Health officials in the Ashanti Region are worried there could be a surge in the region’s Covid-19 cases with the festive season approaching, as many residents have failed to get vaccinated.
Vaccination centers that used to have over 700 people coming for their shots in a day now struggle to get less than a hundred residents to take their jabs.
The Kumasi Metropolis Director of the Ghana Health Service, Dr. Akosua Gyimah Omari-Sasu urged residents to visit vaccination centres for the jabs.
“I’m worried because some vaccines have expiry dates, so if we don’t take care, the country will be making a huge loss should they expire while we have a huge part of our population who have not been vaccinated.”
“In Kumasi, we have 126,000 who have received at least one dose, and we have about 60,000 who are yet to receive their second dose.”
The Ghana Health Service (GHS) had earlier expressed its unhappiness with the low patronage of the COVID-19 vaccination program.
According to GHS, only five million have so far received at least a single jab.
The Manager of the Expanded Program on Immunization, Dr. Kwame Amponsah-Achiano, said many Ghanaians are still skeptical about getting vaccinated due to misinformation.
“As of 21st, we had almost 5 million doses given out. Some have received 1, others 2. When we count the doses individually, we are looking at 4.7. Out of this number, only 1.2 million are fully vaccinated.”
“Considering our track record, we have done more campaigning on COVID-19 vaccines than we have in the past. Even with those, we were able to inoculate more than 6 million doses within 10 days.”
