Fellow Ghanaians, this is the 6th time President Akufo-Addo is addressing the nation on the Coronavirus situation in the country. After nearly 2 weeks of lockdown, I must say I’m highly disappointed in the progress we’ve made so far.
The President in his address has admitted that he failed to act swiftly at the right time to prevent the importation and horizontal transmission of the virus. From his own statistics 192 persons who tested positive entered the country with the virus before his belated closure of our borders. Only 105 of the 1030 persons who were in mandatory quarantine tested positive.
What does this tell us, that while countries were putting measures in place to prevent the importation of the virus, our President embarked on a 5 nations tour to Switzerland, Belgium, UK, Scotland and Norway. He ignored all caution to quarantine himself and delegation and was recklessly traveling around the interacting with people upon his return. He confirmed the first case a week after his arrival. And this was a Norwegian Diplomat who was part of the delegation in Norway. But this is a subject for another day.
He stated in his speech that his approach is contact tracing, testing and treatment.
Let’s interrogate them one after the other.
Contact tracing- since when did this start? It started so late. Till date many of those who arrived before the closure of our borders have not been contacted. Some of those who called the emergency numbers don’t get any response. It is difficult to get a clear picture as to how we’re doing this contact tracing. It’s clear that the more infected persons remain in the population the more they spread the virus.
Testing- as for testing, the least said about it the better. We locked down not for fun but to contain the spread of the virus. The best thing to do is to accelerate testing but that’s not the President’s priority. Our testing rate is so slow. People whose samples have been taken for over week have still not received their results! Can you imagine the trauma? Our testing centers are not operating at optimal capacity because they lack testing kits and other equipment they need to accelerate the rate of testing. Imagine that it took about 2 weeks to test just 1030 persons who were under mandatory quarantine?
In his 5th address last Sunday, the President announced that they had traced the contacts of about 19000 people. Yesterday he said we needed to extend the lockdown by one more week to test some 10,000. Do you really believe this? He hasn’t said anything about increasing our testing capacity which is key in bringing the situation under control.
Instead he is happy depleting our stabilization fund, giving money to NPP and government operatives to share free food (mostly for NPP card bearing members), promising tax and utility waivers etc. Which reasonable manager or leader does this? Instead of investing in testing and taking control over the situation, he has found the best excuse to deplete our resources in a subtle political campaign. The man is campaigning each day using state resources and telling us not to politicize the issue. Are we all daft? Obviously NO! We can read in between the lines.
As for treatment, we hardly hear anything about it. Our health workers don’t even have the PPEs to protect themselves while attending to patients so some have started contracting the virus. They don’t deserve this. It’s is taking forever to distribute PPEs to health workers across the country. They have to keep threatening strikes to get protective gear to do their work. This is unacceptable.
Are our scientists also being supported to explore and develop treatment? What about the Centre for Plant Medicine Research, have we provided any support for them to explore herbal treatment? No word about that.
So it is clear that the President is not interested in bringing the situation under control by investing in testing so we can move on with our lives. He’s happy about the discomfort we’re going through.
He’s enjoying spending our money on other things as part of his campaign. Governing by flowery speeches and numerous daily press briefings instead of addressing the real problems. Enjoying unconstitutional emergency powers such as spying on our communications and mobile money transactions.
As we go through this discomfort, let’s continually remind ourselves that it is avoidable and needless.
The one week extension of the lockdown is unjustified- it is as a result of government’s failure to invest in tracing and testing.
At this rate, our patience must begin to run out on this government. We don’t deserve another extension of the lockdown due to government’s incompetence.
Dr. Jones Appiah
Private Medical Practitioner