Coronavirus: Evaluate infection rate by variables not percentages – Public Health Expert

A research fellow at the New York University College of Global Public Health, Nana Kofi Quakyi has advised government to adopt the use of key variables in determining Ghana’s infection rate rather than percentages.

This follows an announcement by President Akufo-Addo suggesting that the country has since recorded ‘a low infection rate of 1.5%’ in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, hence lifting the 3-week lockdown.

According to Mr Quakyi, it is rather important for authorities to project the number of people who have tested for the disease instead of the number of tests done.

“It's important for us to use the number of people who have been tested instead of the number of tests that have been done. It's a key variable we need to estimate our infection rate. Looking at the number of people who have been tested means you are looking at the coverage of your tests. Replacing that with the number of tests done, which is something different, is misleading,”

“Mistaking the samples tested for people being tested is a very shrewd and inappropriate coverage of the outlook,” he told Citi FM’s Breakfast Show.

He also highlighted the need for Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research and the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research in Tropical Medicine to constantly update the public about their testing capacity.

This he believes, will prove the country’s ability to place responsive measures in real time to ongoing infections of the virus.

Meanwhile, there has been an argument about whether Ghana’s medical laboratories will be able to conduct research on samples for as many as 85,000 as announced by President Nana Akufo-Addo last Sunday, April 19, 2020.