COVID-19: We’re undertaking enhanced contact tracing not mass testing – Health Minister

Government has denied that it is conducting a mandatory mass screening of citizens for Coronavirus.

“I’ll stress, there is no policy as yet for compulsory mass-testing that people are parading on social media,” Minister of Health, Kweku Agyeman Manu said during a media briefing on Wednesday.

He explained that “It is correct that we have teams that are working now in Accra and Kumasi for what we call contact testing. Those who have tested positive had contact with people and those who travelled into the country before the quarantine are already in the community. We have got a tall list of them with their contacts, telephone numbers, and from the database that we have, almost all of them are in Accra and Kumasi with isolated cases across the country.”

“These are the people we are trying to reach and when we get to each of them, we’ll try to take samples from that person and transport for a test,” the Minister clarified.

This comes after information circulating on social media indicating that health officials will be going to particular areas in Accra to conduct compulsory tests on everyone.

But the Health Minister said such is not the case.

He explained that their officials are instead undertaking “enhanced contact tracing”.

Giving further clarification on the issue, Information Minister, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah said although health officials will be in some selected areas identified as COVID-19 hotspots, they will instead be doing active surveillance.

“In the hotspot areas, there are some neighbourhoods in which the Ghana Health Service and the surveillance team desire to do some more active surveillance. What that means is that they will visit homes, have conversations with people as to whether they have developed symptoms that they want to test. Because while you are generally saying you are tracing and testing, there may be someone in a particular neighbourhood who has not even heard. So that enhanced testing is to allow to go out into these hotspot areas and engage the communities and if there are persons who are at-risk population, then they test such persons.”

“So in ramping up the testing, it’s not a compulsory test of everybody in the neighbourhood because even logistically, we can’t do that. And we can’t force people to test compulsorily. I think it’s important that we have this clarification so that we don’t cause more panic out there that there are people coming to do compulsory testing on everybody,” he insisted.

Enhanced testing in the Ayawaso West Municipality

A house to house Coronavirus tracing and testing exercise is set to be carried out in the Ayawaso West Municipality in the Greater Accra Region from Wednesday, April 1, 2020.

The announcement made by the Municipal Health Directorate follows the identification of the municipality as a hotspot for the virus.

The exercise will be conducted for 10 days to tackle the spread of COVID-19 among residents.

“A directive from the National Level has been given to conduct a COVID-19 contact tracing of all persons who have come into contact with COVID-19 positive patients…and conduct compulsory house to house testing of every individual residing in Ayawaso West Municipal Municipality,” the statement from health authorities indicated.

Over a hundred health and security officers from the police, immigration and national security are expected to be deployed for the exercise in the municipality.