How ‘fear and panic’ caused Korle Bu doctors to flee over suspected coronavirus

Following reports of two suspected cases of coronavirus at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, head of the Public Health Department at the hospital Dr Philip Amoo has revealed how some doctors deserted the facility.

In an interview on Joy FM’s Morning show monitored by GhanaWeb, Dr Amoo said some doctors out of fear of contracting the virus began to flee the hospital.

“Yesterday I saw something very funny… “There is something we call malicious panic: panic that is not founded on anything. Just people (doctors) wanting to go home…it’s sad. This one will shout, ‘hey I have little children’…and disappear from the scene. That is the reason why as soon as the epidemic thing steps in into the environment, the case needed to be moved away quickly from routine sites,” he said.

On Wednesday morning, an Argentine and a Chinese national reported to the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital with symptoms of coronavirus.

Officials say the two live together but travelled on different dates from China to Ghana. They two had gone to the hospital to test for meningitis before they were quarantined for having symptoms of the coronavirus.

In a latest development, officials of the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research have announced that tests conducted on blood samples of the two suspected cases have all come back as negative.

This means that Ghana remains one of several African countries yet to record a confirmed case of coronavirus.