The Director of the West African Center for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP), Professor Gordon Awandare, has revealed that the fifth wave the country is currently experiencing with the COVID-19 is as a result of the B4 variant of the omicron virus.

According to him, the variant is more infectious than the previous versions of Omicron which were the BA1 and BA2. He indicated that the BA4 has firmly established itself and it’s the major one causing the current wave of infection.

“I think there’s no doubt that the cases are surging so I think we can safely say that we are in some kind of fifth wave now. Based on the sequencing, this is being driven by two new variants but particularly one which is the BA4. These are sub variants of the Omicron and this has been in South Africa for a while now and they are here now. The latest sequencing that we’ve done, more than ninety percent are the BA4 and we also have the BA5.”
Professor Gordon Awandare

Professor Awandare explained that antibodies testing data shows that more than 80 percent of the people in the country have been exposed to COVID already but because these are new variants which haven’t been seen before, “that previous exposure to the other variant is not able to protect us from this one”. This, he noted, is the reason why the new variants are now predominating and taking over transmission of the virus.

“Like the Ghana Medical Association has emphasized, the vaccination is the key because what the data show is that, if you have previous exposure to the other variants and you are vaccinated, you have a better chance against this new variant than if you are not vaccinated.”
Professor Gordon Awandare

Call for increased vaccination drive

Commenting on the increased call for vaccination drive to be taken more seriously, Prof Awandare expressed that the current data is what is informing this call now and “I don’t think we are being alarming”. He highlighted that the time is right “to sound this caution” on the need to increase vaccination of the Ghanaian population.

“We have moved from a period where our total case count or active cases were less than forty and we are in the thousands. If you had a period where we had several weeks of no COVID tests and now we have three, we used to have nobody in severe case and we have about eight, we’ve been here before.”
Professor Gordon Awandare

The Director for WACCBIP emphasized that the other reason which has influenced the call for enhanced vaccination drive is that Ghana is still one of the countries with low vaccine uptake and that gives “us a very susceptible population” to the virus. He explained that this further increases the country’s susceptibility of severe to critical cases and in this background, “it is important that once you see that the cases are going up, we sound the necessary alarm bells”.

Meanwhile, Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital is on high alert for COVID-19 cases as 23 of its staff have contracted the virus. A notice issued by the Management of the facility to employees stated that about 70 percent of the infections were hospital-acquired and 30 percent community-based transmission.

Five doctors, thirteen nurses and five non-clinical staff have been infected by the virus. Out of the number, twenty of the staff members have been fully vaccinated while three are unvaccinated.