More than 100,000 people have received their second dose of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine as of Sunday, 23 May, data from the Ghana Health Service (GHS) has shown. The exercise, which began on 19 May, is expected to inoculate about 360,000 persons who received their first jab from 1 March to 9 March, this year.
Dr Franklin Asiedu-Boeko, director of Public Health at the GHS, said those who received their first jab from 10 March, would have their second dose in the next phase. He told the Ghana News Agency(GNA) in an interview in Accra that 380,000 doses of vaccine had been specifically allocated to those in the first phase and said the exercise would not end on 26 May as stated earlier.
Dr Asiedu-Boeko described the exercise as impressive despite the failure of an online application introduced to make the exercise more effective. “We are happy about the process so far because, despite complaints about the side effects of the vaccine, people are still interested in getting inoculated,” he said.
Dr Asiedu-Boeko assured the public that the government was still making efforts to acquire more vaccines to get more people vaccinated. He assured the public that the plan to vaccinate 20 million Ghanaians before the end of the year was on course.
Dr Asiedu-Boeko reiterated the need for the public to keep adhering to the COVID-19 safety protocols by wearing face masks, using alcohol-based hand sanitisers, coughing or sneezing into tissues, and washing of hands with soap under running water. Ghana, on Tuesday, 2 March 2021 kicked off its mass COVID-19 vaccination exercise in 42 selected districts in the Greater Accra, Kumasi, and Western regions.
As of Friday, 30 April, a total of 849,527 AstraZeneca vaccines had been administered to the public. Ghana recorded its first case of COVID-19 on March 12, 2020. So far 92,513 cases have been confirmed with 783 deaths. There are 1583 confirmed cases.
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