CDD, lecturer challenge GHS over COVID-19 infections peak…but GHS insists

The Centre for Democratic Development (CDD) and a lecturer at the University of Ghana have challenged claims by the Ghana Health Service (GHS) that Ghana is at its peak of infections with regards to COVID-19.

According to them, Ghana’s cases are now spiking with an even more dangerous trend of infections which would not flatten anytime soon.

They were Kwame Sarpong Asiedu, Democracy and Development Fellow with CDD and Dr James Aheto, the lecturer, noted that there was more work to be done to get hold of the virus in the country, saying, “until and when we are able to move spread from polynomial, we are nowhere near peak because the rate at which our cases are jumping does not look like we are approaching peak.

They expressed the sentiments after Dr Badu Sarkodie, the Director of Public Health at the GHS, said the nation was at its peak of infections.

According to Dr Sarkodie, data on Ghana’s rate of COVID-19 infections showed case count has peaked because rate of infection was yet to decline, but would only happen if preventive, precautionary and hygienic protocols for the virus were adhered to.

“We are not off the hook yet but if we continue the way we are doing now, adhering to various social distancing, individual preventive and precautionary measures will let us come down from where we are,” he noted and explained that “because Ghana started aggressive and enhanced contact tracing early, for instance, testing a lot of people who are not even showing symptoms, only few of them tested positive for virus from large pool of samples”.

But Mr Asiedu pointed out that “look at significant jumps over last few days, I do not even think we should be having such conversations now since acceleration is huge, there is no basis to even talk about our peak, we are not even anywhere near plateau and is based on evidence available”.

Contributing, Dr Aheto also refuted claims calling on the citizenry not to expect more cases and explained that Ghana currently does not have supportive and fundamental data needed to arrive at such a conclusion as it fights the pandemic.

“We are still working together in order to get reliable data that can help us estimate prevalence of infection and peak because we haven’t got there yet, I don’t know which data Dr Sarkodie is speaking to, something we need to know is reproductive rate, we can tell how many people can be infected within a day to enable us to forecast on how many people will be affected, recovered, or dead with specified time period.

“It is only when we have this available to us before we can say Ghana is at its peak when it comes to infection but as of now, we have not been able to get data yet, however, figures they churn out are accumulated figures and not daily data,” Dr Aheto cautioned.

COVID-19 cases in Ghana have seen staggering jump from 2,169 to 2,719 within two days which means 550 more cases have been recorded since Saturday when last update was released. -starrfmonline.com/citinewsroom.com