Nation's capacity informed lifting of partial lockdown - Prez Akufo-Addo
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo says the decision to lift the partial lockdown on Accra, Kumasi, Tema and Kasoa, was taken after a careful consideration of a number of factors.
He said the country’s current capacity “to trace victims of this disease, being able to test, being able to isolate and quarantine those people so that we take them out of the population, and, of course, the treatment”, were some of the factors that led to the decision.
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Again, the President stated: “We are also looking at the demography of the disease itself, in terms of the sick, in terms of death. What we will like to do, as decision-makers, is to balance all these factors and to come to a conclusion and a set of solutions that will benefit our people and of course, protect the economy of our country. All of these have been the basket of issues that have led us to take this decision.”
President Akufo-Addo said this yesterday, April 20, 2020, when he met with the Executive Committee of the Ghana Medical Association (GMA) at the Jubilee House to explain the rationale behind the lifting of the lockdown, and deliberate on how the government and the association could continue to work together post the lifting of the lockdown.
Hope
Whilst being hopeful of gaining the understanding and co-operation of the association, he expressed his satisfaction with the mode of testing and the results that had emanated from the tests.
“The common consensus has recognised that we have undertaken the most preemptive testing on the continent in relative terms. That has given us a very large pool of information as to how the disease is unfolding in our country.
“I think our capacity to be able to continue to do that is very critical for our ability to deal with this virus,” President Akufo-Addo added.
He noted that had the government not taken the decision to aggressively go out and test infected people and their contacts, “we would not have had the figures that we are getting today and yet, we would have had those very same people within the population”.
President Akufo-Addo mentioned the testing of nearly 70,000 contacts and told the doctors, “Continue to give us the demography, the infection rate, the death rate and the numbers of people who are affected and are moderately ill. All of those things are remaining quite consistent in the data that we have received.”
Doctors commended
The President indicated that: “I cannot ignore the impact that this lockdown is having on several constituencies of our nation, especially the informal workers, a very important part of our economy, who need to have a day out in the market or otherwise in order to provide for their families, who were having a lot of difficulty.”
He expressed appreciation to the doctors for the important role health workers were playing towards helping the government to combat the disease.
“You are the very centre of this battle – doctors and the association of doctors in our country. You are very, very central to whatever steps we will take to take this country forward. I thought it was important to meet immediately after the decision that we took last night to ease the restrictions of movements in our two greatest cities, Accra and Kumasi, and to get a bit of a flavour of how we are looking to go about this,” he added.
GMA grateful
The President of the GMA, Dr Frank Ankobea, thanked the President for the invitation, adding that “all we need to do is to pledge our support to government that we will continue with you, and we will continue to fight until this virus is eliminated from Ghana.”