When all is said and done
When we get to the end of this pandemic, I hope handwashing would be a feature of all the corporate institutions and big commercial organisations, now having a field day with photo opportunities and publicity stunts, with their provision of handwashing facilities.
I hope the plethora of news items on institutions and organisations setting up washing facilities with Veronica buckets would not merely be just such stories, but a permanent culture.
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I remember the Ebola crisis of 2013/14, when these buckets first re-surfaced everywhere. The epidemic passed and the Veronica buckets fizzled out, until COVID-19 appeared and with it, the buckets, as handwashing was again touted as the first line of defense in the fight against COVID-19.
I also do, really, hope that my country would have a dedicated unit of public health specialists, who can decipher the signs of viral and other global contagion and not wait for the World Health Organisation (WHO) to sound the alarm before attention is paid.
On January 10, 2020, with China publishing the full genome of the novel COVID-19, Singapore, bordering China, and which should have borne the brunt of the disease, quickly went into the local production of swab test kits, developed by its Home Team Science and Technology Agency and Veredus Laboratories.
The locally produced Singaporean swab test kits showed results within three hours, with an accuracy of more than 99 per cent.
Ghana has its Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research (NMIMR) and the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research in Tropical Medicine (KCCF), with their capacity to test all viral, bacterial and other apparitions.
Like Singapore, could Ghana not also locally produce test kits, with its sterling institutions?
I really do hope that the disinfection of our markets, one of the COVID-19 interventions, would also be a permanent feature of markets management by local authorities. It will inure to our collective health.
I hope and pray the leader of the Centre of Awareness Global Peace Mission (COAGPM), Professor Samuel Ato Duncan, while lobbying for government support in the production of his dietary supplement and immune booster, COA FS, said to help in the management of COVID-19 and currently being reviewed by regulatory bodies, would also think about getting the supplement patented.
I hope COA FS would pass the reviews and be authenticated as a drug of choice in the management of the dreaded disease. That would headline Ghana and I imagine the CNNs and the BBCs all scrambling for information about this wonder drug.
I do hope the government and the opposition (dying to govern) would all take a cue from the pandemic and cut out the rhetorics on Ghana's development and governance.
They must realise that leading Ghana is not a contest in mere political manouverings or diatribes, but a burdensome responsibility of making the Ghanaian life better by using our own knowledge, resources and skills.
They must govern with some sense of trepidation, knowing that if care is not taken and Ghana does not become self sufficient, they may have to deal with how to dispose of corpses, when another pandemic strikes and developed countries, understandably, will hold back aid, as they also focus on their own.
I hope Veronica Bekoe, the woman who invented the buckets with taps, now popular across the country, would be honoured in some way. What if Ghana did not have the Veronica buckets in times like these? I have wondered.
Ghana has the innovative and creative minds. They need the right leadership and direction to set them into productive causes.
When all is said and done, I hope with all my heart that we will all be spared our lives. That our death count of five, would be just that.
That no eye in Ghana would see the mass corpses, coffins and cremations or burials that we all now are used to seeing on our screens in Italy and Spain.
I hope we all survive this!