Coronavirus: No supplies and funds forces National Trust Fund to give back warehouse to army

Sophia Akuffo, Chairperson of the Board of Trustees of National COVID-19 Trust Fund, has lamented the lack of funds to the Fund, with the last donation it received, since October 2020, being last week.

She said that with no more funds coming into the National Trust Fund, they have had to, for instance, hand back the warehouse that housed medical supplies for the coronavirus in its possession, to the Ghana Army, its original owners due to lack of support.

The former Chief Justice stressed the call on the public to continue to make donations to the Fund because, as has been clearly seen lately from the statistics from the Ghana Health Service, the number of coronavirus cases have been taking a spike.

“If you remember, last week, we donated some items to three medical centers and to the National Commission on Culture, and the National Ambulance Service. Now, we have an empty warehouse as a result and we’ve handed the warehouse back to the Army, whose warehouse it is. And so we don’t have any items anymore: no PPE, no sanitizers, nothing,” she said.

Speaking to GhanaWeb on the sidelines of the installation of the Digital Laboratory Information System (LIS) at the Noguchi Virology Laboratories at the Noguchi Memorial Institute of Medical Research (NMIMR), she stated that the Fund only has GHs6 million, an amount she indicated will not be enough to sustain the heavy demands it continuous to receive.

“And then, in terms of funds, we have just about GHs6 million left of which, really, if we look at the sort of requests we’ve been receiving, and so on, the furthest that amount will take us may be to about April and then the vault will be empty.

“I think maybe for a while, people felt that the pandemic is over but it is not over. I think the figures show it is not over; everybody is now being reminded that it is not over but it has not been something to make us happy or proud because we’ve gone to levels, we had never reached before and for Ghana and because of the number of properly fitted medical facilities, it’s quite scary,” she said.

The installation of the LIS at the Noguchi Virology Laboratories, costing over GHs 600,000, is the first phase of the “LIS for Ghana” Project, and is planned to be followed this year by a similar installation at the National Public Health Reference Laboratory, Accra.

The SchuyLab LIS is expected to better the work of the Institute by 30% and increase the speed of delivering test results, helping to totally eliminate the manual way of test gathering for the coronavirus.

The system will also be able to check incidences where reports are changed or wrongly entered, checking unnecessary fraud that existed in the past with, for instance, the multiple printing of results of patients.