The opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has insisted that the partial lockdown of Accra, Kumasi, Tema and Kasoa has backfired.
Speaking on Eyewitness News on Thursday, a member of the NDC’s COVID-19 team, Dr. Grace Ayensu Dankwa said the lockdown should have taken immediate effect instead of the delayed implementation date.
According to her, because the implementation date delayed, it gave people possibly infected with COVID-19 to leave the epicentres.
“It was actually a lockdown of the people in the geographical area. So in other words, it was more like we wanted to quarantine all the people in Accra. So you make an announcement two days, three days that you are going to lockdown Accra on Monday and what happened was more of what we predicted–the human beings that we were sort of concerned about, most of them left the area to other regions in the country…The way this lockdown happened we think it has backfired in the sense that, the lockdown was not a geographical lockdown,” she argued.
Ghana joined South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Mali, among others, in Africa to restrict the movement of citizens in a bid to curb the spread of the virus which has infected over a million people worldwide.
President Nana Akufo-Addo imposed a partial lockdown on Accra, Tema, and Kumasi effective Monday, March 30, 2020, when he addressed the nation on Friday, March 27, 2020.
The National Democratic Congress (NDC) COVID-19 team on Thursday, April 2, 2020, asked the government to as a matter of urgency, conduct a nationwide mass testing to curb the further spread of the novel coronavirus in Ghana.
“The NDC has called for mass testing because we don’t feel that currently, the contact tracing is actually working. We went from vertical cases to the horizontal cases with people who didn’t have any travel history testing positive and when that happened, we (NDC) knew the case numbers will go up. Then, the numbers went up in Accra and Kumasi and before that, we (NDC) had already called for the lockdown,” Dr. Ayensu Dankwa noted.
Ghana’s confirmed COVID-19 cases
When President Akufo-Addo announced the lockdown a week ago, the COVID-19 cases in Ghana were 137. But the figure as of April 2, 2020 had risen to 204.
Accra has the highest numbers with over 180 cases.
Five deaths have so far been recorded with three recoveries.
