What does the Ghana Government’s Lifting of the Partial Lockdown Mean for its Citizens?
As we all know by now, the world is fighting two evils: 1) combat and contain the spread of Covid-19 to save lives; and 2) implement appropriate economic intervention measures timely to manage the adverse impact of the containment measures on businesses in order to save livelihoods.
The Ghana government in the last 3 weeks implemented aggressive contact tracing and testing measures to first identify positive cases early, quarantine them and treat them early to ensure fewer critically ill cases and therefore deaths.
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This aggressive contact tracing approach also gave the government enough data on the rate of incidence of positive cases (1,042) to total test results (68,591) of 1.52% to enable them make informed decisions about a phased approach in reopening economy.
For now, the government has lifted the partial lockdowns in Accra and Kumasi, but restrictions on large social gatherings such as schools, church gatherings, sports gatherings, funerals etc still remain. Citizens are also entreated to continue to practice appropriate personal hygiene such as frequent washing of hands, wear masks when leaving their homes and continue to practice social distancing whiles in public.
This current development puts more responsibilities on us as individuals to make sound common sense decisions to not only protect ourselves, but to also protect our communities! It also allows some small business that would have collapsed and adversely impacted the livelihoods of a large segment of the population to slowly revive their businesses whiles implementing sound social distancing measures at work!
Ultimately our success in winning this dual war against Covid lies a lot on the actions and inactions of us the individuals to work with the Government to make the plan work!
This past week and the coming week have seen a number of countries such as Czech, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy and US with worse cases of Covid implement different phased approaches to opening their economies. What is critical is for each country to determine the optimal balance between containment measures and increased economic activities to ensure that we save lives as well as livelihoods!
I believe strongly that it is a reasonable approach considering that there are contingency plans should there be escalation in cases in particular communities!
#UnitedAgainstCovid #FactsOverFear #EducateAndEncourage #WashYourHands #WearYourMask #PracticeIndividualSocialDistancing #StaySafe #SaveLives #SaveLivelihoods
