2nd Phase of vaccination against COVID-19 kicks off today
Today marks the beginning of the second phase of Ghana’s vaccination programme against the COVID-19 pandemic.
In all, about 360,000 Ghanaians who had the first jab in March this year are eligible to receive the second one from today until May 26, 2021.
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Those who will receive the jabs are in the 43 districts in the Greater Accra, Ashanti and Central regions, which were covered in the first phase of the exercise.
The first phase of the mass COVID-19 vaccination exercise took off on Tuesday, March 2, 2021 and as of Friday, April 30, a total of 849,527 AstraZeneca vaccines had been administered to the public.
Categories
Those expected to turn out for the nine-day exercise include members of the Executive, Judiciary, Legislature, all frontline government officials as well as frontline health workers and people aged 60 and above. Persons with underlying conditions, media practitioners and the security services as well as other frontline workers in other sectors also fall within this group.
These categories of people, who have already received the first vaccination, have been prioritised for the second round in order to make up for the time frame of between eight to 12 weeks for a second jab.
The expectation is that all those within these categories will make it a point to get vaccinated in order to get the full protection because, according to health personnel, the first dose alone does not give full protection.
It is important to note that each person is required to return to where he or she took the first jab with their cards for the second one.
Centres
In the Greater Accra Region, the Ghana Health Service (GHS) has already released the schedule of the various vaccination centres, with each municipality having not less than 10 vaccination points to ensure that all qualified persons are able to receive the vaccine within the stipulated period.
Demystifying
Even though the GHS maintains that the government is committed to ensuring that 20 million people are vaccinated by October this year, it still has huge task ahead to demystify the vaccination and the pandemic.
Until the GHS is able to get the cooperation of all, the desire of the government to achieve herd immunity through vaccination may not be attained.
This is because until everyone is vaccinated, people still stand the risk of being infected.
Additionally, even as the vaccination is ongoing, it is still crucial to fight the pandemic by adhering to the COVID-19 safety protocols by wearing face masks, using alcohol-based hand sanitisers, coughing or sneezing into tissues and washing hands with soap under running water.