Danger! Akufo Addo’s Lockdown Sparks Italian-Style Covid-19 spread

Tamale in the Northern Region today recorded 10 Covid-19 cases as the recent lockdown protocol announced by President Akufo Addo eerily re-echoes the disastrous approach adopted by Italy resulting in Covid-19 cases exploding from zero on February 22, 2020, to almost 93,000 and 10,000 deaths now.

Before President Akufo Addo make his Friday night (March 27, 2020) broadcast announcing the lockdown of a few selected areas including Accra, Tema, Kumasi and Obuasi, there had been no single case in the Northern Region despite almost three weeks of the rampant spread in the Southern belt.

In his Covid-19 broadcast on Friday night, President Akufo Addo barely gave residents enough time to stock up when he announced that the lockdown will take effect from Monday, March 30, 2020.  

Since Saturday morning, this announcement has triggered an unprecedented massing up of people in markets and supermarkets in frenzied panic-shopping. 

The announcement has sparked a hysterical movement of people from the affected lockdown areas into other parts of the country in what is similar to the knee-jerk strategy that has been blamed on the hopeless situation in Italy currently.

Just like what Ghana is doing, in late February 2020 when few pockets of people were confirmed positive to Covid-19, the Italian government issued a series of decrees that gradually increased restrictions within lockdown areas (“red zones”), which were then expanded until they ultimately applied to the entire country.

The approach backfired badly as it was inconsistent with the rapid exponential spread of the virus as the Italian government’s strategy only followed the spread of the virus rather than prevented it.

Second, the selective approach might have inadvertently facilitated the spread of the virus because when the decree announcing the closing of northern Italy became public, it touched off a massive exodus to southern Italy in a wave of public movement that only helped spread the disease.

Also, at the onset of the outbreak in Italy, some section of the public and even policymakers took the threat lightly with people disregarding the social distancing regime prescribed by the World Health Organisation (WHO).  In Ghana, just few hours to President Akufo Addo’s, the Attorney General has desperately fought and won a case in the Accra High Court that allowed the  National Identification Authority (NIA) to defy social distancing directives and organise mass registration exercise for Ghanaians in the Eastern Region.

The NIA eventually developed cold feet and called off the exercise despite the express endorsement by the High Court, however, the case had already succeeded in sending signals to the public that certain categories of people could ignore social distancing.

Ghana’s trajectory of recorded Covid-19 is disturbingly getting out of hand as it increases exponentially. The first two official cases were recorded on March 11, 2020. In less than one week, by March 17, Ghana’s recorded cases had increased to seven (7).

By March 23, 2020, Ghana’s cases had more than tripled to 27 cases and by the following day, this number dramatically doubled to 52 cases.

As at today, March 29, 2020, Ghana’s cases have increased from just two to a whopping 152 in just three weeks, as experts fear that there are probably some 800 more roaming about untested, having been in contact with the infected patients.

As of Saturday, March 28, the Ghana Health Service said a total of 2,519 persons have been tested for COVID-19, with 5.6% of them testing positive.

Meanwhile, the government has designated security personnel to enforce the lockdown directive in the selected areas, amidst fears that the police and military officers may exert excessive force on trespassers.  Whatsup News has intercepted a worrying video that appears to show a group of soldiers singing “Fire for fire” and “I wanna kill somebody”.