Three hundred ninety-six thousand seven hundred fifty-nine (396,759) Ghanaian residents have received both doses of the AstraZeneca Coronavirus vaccine, official figures from the Ghana Health Service (GHS) show.

The figures announced by the Director-General of the GHS, Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye on Sunday in Accra represents 1.3% of Ghana's population of 30million.

He also disclosed that as of 6.30 pm on June 30, 2021, the country had administered a total of 1,261,677 doses of the vaccine.

The figure also falls short of an initial target to procure 17.6 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of June 2021.

The country currently has 1,619 active cases of COVID-19 and an average daily case count of about 80 cases.

Ghana is not close to reaching herd immunity

Vaccine challenges

The latest update comes amid growing concerns that supply shortages in many African countries are holding back the rollout of their vaccination programmes.

Most African countries were supplied their AstraZeneca vaccines under the global vaccine sharing scheme COVAX, and these were sourced from the Serum Institute of India. However, India halted vaccine exports in response to a spike in COVID-19 cases in that country.

The COVAX programme by the WHO and other multilateral bodies aims to supply 600 million doses to Africa, enough to vaccinate at least 20% of the population.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says a large number of countries relying on the COVAX do not have enough doses to continue vaccinating.

The UN and the Africa Centres for Disease Control (CDC) have already urged countries with surplus supplies to donate them to parts of Africa where they are needed.

Africa vaccine rollout

Data from the John Hopkins University COVID-19 vaccination portal indicates that Morocco is the country with the highest number of fully vaccinated residents in Africa with 9.1million (25.1%) of its population getting both jabs (from a total of 19.2million doses).

Tunisia and Botswana have also fully vaccinated 553,795 (4.7% of its population) and 91,482 (4% of its population) respectively.

Ghana's West African neighbours Mali, Togo and Nigeria have fully vaccinated 46,317; 76,462 and 1,155,890 respectively.