Twenty-four hours after Ghana recorded 921 novel coronavirus cases, 437 new confirmed cases have been registered by health authorities Sunday, bringing the total to 4,700.
“With our total number of infections standing at 4,700 with 494 recoveries, 5 persons being critically ill and 4,179 responding to treatment, 22 persons virtually all of them with underlying illnesses such as hypertension, diabetes and chronic liver disease have unhappily died,” President Nana Akufo-Addo announced on Sunday.
The figures, the President said, is from the 160,501 tests conducted in the country since the first two cases on March 12.
Of the active positive cases, Nana Akufo-Addo said 4,179 persons responding to treatment.
“We must understand that the more people we test for the virus, the more persons we will discover as positive,” he stated.
In his ninth address to update the nation on Ghana’s covid-19 situation, the president said if people are not tested for the virus, “you will not find the persons who are positive, let alone isolate them from the population and treat them”.
Nana Akufo-Addo said that but for the proactiveness of the health authorities in undertaking undertaking enhanced contact tracing of infected persons, and had relied solely on testing persons who reported to hospital, Ghana’s case count would have stood a 1,413.
“The implementation of our strategy of aggressively tracing, testing and treating is our surest way of rooting out the virus,” he assured.
Early identification of persons with the virus, he observed, ensures that people do not spread the virus to others.
He said the rapid implementation of policies has resulted in our low infection, hospitalisation and death rates, some of the lowest in Africa and the world.
“We, certainly, must be doing something right in Ghana. Our country has administered more tests per million people than any other country in Africa, and, in fact, the World Health Organisation has reached out to us to share our sample pooling experience with other African countries, so they can adopt this strategy and also ramp up their testing capabilities,” he stated.
By 3news.com|Ghana