Claims 3 million Ghanaians might contract COVID-19 false – Dr. Nsiah Asare

Special Advisor to the President on Health, Dr. Anthony Nsiah Asare has refuted claims that about three million Ghanaians will contract the novel coronavirus.

According to him, such claims attributed to him is false.

“I want to just make it very short that it’s not true that Ghana will have three million people infected before we’ll reach the peak. It’s not true. We’ll never see that. Because as we speak now, the number of deaths in the country is nine. If you calculate it according to the percentage of the number of people who are infected, it’s 0.7%. So it’s nowhere near 5%. If you look at the number of tests we have done so far, we have 1,154 positives which is about 1.5% positivity of people that have been tested. And even if you look at the negative range, it’s about 98.5%. So we will never get near the WHO hypothesis,” he insisted.

Dr. Nsiah Asare, former Director-General of the Ghana Health Service, has been quoted as saying a model generated for coronavirus infections in Ghana projects that 10% of the population is likely to test positive.

Speaking to Accra based Joy News, Dr. Asare reportedly said out of the 10% projected infections, majority of the cases are likely to be asymptomatic.

“We expect that about 10% of the population may be infected and out of the 10% of the population 80% may not show signs or symptoms at all and 5% of them will be very ill, that is the projection,” he said.

But speaking at the Special COVID-19 press briefing in Accra today, Dr. Asare said his assertion was taken out of context.

“I gave a hypothesis that WHO put out which is based on the population of the country. And I said that if Ghana stays without doing anything at all, that is what will happen to us as a country; 10% of the population being infected and 20% getting sick and about 5% getting very seriously ill. But I said that, that is not the case in Africa. Based on the facts and data that we have, we have realized that our actual figures are far below what WHO has quoted. And it’s because we’ve put a lot of things in place to prevent the spread,” he noted.

 

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