Coronavirus: Let’s practise healthy lifestyles - GHS

The Ghana Health Service (GHS) has advised Ghanaians to practise healthy lifestyles to stem the spread of COVID-19.

The Service emphasized the need for regular exercising, reduction in alcohol and tobacco intake and eating of healthy meals to boost the immune system against the novel Coronavirus disease.

Dr DaCosta Aboagye, the Director of Health Promotion at the GHS, who gave the advice in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, said that had become important because lifestyle diseases such as stroke, hypertension, and Kidney diseases accounted for latest COVID-19 deaths in Ghana.

He said, postpartum infection - a disease, which could develop after childbirth, was also becoming major causes of deaths and must be watched.

Dr Aboagye said, until now, postpartum infections and stroke had not been identified among the co-morbidities afflicting COVID-19 patients, raising concern about how non-communicable diseases were contributing to Ghana’s COVID-19 deaths.

Ghana’s current COVID-19 active cases are 3,782, with 24,988 confirmed cases and 139 deaths. Out of the total recorded cases, 21,067 have recovered.

Mr Aboagye said the latest data added to already worrying statistics recorded since the outbreak of Sars-Cov-2.

“Majority of the deaths that we have recorded in this country came from co-morbidities, underlying conditions; and most of these underlying conditions tend to be the non-communicable diseases; hypertension, diabetes and the others.

“So we certainly have to step up education on these non-communicable diseases with emphasis on diabetes, hypertension, and the cancers,” he said.

The Director said his division was planning to roll out a new programme dubbed the “Wellness Clinic” to profile Ghanaians based on their health status and link them with appropriate institutions like Health Insurance Schemes for support.

He said the Service’s attention was also on respiratory diseases and ways on how to reduce the number of persons dying from the non-communicable disease, he said.

“This programme will provide a platform for every Ghanaian to at least check their health once a year. This data can be linked to the National Health Insurance data and help us in reducing the non-communicable diseases before the next epidemic,” he explained.

In its latest report, the Ghana Health Service announced four new COVID-19 deaths, raising the country’s death toll from 135 to 139.

Dr Aboagye said though no new death was reported from the Ashanti Region, it remained the region with the highest number of deaths, contributing nearly half of the country’s COVID-19 deaths.

He said a high powered medical team, led by the Director-General of the Service, was investigating the trend in Kumasi.

“As we speak there is a team trying to investigate what is happening in the Ashanti region. The Director-General himself, Dr Patrick Kuma Aboagye is there,” he stated.