2,180 Children have contracted COVID-19 — Report

Out of the 49,202 people who contracted the COVID-19 virus between March 11, 2020 to November 9, 2020, 2,180 were children below 18 years.

The figure, which represents 4.43 per cent of the total concentration rate of the virus among children in the country was contained in a research conducted by Child Rights International, a non-governmental organisation concerned with the welfare of children.

Meanwhile, according to the research, four deaths were recorded among children within the ages of 0-14 years.

Report

Titled “COVID-19: state of children in Ghana”, the report, which sampled views from 589 communities, towns and cities adopted both quantitative and qualitative methods for collecting data.

In addition, data from the Ghana Health Service (GHS) on COVID-19 was also used among secondary data from other sources.

The report covered data on children from March 11, 2020 to November 9, 2020.

The Executive Director of Child Rights International, Mr Bright Appiah, said: “We did this because we realised that most of the countries that were hardly affected by COVID-19 also did assessment on the state of children and how they would design the welfare system to accommodate the difficulty that children go through during the period so for us as an organisation we also looked at various issues that affected children during this period.”

The assessment of the report, he said, was based on children within the ages of 0-14 and 15-17 respectively.

COVID-19

According to Mr Appiah, although the data gathered projected a low incidence of COVID-19 among children in Ghana, there was a need for government to intensify its campaign on making children understand the importance of adherence to the COVID-19 safety protocols.

He said there was also a need for government to institute programmes that would boost the immune system of children such as proper nutrition system to ensure children have a balanced diet, good personal and environmental hygiene practices and physical activity as much as possible.

“Moving forward, there must be a comprehensive nutritional plan under the school feeding programme in schools and the provision of regular information on nutritional values to the general public in order to maintain a strong immune system against COVID-19 in children,” he said.

Case count

Ghana’s active Coronavirus (COVID-19) cases has hit 1,424 after the country recorded a drastic reduction in active cases in the last two months.

According to data from the Ghana Health Service, as at Tuesday, November 18, 81 new cases had pushed the cumulative number of cases to 50,457.

The number of discharges or recoveries had also increased to 48,710.

The number of deaths has now reached 323.