Ghana’s ICUs are not full, the Ghana Health Service has said.

Director-General Patrick Kuma-Aboagye told journalists on Wednesday, 14 July 2021 at a media briefing that: “Our ICUs are not full”.

“For example, Ridge Hospital has 16 ICUs beds but as we speak, they only have three occupants”.

“Ga 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”, he announced. “As I said, the critical cases have increased but we are not overwhelmed yet.”

“To prepare for more vaccines, we have had to upgrade our cold chain facilities, especially the ultra-negative cold chain 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] 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.”

Also, he said Ghana is to take delivery of some 1.2 million doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in mid-August this year.

Dr Kuma-Aboagye said: “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”.

Dr Kuma-Aboagye also revealed that a total of 2,323 students from 363 schools have tested positive for COVID-19 since the beginning of 2021.

“The North East Region is the only region with no cases recorded in schools,” he said.

Achimota SHS in Accra is one of the hardest-hit in the Greater Accra Region.

It has been on a two-week partial lockdown following the detection of 135 cases of the Delta variant among some students and staff.

According to Dr Kuma-Aboagye, a total of 1,173 students and staff had their samples taken and 195 students tested positive out of the 1,156 results available.

Also, 120 have recovered.

The active cases in the school currently stands at 75.