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The Ghana Health Service’s Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI) has announced that it will expand the current immunization exercise for health workers to key service providers in the West, Central and Central regions. Is.
EPI program director Dr Kwame Amponsa-Achianoo told the Ghanaian News Agency (GNA) in an interview in Accra that the expansion had become necessary because the three regions had been identified as hot spots after the regions of Greater Accra and Ashanti.
He said Ghana received 160,000 doses of Covishield, the Oxford AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday.
The doses are part of the vaccine donations made by MTN to support the government in the current immunization 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 in the central region.
Currently, immunization is underway for health workers, key officials and people with stressful health issues in 217 districts across the country.
Dr Amponsa-Achiano said that the initial plan for immunizing people in segments had not changed and the EPI was working according to the expectations of vaccine arrivals in the country.
Commenting on adverse events from the current immunization exercise, he said the EPI had recorded around 1,600 adverse events as part of the Food and Drugs Authority’s safety oversight process.
He said 12 of 1,600 adverse events were serious, with the vaccine tending to threaten an individual’s life, leading to an extension of an existing hospital stay and disability.
The program manager said nine of the 12 serious events had been assessed for causality, three had yet to be assessed, with seven of the nine unrelated to the vaccine but coincidental.
He said data available for GHS indicated more than 5,000 people had been vaccinated against the coronavirus so far.
“So far, we have distributed around 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 themselves, observe physical distance and good hand hygiene during the Easter holidays.
“If we look at our data we see that mask wear has gone down because cases have gone down, it looks like people’s behavior only changes when cases go up,” he said.
As of March 28, Ghana had recorded a total of 90,583 cases of COVID-19, 88,063 recoveries and 743 deaths.
Coronaviruses are a large group of viruses that are common in animals.
In rare cases, they’re what scientists call zoonotics, which means they can be transmitted from animals to humans, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It has an incubation period of between 4 and 6 days and is fatal, especially for people with weakened immune systems – the elderly and the young.
It could also lead to pneumonia and bronchitis.
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