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Slyvester Adinam Mensah, a former Presidential hopeful, of the main opposition, National Democratic Congress (NDC) has call on government to show more commitment, and proactive as its seeks to stem the unabated spread of the deadly coronavirus, in Ghana.

The former Chief Executive Officer of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) revealed on his facebook wall that, the speed at which the virus is permeating via community infection is alarming and nerve – wrecking, as he challenges President Nana Addo Dankwah Akufo – Addo, to do more.

He posited that, the knee-jerk and snail pace combativeness by government has yielded retrogressive outcomes, and charges officials to redefine its surveillance systems in tracking the pandemic to ensure Ghana wins the fight against the novel virus.

As at Publication and Production, of this article, the country has recorded 566 confirmed cases with 8 deaths.

Read details of the write up below..

__Sylvester A Mensah writes:

Coronavirus kills by stealth and speed. Our usual slow-paced political decision making processes are no match for this silent speedy killer. Our ponderous processes, compromises, horse-trading, should-we-or-shouldn’t-we approach to decisions, allows the coronavirus to spread quickly while we are struggling to put counter measures in place.

COVID19 stole a march on a world that was slow to understand and slow to act. The virus quickly spread beyond the original epicentre in Wuhan in China and became a pandemic before anyone could say Jack. China had to take prompt, unprecedented, drastic measures before gaining control over a hitherto runaway outbreak. Italy, Spain, Iran the US are all paying a heavy price in high death tolls from the COVID 19 outbreak. On Wednesday 8th April, 2020 the US alone recorded more than 1,800 deaths in a single day.

Despite the frightening escalation in death tolls in the advanced countries, here in Ghana our approach is typically and dangerously old school. “Let’s do a partial lockdown; let’s wait and see, contact tracing is adequate …” while the aggressive virus is silently spreading in our densely populated communities. Once a country begins to play catch up, a heavy price in medical costs, deaths and economic downturn awaits. In Italy and Spain, their more advanced healthcare systems were quickly overrun by the aggressive virus and they have not yet regained control.

In hindsight Ghana would have been better off if we had taken steps much earlier to close our borders, stop flights into the country, and put our quarantine protocols in place.

Our half-hearted, piecemeal approach to containment of the virus is a recipe for disaster, considering the exponential spread of this aggressive and highly contagious coronavirus. Whatever measures we would be putting in place in the worst case scenario, let’s implement them now and we would be glad we did.

Government can do __better!

StopTheSpread #StayHome

By: Nana Dogbe / Ahotor News