority’s safety monitoring process.
He said that 12 of the 1,600 adverse events were serious, and that the vaccine had a tendency to threaten an individual’s life, caused a prolongation of an existing hospitalization and a disability.
The program manager said that nine of the 12 serious events had gone through a causality assessment, three had not yet been evaluated, and that seven of the nine were not related to the vaccine, but had a match.
He said the data available to the GHS indicated that so far more than 5,000 people had been vaccinated against the coronavirus.
“So far, we have distributed approximately 570,000 doses in addition to the 155,000 doses donated by MTN with low vaccine waste,” he said.
Dr. Amponsah-Achiano advised the public to mask, observe physical detachment, and proper hand hygiene during the Easter festivities.
“If we look at our data, we see that the use of masks has decreased because cases have decreased, it seems that people’s behavior changes only when cases increase,” he said.
As of March 28, Ghana has recorded a total of 90,583 COVID-19 cases, 88,063 recoveries with 743 deaths.
Coronaviruses are a large group of viruses that are common among animals.
In rare cases, they are what scientists call zoonotic, which means they can be transmitted from animals to humans, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It has an incubation period of 4-6 days and is fatal, especially for those with a weakened immune system – the elderly and the young.
It could also lead to pneumonia and bronchitis.
