Health economist calls for more details on coronavirus cases with no travel history

A health economist, Nana Kofi Quakyi, is calling for more streamlined data on the section of Ghanaians infected with the novel coronavirus who have no travel history.

As community transfer of the virus increases in Ghana, the Ghana Health Service is indicating that 66.6 percent of the infected persons in Ghana have no travel history.

But the data does not indicate if they were infected by persons in the community or persons with a travel history.

“It is actually, in my opinion, the single most important data point for us to have right now,” Mr. Quakyi stressed on the Citi Breakfast Show.

The one other data point is for infected persons with a travel history.

“The important question is outside of these two categories, what is the percentage of the total cases we have where we can identify a connection with a known positive case where there is no known travel history,” Mr. Quakyi noted.

The service has also broken down data for persons quarantined on arrival, and persons identified under enhanced contact tracing.

In Mr. Quaky’s view, a better breakdown “actually gives us the scale of what is coming our way.”

“Contact tracing, when you have local transmissions like that inherently means that it has missed some of the links in the chain.”

Without better data to track community spread, “we are going to make some really unfortunate tactical errors in our approach to dealing with this thing,” he warned.

A total of 566 novel coronavirus cases have so far been recorded in Ghana with eight deaths and four recoveries.

The Greater Accra Region has the most cases with 452; the Ashanti Region, 49; Eastern Region, 32; Northern Region, 10; Volta Region, nine; Upper West Region, seven; Upper East Region, four; North East Region, one; Western Region, one and the Central Region with one.

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