We never stopped contact tracing – GHS

The Ghana Health Service has debunked assertions that they had ceased their contact tracing efforts of COVID-19 cases.

Director of Health Promotion at the Ghana Health Service, Dr. Dacosta Aboagye in an interview with Sefa Danquah on the ‘Epa Hoa Daben’ show explained that it may seem that the contact tracing had stopped because of the less number of people who were involved in the process when the COVID-19 cases were minimal.

He clarified: “We never stopped contact tracing. If the infections are low, you will need fewer number of the people to do the contact tracing. Now that the cases have gone up, certainly, we will need many people to help us.

For example, if you have say sixty (60) cases daily, you will need few people to deal with the first, second and third-generation contact tracing. But now that we are recording about 200 to 300 cases per day, you may need about 1500 people to do the contract tracing. You will need more hands. That is the situation. So if the infection comes down the people who do the contact tracing become fewer and if the cases increase that is when you beef up your contract tracing team so that they can meet the required work”.

Dr. Aboagye shared that because of the rigorous contact tracing, we now know the number of active cases we have in the country.

He, however, pointed that the contact tracing exercise has been met with a few challenges. “One of the challenge is the presence of private labs that have come into scene. In the beginning we had an agreement that they will give us live results but when it got to a point they stopped giving us the results so we saw that people went for their own checks and there was a gap. That is why the President said that any lab that does not give us real-time results, will be dealt with. So now we have begun working with them again. We will measure the impact and see where we have gotten to”, he added.

Ghana’s active COVID-19 cases stand at 2,174 with 358 deaths.