There were restrictions on the movement of people, with the police and military mounting road blocks to carry out checks. It took a long while for people to understand the disease and for the stigmatisation to dwindle.Ī partial lockdown was placed on the two biggest cities, Accra and Kumasi, which were the epicentres for the pandemic, from the end of March 2020 for three weeks. Recovered persons faced stigma in their communities. Stigma, for those who were infected was rife in Ghana during the initial periods. Isolation centres were created in almost every district to handle COVID-19 cases. Even though testing was initially centralised in the two aforementioned institutions, hospitalisation took place at health facilities within the district where the positive cases had been found. Some private health facilities also started to undertake tests for the coronavirus. This was very significant as it helped to facilitate quick case detection and initiation of treatment for all positive cases.īeginning in May 2020, the government of Ghana empowered other health facilities to establish testing centres. To complement efforts, Zipline, a company with a mission to “provide every human on Earth with instant access to vital medical supplies” collected samples from over 1,000 health facilities located in difficult to reach rural areas of Ghana and sent them to the testing centres using drones. These centres undertook PCR testing of about 1,000 samples per day, due to pooling of samples, many of which were negative. Samples from the northern part of the country were taken to the KCCR whilst those from the southern part were taken to NMIMR. Two institutions, namely the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research into Tropical Medicine (KCCR) in Kumasi and the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research (NMIMR) in Accra, served as initial testing centres for all suspected cases. Intermediary initiatives saw persons entering the country between the time of the announcement and the shutting of the borders being quarantined in 4 and 5 star hotels at the expense of the Ghanaian government. Measures included shutting all land borders to the country together with the closure of the main international airport in Accra. These imported cases initiated the first contact tracing process in Ghana, helping detect several dozens of cases in a short period of time.įollowing the discovery that the pandemic had already started to spread in Ghana, the government instituted measures to stop local spread of the infection and any further import of the virus into the country. The two cases were identified as people who had returned to the country from Norway and Turkey. The Health Minister announced the nation's first two confirmed cases in Accra. In Ghana, the first official cases of COVID-19 were reported on 12 March 2020. It is having a serious impact on people’s health, livelihoods, economies, and behaviours. However, it has already passed the one-year mark and spread to almost every country in the world. The general perception at the time was that the pandemic that started as a flu outbreak in Wuhan province, would only hit China and probably some Asian countries, and disappear just like SARS did in 2003. Worldwide, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has disrupted public health, economic and social systems in ways unprecedented since the Spanish flu of 1918.
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