Coronavirus: Suspected Korle Bu patients ‘freed’ after public scare

Chief Executive Officer of the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, Dr Daniel Asare has confirmed that patients who were quarantined yesterday for suspected cases of coronavirus have been discharged.

Dr Asare noted that the two patients have been released to the appropriate health officials for further treatment as they tested negative for the deadly virus.

"They're going home...today" he emphasised. "If you keep somebody in quarantine and you make the diagnosis that they haven't got coronavirus, any other disease that he has, you send him to the appropriate medical team for treatment, Dr Asare added.

"They realized that these people may have this condition and they were referred from outside Korle-Bu. So what they did was to ask them to stay a little bit, take their blood samples to Noguchi Memorial Institute that's the only place confirmation can be done," Dr Daniel Asare said.

"Once we were waiting for the confirmation we were in tune with them telling them to keep calm...and we got the confirmation and the preliminary confirmation was negative. And the next one which was the actual confirmation showed that they were negative. SO these two suspected cases proved negative." Dr Asare affirmed while speaking in an interaction with the media Thursday, February 6, 2020.

The two patients were earlier quarantined and admitted at the Triage Department at the Korle-Bu hospital while their blood samples were taken to Noguchi Memorial Institute for further investigations.

Dr Asare further allayed fears of a possible outbreak of the deadly disease saying our high temperature cannot foster the growth of the virus.

The novel coronavirus has killed more than 563 people in China since its outbreak.