Covid-19: Curb Growing Community Spread

An Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the New York University, Nana Kofi Quakyi says government must work to urgently curtail the further community spread of COVID-19 in Ghana.

According to him, the fast-rising COVID-19 cases in the country could spell doom for the country if measures are not taken immediately to halt it.

Speaking on Eyewitness News on Wednesday, he said “we should really be investing a lot of our time and energies right now on mitigating the spread. The idea that we are going to allow the COVID-19 to spread and then we deal with it, that is a clinical issue. That is not something that is going to be sustainable for us for even two or three months. We have to really be focusing on making sure that we are curbing the rate of transmission. That is where we really should be evaluating our success at dealing with the coronavirus.”

Over a period of one week, Ghana’s case count has risen by more than 1,000 with the number of daily recorded recoveries struggling to catch up with the number of new positive cases.

Many people have attributed various reasons for the development, including the lack of adherence to COVID-19 prevention protocols.

Nana Kofi Quakyi believes that the situation is further caused by the seeming reduction in the number of daily tests done in the country which allows for more cases to go undetected.

“Contact tracing and testing have both slowed down a little bit… If testing goes down and contact tracing goes down, we will have more unidentified cases because the cases will be growing and there is a factual limit to what our health sector can do, there will be a factual limit to what our public health infrastructure can handle. Once we hit that, we can’t expect to have anything pleasant,” he warned.

Regional breakdown

As of 6 am on Wednesday, June 11, 2020, Ghana had recorded 10,358 COVID-19 cases with 3,824 recoveries and 48 deaths.

Cases per Region