COVID-19: Treatment centres to be completed by end of 2021 – Agyeman-Manu assures

Health Minister-designate, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu says all COVID-19 treatment centres are expected to be completed by the end of this year.

He said this when he appeared before Parliament's Appointments Committee on Wednesday, February 10, 2021.

“At the onset of COVID, the first instruction was for all district hospitals to create spaces to fight COVID-19. Honestly, district hospitals have never had ICUs to the level that can take care of severe and critical patients, so they can take care of severe and critical patients, so they kept on referring them to regional hospitals.”

“After having evaluated the inadequate infrastructure in our facilities, we earmarked about 12 places where we set up ourselves to construct treatment centres quickly.”

He explained that the projects could not be completed as expected due to inadequate funds adding that they will be ready for use by the close of the year.

“Unfortunately, almost all the money we were supposed to have utilised went into the procurement of PPE, facemasks, sanitisers and gowns for doctors. So the project stalled a bit. The second tranche of the World Bank support is now giving us room to advance money to contractors. I believe that by close of the year, all these treatment centres would have been completed.”

Meanwhile, the Ghana Health Service (GHS) says there are Post-COVID-19 clinics for patients who have recovered from the virus.

“After days or a few months of being discharged from the treatment centre, one could do a follow-up to ascertain whether he or she has experienced any residual damage(s) from the disease.”

The GHS said that would allow medical experts to provide the necessary medical support to the recovered patients. The coronavirus situation in Ghana

Ghana's active COVID-19 case count as of Tuesday, February 9, 2021, is 6,707 after 795 new cases were recorded.

The country's death toll has risen from 464 to 472 following a Ghana Health Service update today, February 9, 2021.

Since recording its first cases in March 2020, Ghana has confirmed 72,328 cases of the virus following which there have been 65,149 recoveries.

Ghana has conducted 810,040 tests for the virus in the past year.

In the past few months, new variants of the virus from the UK, Brazil, and South Africa have been detected in Ghana.

The UK variant, in particular, is believed to be contributing to the recent surge in cases and severity of symptoms.

Before 2021, Ghana had less than 1,000 active cases.

---citinewsroom