Go to the hospital if you want to test for covid-19 – Noguchi

Noguchi Medical Research Institute has advised the general public thronging their premises to get tested for COVID-19 to rather visit the hospitals.

The Research Institute has thus raised concerns on nationals and foreigners trooping their facility to know whether or not they have been infected with the pandemic virus.

Speaking in an interview with GhanaWeb, the Public Relations Officer of the Noguchi Medical Research Institute,Mrs. Gloria Obeng Benefo, reiterated the research center has seen people walk in requesting to be tested instead of visiting the hospital.

“People have been coming here who want to be tested. We see both locals and foreigners come here. Some of them say they have had contact with people and places they think could make them prone to the having the virus.”

She further advised people to visit the various hospitals for testing as she adds that “if you test at the hospital and the results are suspicious, your samples will eventually be brought to us for further tests”.

Ghana confirmed its first cases of coronavirus on Thursday, becoming the tenth country in sub-Saharan Africa to register positive cases.

Ghana’s Health Ministry said its two cases were people who had returned recently from Norway and Turkey.

“These are imported cases of COVID-19. Both patients are currently being kept in isolation and are stable,” the Ministry said in a statement.

The coronavirus outbreak has been labelled a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). It is a term that the organisation had refrained from using before now.

WHO Chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was now using the term because of deep concern over "alarming levels of inaction" over the virus.

A pandemic is used to describe an infectious disease with significant and ongoing person-to-person spread in multiple countries around the world at the same time.

Globally, there have been 134,511 cases recorded and at least 4,970 deaths.