COVID-19: Ghana's active case count increases to 871

The Ghana Health Service (GHS) has announced 65 new COVID-19 cases, increasing the country’s active case count to 871.

In a December 26 update, the GHS also revealed that the death toll remains 333.

The country now has a total cumulative case count of 54,286 and 53,082 recoveries from the illness.

Hotspots

The Greater Accra region remains the hotspot for the illness in the country with 509 active COVID-19 cases while the Ashanti region has 33 active cases.

New COVID-19 variant

Meanwhile, the Director of Public Health at the Ghana Health Service, Dr Franklin Asiedu-Bekoe has disclosed that testing is ongoing to determine if the new variant of the Coronavirus is in the country.

This comes days after Nigeria recorded cases of the new variant of the virus which is said to be more infectious.

In an interview with Citi FM, Dr Asiedu-Bekoe assured that Ghana’s preventive set-up will ensure that any new strain is identified and brought under control.

Dr Asiedu-Bekoe said: “We have adopted the strategy of testing people before they enter the country. We have made the PCR testing mandatory. We also do the antigen tests. When we get the positives, we pass them on to Noguchi to do the sequencing, they did it two months ago and did not identify any new virus strain. What they are doing now, with the advent of the new virus variant is, they are collecting the samples to see whether there are any in Ghana.”

“However, per what we have gathered so far, there is no evidence of such in the country,” he indicated.