The Ghana Health Service said the total positive cases confirmed in Ghana has hit 1,154 making 112 new cases since President Akufo-Addo’s lifting of the Lockdown on Sunday, April 19, 2020 with 120 recoveries.
“The Ghana Health Service is continuing with the supervision of the completion of a backlog of laboratory samples which have been picked for testing for COVID-19.” – a statement of the GHS website said
According to the health service, “Total samples tested so far now stands at 68,591 with 1.52 % testing positive. The results of these backlog of samples when released does not mean the number of new cases recorded on the day of the report. Regions that have reported cases remain the Greater Accra, Ashanti, Eastern, Northern, Volta, Upper East, Upper West, Central, Western and North East regions.”
On Sunday, April 19, 2020, President Akufo-Addo announced the lifting of the restriction to movements of persons in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area and Kasoa, and the Greater Kumasi Metropolitan Area and its contiguous districts.
According to President, the decision to enforce the 3-week lockdown was taken to give Government the opportunity to try to contain the spread of the virus, scale-up effectively the tracing of persons who had come into contact with infected persons, test them for the virus, and quarantine those who tested positive and isolate them for treatment.
He explained that, with Ghana having received the test results of some 68,591 contacts, and with the majority of tests being undertaken over the last 3 weeks, 1,042 persons, i.e. 1.5%, have been confirmed as positive, with 67,549, i.e. 98.5%, testing negative.
Additionally, 99 persons have recovered and have been discharged, with 930 persons, who have been isolated responding to treatment either in their homes or in treatment facilities.
“The main reason our country has seen an increase in the number of confirmed cases over the last three (3) weeks is because of the decision we took aggressively to trace and test contacts of infected persons. This has enabled us to identify and isolate infected persons, protect the population from further infections, and contain better the spread of the virus,” he said.
“Indeed, Ghana is the only other country in Africa to have conducted more than sixty thousand tests, and we are ranked number one (1) in Africa in administering of tests per million people”. – He added
