Bawumia’s role in coronavirus fight revealed

The seeming silence and apparent lack of involvement by Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia in the coronavirus fight has not gone unnoticed.

Bar the donations of three months salary to the COVID-19 Trust Fund and GHC500 each to some head potters who were arrested at Ejisu, Bawumia, by his own lofty standards has maintained a low profile for the past few weeks.

As the numbers surge, his perceived silence has become conspicuous, leading to questions about his role in the battle against the virus.

It was therefore unsurprising when the issue was raised at the Information’s Ministry’s latest press briefing on the virus.

A reporter posed the question to Information Minister, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah who took time to highlight a number of roles being played the Vice President.

He revealed that Dr Bawumia and his office are actively involved in most activities going on behind the scenes.

“He chairs daily monitoring meetings that bring in all data. He chairs those meetings. He is also leading efforts to put in place a digital platform that allows those doing the contact tracing to share with us the data of what is happening on the ground and connect it to those who are running samples in the lab so that we can know the number of people tested so far.

“The food distribution exercise going on at the Gender Ministry and being supported by National Security etc, the coordination is being provided by the office of the Vice President. The use of PPEs, there needs to be a tracking mechanism for them because many of them are disposable. So how many have gone out, how many have been used and how are feeding into the system, all those things are being done by the Vice President.

“The Vice President has also been very instrumental in getting the Bank of Ghana to provide about GHC25million to support for the exercise to provide food for the vulnerable and homeless at this point in time”.

At the same presser, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah announced that out of 7,461 samples from contact tracing only 14 tested positive, representing 0.18%.

"Aside from the routine surveillance, we followed up to trace the contacts of all the positives. Contacts of over 19000 persons have been made with samples from a total of over 15,000 contacts collected so far. In Greater Accra, over 8,000 of such contacts have been made.

“After testing 7461 of these contacts as at yesterday, we found 14 positives, representing 0.18%. While this is still early, it suggests that the community spread is relatively limited. More testing will, however, provide a clearer picture in the coming days. In total, routine surveillance and contact tracing have yielded 287 positives of which 49 have been discharged for home treatment, 228 are responding well to treatment, three have fully recovered and five with underlying health conditions have died," he indicated.

Ghana’s case count stands at 287 with five deaths.