Programmes Manager of the Expanded Programme on Immunization of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr. Kwame Amponsa-Achiano, has intimated that the vaccination month declared by the Health Service turned out well.
The exercise, he indicated, had more people being vaccinated in the country which was good for the country’s vaccination drive.
“Even though we didn’t put in a lot of effort for a typical vaccination month, I will say that it was good. Normally, when we declare a month or week as vaccination week or month, we do a lot more of the social mobilization, communication and making of noise.”
Dr. Kwame Amponsa-Achiano
The EPI Programmes Manager averred that the success of the initiative has highly motivated high level management to institute what the Health Service now calls National COVID-19 Vaccination Days.
“So that we put a lot more effort, learning lessons from the vaccination month.”
Dr. Kwame Amponsa-Achiano
This follows GHS’s declaration of the month of December as vaccination month to help achieve the country’s herd immunity target.
According to Dr. Amponsah-Achiano, about three million COVID-19 vaccines were administered in December, with the figure being the highest administered so far in a month since Ghana began its mass vaccination drive against COVID-19.
“If you look at our rate of delivery, it was less than a million a month, but in December we did almost three million, It was only short by two hundred. We don’t do this and that was quite good within the contest of COVID -19 delivery. I think that it was not bad at all.”
Dr. Kwame Amponsa-Achiano
Dr. Achiano disclosed that the Ministry of Health has launched a five-day national campaign as part of efforts to increase the uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine.
It can be recalled that government declared the month of December as vaccination month.
The Director General of GHS, Dr. Patrick Kumah-Aboagye, who announced this stated that with the increasing availability of vaccines in reasonable quantity in the pipeline, the vaccination drive was necessary to get more persons vaccinated in the country to help government achieve its heard immunity goal.
COVID-19 Update
Meanwhile, seven more person have died of COVID-19 taking Ghana’s death toll to 1,391, the latest update from the Ghana Health Service (GHS) has indicated.
The country’s active cases have also reached 1,906 after 175 new coronavirus cases were confirmed at the laboratories. The GHS reports that the country’s total confirmed cases increased to 156,690, out of which 153, 393 have recovered.
So far, 36 cases have been classified as severe while 5 remain critical, according to GHS.
Cases detected at the Kotoka International Airport (KIA) are 6,945 with 6,330 recoveries so far.
According to the Ghana Health Service, 10,025,481 persons have so far been vaccinated across the country.
