Akufo-Addo should have been guided by his own ‘lives can’t be brought back’ comment - Prof. Akosa

Former Director-General of Ghana Health Service, Professor Agyeman Badu Akosa has argued that lifting of the partial lockdown by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo falls short of the President’s own profound statement that the economy can be brought back to life but human lives cannot be brought back.

In the view of the health expert, lifting the lockdown was not a good decision in that face of horizontal spread of the Coronavirus to other regions aside the national capital Accra.

“I expected probably two weeks to the end of April and I expected that at least all regional capitals should have been locked down as well,” he said in an interview on Citi TV monitored by MyNewsGh.com.

President Akufo-Addo on Sunday announced the lifting of a three-week partial lockdown of Accra, Tema, Kasoa and Greater Kumasi which was imposed to stem the spread of the Corona Virus.

The decision to lift the lockdown has been received with mixed reactions from health experts and the Ghanaian public with many expressing their shock and disappointment at the decision though President Nana Addo stated seven reasons for lifting the lockdown which includes Ghana’s capacity to trace and test, produce Personal Protective Equipment and the impact of the lockdown on the poor and vulnerable.

However, Professor Badu Akosa believes an extended lockdown would have served a good purpose especially at a time Ghana was recording cases in the Eastern, Volta and Northern parts of the country.

He said “If you look at the science of this whole distribution of COVID-19, you would immediately appreciate that it has moved from where the centre is that is Accra towards the peripheral. In all cases apart from the cases in Ho where people came through porous borders and therefore Aflao became a flashpoint, most of them went from Accra to the regional capitals and then contact tracing takes you to wherever people are. There was a progression and the progression had moved from Accra to Kumasi and other places.”

According to him, though one reason that was given for lifting the lockdown was setting up of more testing centres, Ghana currently has only three testing centres adding that “Till date results are coming up 5, 7 and in some cases 10 days which we all felt was not good enough. We needed to get to a situation where more testing centres would have come online. At the moment we have only extended it to three. The rest are coming on and [as to] when they are coming, we don’t know.”

Professor Akosa further stated that government needed to be guided to ensure that there is no revamp of infections that could plunge Ghana into a more difficult situation.

“In the President’s maiden statement, he said that the economy can be brought back but human lives cannot be brought back and for me, that has been my guiding statement. It was an operative statement that we all felt he (President) should still have made that a guiding principle. But unfortunately, like I said he has lifted the ban,” Professor Akosa added.