The Vice President of the Ghana Medical Association (GMA), Dr Frank Serebour has called on the government of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo to as a matter of urgency impose a nationwide total lockdown to fully tackle the spread of the coronavirus.
“I think the conversation should shift to the point that now we need to be tackling the whole country in general. Whether there are recorded cases or not. I think the whole country would have to come under some degree of restriction. It shouldn’t be limited to Accra, Kumasi and Kasoa. This is what we requested for some weeks ago and people started calling us all sort of names”, Dr Serebour told a local radio on Tuesday.
Responding to the current partial lockdown in the country, he said: ‘‘I don’t call this a lockdown, honestly. What we are experiencing is restriction. Even this restriction is very lax. This fuse into our earlier call. When we first brought it up, some wise people said we were not wise enough to request for a lockdown. I can tell that as we speak now, all the other regions have recorded cases including my hometown- Bekwai in the Ashanti Region. Therefore, it is important to consider restrictions in the whole country”.
Some weeks ago, GMA and the Nugouchi Institute of Medical Research called on the government to introduce a complete lockdown of the whole country following an increase in the number of confirmed cases of the deadly respiratory illness/
However, President Nana Addo had resorted to a partial lockdown of some parts of the country, restricting the movement of people.
Despite the current restrictions, Dr. Serebour is of the view that the government had provided a window of opportunity for persons to flee taking into account what he called the grace period given them in preparation for the lockdown.
“What really went wrong under the lockdown was that people had to flee from their various regions to other regions. And we are compounding that problem with the food sharing exercise. It is better we did not have it”, he said.
Some individuals and organizations such as the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), the Progressive People’s Party (PPP) and the Bureau of Public Safety have all demanded a nationwide lockdown to help deal with the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Last week, the Ghanaian leader extended the lockdown by one week.
Ghana has so far recorded 636 confirmed cases of Covid-19 with eight (8) deaths on Tuesday.
According to the Ghana Health Service (GHS), 70 percent of the cases are persons with no history of travel while 30 percent have a history of travel.
41 percent of the infected persons are female while 59 percent are male.
“Of the 636 confirmed Covid-19 cases, 268 were reported from routine surveillance, 253 from enhanced surveillance activities and 115 from travelers under mandatory quarantine in both Accra and Tamale” the GHS said.
DAP/as/APA