Two cities – Accra in the Greater Accra Region and Kumasi in the Ashanti Region have been identified as the hotspots of COVID-19 in Ghana, Health Minister, Kwaku Agyemang Manu has said.
It follows the latest confirmation of 25 new coronavirus cases bringing to total, 52 confirmed cases in the country.
Addressing the press today (Tuesday, March 24, 2020) in Accra, the Health Minister said following the case management by health officials, “What we have identified so far is that, we can describe two areas in Ghana now as our own epicentres. Accra and Tema together and Kumasi”.
“In Accra, we have deployed 98 field officers, epidemiologists and community health nurses who have been trained in tracing people. In Kumasi, we have deployed about 50 trained people who are also doing contact tracing,” the Minister added.
Kwaku Agyemang Manu, therefore, urged Ghanaians to assist health officials in identifying persons who might be at risk of the pandemic in a bid to tackle the horizontal spread of the virus in the country.
“The advice I will give now by this evidence is the fact that…all those our brothers and sisters who have come in [from abroad] we should assist them to put themselves in self-quarantine if we haven’t tracked them yet. We should talk to health authorities in the areas where they live to send teams to serve them such that we can protect the population against community spread that we have seen in the country at the moment.”
The 25 new cases were confirmed among the 1,030 people who are under mandatory quarantine in the country after arriving at the Kotoka International Airport hours to the deadline for the closure of the country’s borders.
Ghana’s death toll has also risen to two as of Monday, March 23, 2020.
611 people out of the 1030 people in self-quarantine have so far been tested for the Coronavirus and only 185 of the number have their results released.
The Ministry is yet to receive the remaining results.
Cases in Ghana
Since the outbreak of the disease in Ghana, the majority of the cases have been recorded in Accra with a few of them confirmed in Tema and Kumasi.
Although most of the cases are imported in nature, there are also indications that community spreading has begun in Ghana.
The majority of the infected persons are Ghanaians who arrived in the country from other parts of the world. Only a few are foreigners.
Over the weekend, the Lebanese patient among those confirmed to have contracted the novel coronavirus in Ghana died.
The deceased was a 61-year-old man, reported to a health facility in Kumasi with a fever and cough.
He reportedly had other critical underlying health conditions before his death.
Another patient was reported dead on Monday, March 24. But details of the death have not been provided by authorities.
Ghana is likely to record more cases of COVID-19 with the coming weeks, the Information Minister continue to warn.
