Community spread of coronavirus reduced due to increased surveillance - Minister

Information Minister, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah has disclosed that some 14 persons have tested positive out of a total number of 7,461.

The Minister said the figure shows clearly that the community spread was declining steadily.

According to him, of the 19,000 traced contacts, a total of over 15,000 samples had been collected.

He said of the 15,000 samples, 7,461 had been tested and only 14 had tested positive for the Coronavirus as of Monday.

Addressing the press on Tuesday, Mr Oppong Nkrumah said “while this is still early, it suggests that the community spread is relatively limited.”

“Aside the routine surveillance we followed up to trace the contacts of all the positives. Contacts of over 19000 persons has been made with samples from a total of over 15,000 contacts collected so far. In Greater Accra over 8,000 of such contacts have been made.

“After testing 7461 of these contacts as at yesterday, we found 14 positives, representing 0.18 per cent. While this is still early, it suggests that the community spread is relatively limited. More testing will, however, provide a clearer picture in the coming days. In total, routine surveillance and contact tracing has yielded 287 positives of which 49 have been discharged for home treatment, 228 are responding well to treatment, three have fully recovered and five with underlying health conditions have died,” he added.

Following measures for enhanced contact tracing and testing, Ghana has detected an increased number of confirmed COVID-19 cases.

A total of 287 cases of COVID-19 with five (5) deaths have been recorded.

The regional distribution of the cases are as follows: Greater Accra Region has most cases (256) followed by the Ashanti Region (18), Northern Region (10), Upper West Region (1), Eastern Region (1) and Upper East Region (1).

A total of 172 cases were reported from the routine and enhanced surveillance activities and those from travellers under mandatory quarantine in both Accra and Tamale are 115.

The period for mandatory quarantine for travellers who arrived 21-22 March 2020 has ended. In all, a total of 1,030 travellers were quarantined during the period. Out of these, 79 (7.7%) were positive during the initial testing whilst 951 were negative.

Twenty-six (26) among those that were initially negative were found to have converted to be positive at the exit screening, bringing to a total of 105 which constitutes 10.2% among the travellers that were quarantined.