A new survey conducted by the Ghana Health Service (GHS) has said 18.1% of the current COVID-19 cases are among children between the ages of 0-15 years.
Briefing the media in Accra on Wednesday (8 June), the director-general of GHS Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye said the service will deepen its vaccination drive to help contain the upsurge.
“Currently, of the Accra cases, about 18.1% on average are among children aged between 0-15 years, obviously these are unvaccinated children, so 18% of this number are in children.”
“So, if you look at the age distribution you can see that 0-5 is 3.8%, 6-10 years about 6.9% of the cases between May and June and then 11-15 years about 7.4%, so that together makes up the 18.1%” he said.
“The youth becomes a critical group that we need to take a look at, and because most of them cannot be vaccinated now, the protocol has to be stepped up. The youngest child who had was six months, the sibling came from school and infected the family including the baby, so that is the situation we have now,” Dr Kuma-Aboagye said.
Listen to Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye in the attached audio below:
Watch the full briefing in the video attached below:
Surge in COVID-19 cases in Ghana due to rainy season
Dr Anthony Nsiah Asare, the presidential advisor on health has attributed the recent surge in COVID-19 cases in Ghana to the onset of the rainy season.
Ghana’s active cases hovering around 50 for the past two months, have hit 396, according to the Ghana Health Service.
Talking to Asaase News on the development on Tuesday, (7 June), Dr Asare said the cases recorded are mainly mild to moderate ones.
“For the past one month or so, there were no active cases in 15 of the 16 regions except Greater Accra Region, but as you are aware, what is happening now is that in every year around July, from now when the rain starts up to July, we have a flu-like respiratory track infections,” Asare explained.
“We have a testing site, site where we take samples from and Noguchi tests them… so we picked a few increase in influenza infections, and some of them, because influenza and COVID are family, we also tested them for COVID-19 and we had positive cases identified among these COVID-19 cases,” he said.
“But the most important thing is that most of them are mild to moderate cases which are being treated at home,” he said.
Dr Asare also admonished Ghanaians to intensify the use of nose masks and adhere to safety protocols to curb the spread of the virus.
“We are also entreating people to reintroduce the use of nose masks within areas where there are a lot of people who are going to meet, especially in corporate organisations when they are having meetings in air-conditioned rooms which are enclosed.
“We entreat them to wear their masks and in schools because we are having flu-like illness. We also entreat the teachers to allow the children or to ask the children to wear nose masks while they are in class or on the school compound,” Dr Asare said.
Fred Dzakpata
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