We applied commonsense - Korle Bu CEO defends doctors who ‘ran’ from suspected coronavirus patients

Chief Executive Officer of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Dr Daniel Asare has justified the actions of the medical personnel who allegedly fled the scene when they heard that two patients suspected to have contracted the deadly coronavirus disease had been brought to the hospital on Wednesday, February 5, 2020.

According to him, the decision by some staff to rather not attend to the patients was just a matter of commonsense application as it’s safer to flee when one has no safety precautions than to contract the deadly disease.

After news broke that some suspected cases of the virus had been recorded at the Korle Bu hospital, head of the Public Health Department at the hospital Dr Philip Amoo was quoted to have said in a media interaction that, “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 into the environment, the case needed to be moved away quickly from routine sites,” he said.

But Dr Daniel Asare while defending the medical professionals in question said, “It is wise, commonsense.”

In an attempt to explain his stance on the issue he noted with concern that the coronavirus has recorded high mortality rate since it broke out and because the hospital has no insurance cover for death, it was only appropriate for medical staff without the appropriate precautions to ‘flee’.

“Even if you’re a press person and they say there are suspected cases, don’t go, go back and have a protective device. It is wise, commonsense. We have trained our people to use precautions and not to hide under insurance because there is no insurance cover for death,” he said.

“This is a highly violent species…that when you see that this is a suspected case you run there, no, you run back…commonsense” he repeated. “Apply commonsense in all this, so if you say a nurse was running away he was just applying commonsense, so do same,” Dr Asare retorted.

He further asked Ghanaians to follow the precedent set by the medical staff and advise themselves whenever they hear about suspected cases of the novel coronavirus.

While this has been a major cause of concern for many Ghanaians, Dr Asare has allayed such fears emphasizing that the country is somewhat far from recording any real case of the virus.

He cited Ghana’s tropical climate as a reason. This means Ghana still remains one of the safest African countries with regard to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

Dr Daniel Asare was speaking in an interaction with the media, Thursday, February 6, 2020.