A former General Secretary of the Ghana Medical Association, Dr. Koma Jehu Appiah has questioned the basis for Ghana’s reviewed COVID-19 discharge policy.
Dr. Jehu Appiah, who is also a member of the NDC’s COVID-19 team says the government’s decision to adopt in wholesale the WHO’s recently released standardized discharge policy is unscientific.
The new WHO discharge policy announced two weeks ago among other things indicated that COVID-19 patients who are asymptomatic will be discharged without another test, 10 days after the initial positive test.
Ghana has since adopted the policy, but has put the number of days until discharge at 14 days.
But Dr. Jehu Appiah says this approach might not work for the country due to the varying nature of Coronavirus cases.
“The caveat to what the WHO says is that they are still learning from countries so if they are still learning from countries why do we take it like that and just say that because WHO says that it is on the tablet of Moses we can apply it. That is not being very academic. That is not being very scientific. We should have a way of learning from our own situation and adapt situations that will best suit us,” he said.
Ghana’s adoption of the WHO policy saw it discharge over 10,000 COVID-19 patients from various isolation centres across the country.
The development sparked mass criticism against the government with many stressing that the government may be putting citizens at risk since those discharge may transfer the virus to healthy people within the population but the government stressed that based on information from the WHO and its analysis, such persons do not pose any risk to the rest of the population.
