Coronavirus outbreak: Govt's partial lockdown measures have failed - NDC

The National Democratic Congress (NDC) has said the partial lockdown announced by the government in Accra, Kumasi, Tema and Kasoa is not working.

According to the party, the lockdown measures had many loopholes and it has so far not served its purpose.

This was disclosed by a member of the NDC’s Coronavirus-19 team, Dr. Grace Ayensu Dankwa on Accra based Citi FM.

Dr. Dankwa said the lockdown should have taken immediate effect instead of the delayed implementation date.

According to her, because the implementation date delayed, it gave people possibly infected with coronavirus to leave the epicentres.

“It was actually a lockdown of the people in the geographical area. So in other words, it was more like we wanted to quarantine all the people in Accra. So you make an announcement two days, three days that you are going to lockdown Accra on Monday and what happened was more of what we predicted–the human beings that we were sort of concerned about, most of them left the area to other regions in the country…"

"The way this lockdown happened we think it has backfired in the sense that, the lockdown was not a geographical lockdown,” she argued.

The National Democratic Congress (NDC) COVID-19 team on Thursday, April 2, 2020, asked the government to as a matter of urgency, conduct a nationwide mass testing to curb the further spread of the novel coronavirus in Ghana.

“The NDC has called for mass testing because we don’t feel that currently, the contact tracing is actually working. We went from vertical cases to the horizontal cases with people who didn’t have any travel history testing positive and when that happened, we (NDC) knew the case numbers will go up.

"Then, the numbers went up in Accra and Kumasi and before that, we (NDC) had already called for the lockdown,” Dr. Ayensu Dankwa noted.