Ghana now has 53 confirmed Coronavirus cases with 2 deaths - Health Minister [UPDATED]
Ghana now has 53 confirmed Coronavirus cases as of Tuesday night, March 24, 2020.
The additional case from the earlier announced 53 followed the testing of more people who have been mandatorily quarantined where one more person tested positive for the Coronavirus disease.
According to the Ghana Health Service (GHS), out of the total 1030 people on mandatory quarantine, the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research (NMIMR) has been able to test a total of 510 out of the 611 samples taken as of Tuesday night.
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Earlier Tuesday when the Minister of Health, Mr Kwaku Agyeman Manu addressed a press conference the cases were 52 at a time only 185 out of the 1030 on mandatory quarantine had been tested.
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.
The additional 26 cases were all from those who arrived in Ghana in the last few days and were in mandatory quarantine and have tested positive.
This brings the total positive cases in Ghana to 53.
Out of that, there have been two deaths, leaving 51 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.
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Read also: Coronavirus: 1030 travellers on mandatory quarantine in Ghana
Out of the 1030 number, with 611 samples taken and 510 processed with 26 positive tests, the rest are yet to be tested.
At a press briefing Tuesday morning [March 24, 2020], the Minister of Health Mr Kwaku Agyeman Manu said those on quarantine, psychologists have been deployed to have chats 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.
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"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."
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."
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"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."
He said in Kumasi about 50 trained people have been employed who are still doing contact tracing.
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He 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.
Writer's email: enoch.frimpong@graphic.com.gh