Over 600 Ghanaians May Already Be Carrying Corona Virus …Ministry to start contact tracing

Health Minister, Kwaku Agyemang Manu, has asked that Ghanaians brace themselves for more corona virus infection cases in the country in the coming weeks.

At a press conference this morning, the Minister said that the Ministry believes that at least 600 people in the country may start showing symptoms in the weeks ahead because they have come in contact with carriers of the virus.

These carriers are the new cases that have been confirmed as Ghana’s tally of infected people swings up to 16 today, from 11 just yesterday.

“So in the next few days and weeks we  are anticipating that we are going to have larger numbers of people  who already have the disease. Over the last three days, almost everyday we get a case, so going forward,  we may begin to grow positives exponentially and  that is becoming a very dangerous situation for all of us,” Mr. Agyemang Manu said.

According to him, infected persons under quarantine have altogether listed at least 600 people that they came in contact with before they were quarantined.

He said the Ministry doubts that the 600 are the only people that the infected persons have come in contact with but that the Ministry has since started contact tracing to bring all of these contacts under observation.

“We have a number of over 600 people from interview with them, those who have tested positive, we keep on asking them who they have had contact with and I believe they might not even be able to give us the entire spectrum of people they may have met before  we detected them to be positive.

“But for now, we seem to have got close to about 600 people. Now we are trying to trace to check on them to see whether they have already contracted the disease and I know the number will be more.”

Meanwhile, the Minister reports that all the infected corona virus patients under quarantine in Ghana are responding to treatment.

“As at yesterday, they were all very stable. Some of them I will say are even recovering. There are two of them we are treating at home, we don’t see any signs with them again but we need to do some other tests before we discharge them fully. But so far we don’t have anybody who is critically ill or severely ill. Illness is mild but you see some of them its like they are becoming very normal people,” Mr. Agyemang Manu said.