Former Director-General of the Ghana Health Service, Professor Agyemang Badu Akosa has expressed disappointment in the decision of President Akufo-Addo to lift the lockdown when the country is still within some considerable risk of the COVID-19 pandemic surging.
To him, the President should have held on to his statement in his first address which attracted international applauds and gave hope to many in the country.
President Akufo-Addo had said, “We know how to bring back the economy but what we do not know is to bring back human lives.”
This statement was greeted with a burst of applauds from Ghanaians and world leaders alike.
However, the President’s decision to lift the restrictions on movement in parts of the country has yet to attract such applauds.
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Speaking on Citi TV, Monday, Prof Akosa disclosed that all the groups he is associated with advised the President not to lift the ban but rather extend it for another two weeks. He’s therefor surprised as to why the President chose to act contrary to the advice given.
“It’s the President’s call to lockdown and it’s the President’s call to unlock. All of us can only advise and therefore I know that the groups that I’m associated with advised that the lockdown should remain and probably advised that the lockdown should be extended. That was an advice to the President but just as I said it was he who initiated the lockdown and he is the only person who can uplift the lockdown so I expected an extension of the lockdown probably for two weeks to the end of April and I expected that at least all regional capitals should have been locked down as well
“In the President’s maiden statement he said the economy can be back but human lives cannot be brought and for me, that has been my guiding statement, it was an operative statement that we all felt he should still have made that his guiding principle but unfortunately he’s lifted the ban and we have got to make do with it. My reasons can only be public health but I believe in this instance the economy overruled the public health concerns,” he said.
The former Ghana Health Service Director argued that a critical study of the distribution of the virus will show that the virus is moving from the central (Accra) to the periphery (other regional capitals) and therefore the capitals should have been added to the lockdown areas while bemoaning the delay in testing of samples.
“If you look at the science of this whole distribution of COVID-19, you will immediately appreciate that it has moved from the central, Accra to the periphery and in all cases apart from the cases in Ho where people came through our porous borders and Aflao became a flashpoint most of them went from Accra to a regional capital. The whole issue is that there was a progression and the progression had moved from Accra to Kumasi to Cape Coast, I think the other exception was Odumase Krobo one but if you saw almost all the cases, it was a progression from the centre and we felt that even at the state where we were, there were still a lot of outstanding backlog in testing.
“Till today, test results are coming 5, 7 days, and in some cases, even 10 days, which we all felt was not good enough and therefore for us, we felt that we needed to get to a situation where more testing centres would have come online. At the moment they’ve only extended it to three, the rest is yet to come, when are they coming on, we don’t know and we’ve been waiting for the last 3 weeks to a month so we needed all those things to come on line and further public education because already the lockdown in so many areas was not being observed right and we needed to make sure we do not get ourselves into a situation where there will be a rebound and then we would be rushing to take measures so for a lot of us, for these reasons, we felt that a lockdown was important,” he added.
Source: abcnewsgh
