COVID-19: Ghana’s ICUs not full – GHS insists

The Ghana Health Service, GHS, has debunked reports that there are no available Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds in the country to handle the recent surge in critical COVID-19 cases.

The Director-General of the GHS, Dr. Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, insisted that enough interventions have been put in place to avert any potential disaster in the wake of the surge.

Specifically responding to reports that the ICUs in the country are unable to admit any more critical patients because there are no more available beds, Dr. Kumah Aboagye indicated that there is no such situation at hand.

“Our ICUs are not full. For example, Ridge Hospital has 16 ICUs beds but as we speak, they only have three occupants. Ghana East has about 19 cases currently on admission with six on ICU. There is a plan to upgrade further with support from the COVID-19 Fund the ICU capacity at the Ridge Hospital. As I said, the critical cases have increased, but we are not overwhelmed yet.”

He also indicated that enough infrastructure has been put in place to store the COVID-19 vaccines set to arrive in the country in August.

“To prepare for more vaccines, we have had to upgrade our cold chain facilities especially the ultra negative cochain which can store Pfizer, Moderna, and others,” he said.

“So far, with our collaboration with Zipline, we have the capacity to store about 1.7 million doses. Yesterday [Tuesday, July 13, 2021] we received 16 ultra-negative cold chain vaccines that will be distributed to all the 16 regions in the country to ensure we are able to vaccinate as many Ghanaians as possible.”

COVID-19: Ghana to get 1.2 million doses of Pfizer vaccine mid-August
Dr. Patrick Kuma-Aboagye earlier disclosed that the GHS is expecting 1.2 million doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to help inoculate more of the country’s population.

He said the doses are expected to arrive in Ghana before the end of August and are part of the bulk of vaccine requests it has made, all geared towards vaccinating the entire population against the virus.

“We are expecting about 1.2 million Pfizer vaccines from the US through COVAX, and we are hoping that latest by the middle of August, it should be available,” he said.

What is Ghana’s current COVID-19 situation?
There has been a steady rise in the number of cases in recent days after it dropped below 500 a few weeks ago.

The country currently has an active case count of 2,314 after recording 143 new cases on July 9, 2021, per the latest update from the Ghana Health Service.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic in the country on March 12, 2020, a total of 97,728 cases have been recorded.

Out of this number, 94,612 persons have recovered from the disease and 802 persons have succumbed to it.