Minister of Health, Mr Kwaku Agyeman Manu

Accra, Tema and Kumasi identified as epicentres of Coronavirus in Ghana

Enoch Darfah Frimpong Mar - 24 - 2020 , 12:06 3 minutes read

The Ministry of Health (MoH) has identified, Accra and Tema in the Greater Accra Region and Kumasi in the Ashanti Region as the epicentres of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Ghana.

At a press briefing in Accra Tuesday, the Minister of Health, Mr Kwaku Agyeman Manu said: "What we have identified so far in Ghana now, we may have, we can describe two areas in Ghana now as our own epicentres, Accra and Tema together and Kumasi."

"We are doing what we describe as contact tracing, in Accra we have deployed 98 field officers ...that have been trained doing the tracing and we are getting to people."
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The Minister said in Kumasi for instance, about 50 trained people have been employed who are still doing contact tracing.

He, therefore, advised that based on the evidence, "wherever we are, all those our brothers and sisters who have come in, we should advise them to put themselves in self-quarantine if we haven't tracked them yet.

"And they should also talk to health authorities in the area where they live, to send teams to serve them, they can be calling on telephone describing their conditions to health officers they get in touch with such that, we can protect the rest of the population against community spread, the horizontal spread we are seeing in our country at the moment," the Minister said.

New cases

As of Monday night [March 23, 2020], a total of 27 positive cases had been recorded in Ghana with two deaths. There were only 25 existing cases.

But at the press briefing Tuesday morning [March 24, 2020], the Minister of Health explained that an additional 25 cases from those who arrived in Ghana in the last few days and were in mandatory quarantine have tested positive to bring the total positive cases in Ghana to 52, with two deaths.

There are 50 existing cases which are being managed in isolation.

In all, a total of 1030 travellers who arrived in Ghana after air, land and sea borders were closed are currently on mandatory quarantine for 14 days.

Out of the 1030 number, 611 samples have been taken and 185 has been processed and 25 tested positive

The rest is yet to be tested.

The Minister of Health said those on quarantine, psychologists have been deployed to have charts with them.

He said the Ministry was also in the process of handing them over to the case management team in isolated areas for treatment.
"Definitely, not all of them will be critically ill and they are not, some might not be ill at all, but decisions on them will depend on individual case management issue. If you are not even ill, you still have to be quarantined for the mandatory 14 days."
He said early on, there were indications that if a person tested negative, "we release you after four days but, [based on] technical advice, and we have met all the doctors and we cannot [continue] do that and we have to keep you for the entire two weeks, which is the 14 days."
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He said: "We have adequate rooms in Accra... to actually take care of all those who have tested positive at the moment. But going forward, a team is going round identifying places that we can use for isolation for case management, not only in Accra."