COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness against severe acute respiratory infections (SARI) hospitalizations associated with laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 in Ghana

October 12, 2022 | Ongoing Project | Reading time: 6 min

Investigators

Dr. Kwaku Poku Asante (PI), Dr. Abraham Oduro, Dr. Nicholas Amoako, Dr. Prince Agyapong, Prof. Seth Owusu-Agyei, Prof. Kwabena Duedu, Prof. William Ampofo, Prof. Ernest Kenu, Prof. George Obeng Adjei, Dr. Ali Sambah, Prof. Ellis Owusu Dabo, Dr. John Amuasi, Dr. Franklin Asiedu-Bekoe, Dr. Dennis Laryea, Dr. Francis Kasolo, Dr. Sally-Ann Ohene

Background
The emergence of the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome – Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which resulted in COVID-19 disease in late 2019, affecting almost every country in the world. Following that, World Health Organization (WHO) advised the effected countries who has already WHO implementing the sentinel surveillance for severe acute respiratory infections (SARI) for influenza to use such systems to also monitor severe SARS-CoV-2 cases by collecting data that would allow for the measurement of COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness (VE).

Evaluating the performance of COVID-19 vaccines post-licensure is critical as a number of factors can impact on the real-world VE, including transportation and storage conditions, vaccines administration, advanced age, underlying medical conditions and also previous SARS-CoV-2 infection. In addition, post-licensure evaluations of the pandemic vaccines allow public health authorities not only to understand the duration of protection of the vaccines but also advise the need for re-vaccination where applicable.

This study was initiated to utilize the hospital-based influenza surveillance sentinel sites scattered across all the 16 regions of Ghana, to recruit individuals diagnosed with SARI and to collect clinical and vaccination data to inform estimates of the COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness against SARI in persons of the vaccination target groups in 21 selected SARI sentinel sites in Ghana..

Objective
This study seeks to measure the overall and product-specific COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness (CVE) against laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 in hospitalised patients belonging to the target group(s) for COVID-19 vaccination in Ghana by using National Influenza Surveillance platform to recruit individuals diagnosed with against severe acute respiratory infections (SARI) in the 16 regions of Ghana

Expected Outcome
The outcome of interest for this study is to detect SARS-CoV-2 in patients of age group eligible for COVID-19 vaccination and hospitalised with SARI symptoms as a mean of measuring the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine being given to Ghanaians to prevent infection and to determine markers of severity of disease as well as genetic variants of SARS-CoV-2 in hospitalised SARI patients of all ages

Collaborators
Kintampo Health Research Centre( lead institution), Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, University of Health and Allied Sciences and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology/KCCR and WHO Ghana Office

Funders: World Health Organization (WHO)