The Ghana Health Service (GHS) has called for calm as it begins the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccination programme today after an additional 350,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines arrived in the country on May 7, 2021.
The 2nd phase of the programme seeks to vaccinate persons who received their first jabs in March this year.
Speaking at government’s COVID-19 press briefing in Accra on Tuesday May 18, 2021, the Director General of the GHS, Dr. Patrick Kuma-Aboagye explained that approximately 360,000 persons in the initial 43 districts in the Greater Accra, Ashanti and Central Regions who received their 1st doses are due for their 2nd.
He said: “in February we received 600,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines. We have since received an additional 350,000 of which we have started deploying. This is part of the comprehensive plan to vaccinate the 20 million persons in phases starting with the at risk population. The deployment like the 1st phase will be based on population and geographical segmentation.
“The population segmentation is about who are at risk and the geographical segmentation is where do we have the largest number of cases. So these are the things we consider before deployment,” he added.
Explaining further, the GHS boss said the first group of persons to be vaccinated will be the at risk population in the 43 hot spot districts who have taken their first jabs, then health care workers in all districts and regions and finally, mixed target including essential service providers.
Meanwhile, in all 852,047 people have been vaccinated in the phase 1 of government vaccination programme. 316,152 persons out of this number are from the Greater Accra Region, 303,465 from the Ashanti Region and the rest split across the remaining regions.
