Ghana’s coronavirus case count has increased by 121 from the initial 1,550 bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 1,671, the Director General of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr Patrick Aboagye, has announced.
The number of persons who have perished from the disease has increased by five bringing the total deaths to 16.
Taking his turn at the Ministers’ media briefing on the disease, code named Covid-19, in Accra yesterday, Dr Aboagye said 188 persons have recovered from the disease adding that “there are more patients waiting for their second tests to be discharged”.
Currently about 1461 are well and have no symptoms and are responding very well to treatment, Dr Aboagye said.
“We have about six who are moderately to critically ill. Two of them are at the University of Ghana Medical Centre, three are at Ga East Hospital and one at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital. All the other parts of the country do not have any critical case,” he explained.
According to Dr Aboagye, 237 of the Covid-19 patients were in isolation at state managed centres across the country with 174 in Accra, 50 in the Eastern Region, 9 in the Ashanti Region, and five in the Northern regional capital, Tamale.
“When it comes to the case counts in the region, as at now, there are eight cases in Upper West, 18 in Upper East, 13 in the Northern Region, Oti has 17, Volta has 11, Eastern Region has 57 cases, Ashanti Region has 84 both from the normal surveillance and enhance contact tracing, Central Region has 18, Western has one and Western North one,” he elaborated.
So far, Dr Aboagye said the Savannah, Bono, Bono East and Ahafo regions have not recorded any case despite active surveillance ongoing in those areas.
Ghana on March recorded its first two cases of Covid-19 which has killed more than 200,000 persons globally.
The disease which was first diagnosed in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on December 31, 2019 has infected over 2 million people.
The World Health Organisation(WHO) on January 31, 2020 declared the disease a global health emergency.
“The main reason for this declaration is not what is happening in China but what is happening in other countries,” WHO Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference in Geneva, Switzerland.
The organisation subsequently declared the disease a pandemic on March 11 as it continued to spread across the world.
BY JULIUS YAO PETETSI