Coronavirus: Our only problem is the active cases, let’s focus on them - Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye

Director General of the Ghana Health Service, Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye has advised that Ghanaians’ focus should be geared towards reducing the active cases of the pandemic as they could pose more problems to the nation than the confirmed cases.

According to Dr Kuma-Aboagye, although Ghana has 27,060 confirmed cases of the virus, the active cases are only 3,871, and hence more attention should be paid to them.

“If you are home, and ten of you are positive and eight are recovered, I think the only problem is the two. That is what your worry should be and that is what the nation should focus on. So, you can see that the active cases is on the decline, and I am sure it will continue to decline,” he said during a Press Briefing on the update of the country’s testing programme at the Ministry of Information on July 19, 2020.

He added that the government’s strategies in controlling the spread of the virus has been effective as there has been a decline in the number of cases recorded.

“Greater Accra represents the key region that is driving the epidemic, and in the greater Accra these are the positives, and you can see the last few weeks, there has been a decline, which means that even the number of positives are not going up, so what it means is the system, the policy, and the strategies are working. If you look at the proportion of active cases against the total accumulative cases, you could see initially, we were stable, we were not going down, but as time went on, we could see that the proportion is down, recoveries are high so the burden is also coming down,” he said.

Dr Kuma-Aboagye concluded that generally, most of the confirmed cases of the virus recover in two weeks, because of the government’s proactive way of dealing with the virus.

“Mind you, anybody who is positive today, expects that in two weeks’ time, they will recover. That is not happening out of the flu but because of the interventions that have been put in place, early identification, treatment and isolation, is helping to make that recovery,” he said.