A Senior Research Fellow at Ghana’s foremost coronavirus testing centre, Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, Dr Kofi Bonney, has said the facility records a positive case of Covid-19 every day.
Speaking on Joy News’ Upfront on Wednesday, Dr Bonney explained that the daily positive cases do not reflect on the Ghana Health Service’s Covid-19 because the service perhaps has its own considerations on when to update the site with Ghana’s caseload.
“Every day there are positive cases, every day. I mean since we started having positives, there have been positive cases every day.
“In fact there was a time for two days some people [public] were saying there had not been any positive cases; it’s that for the two days there has not been any update of the [Ghana Health Service] site, but we here know that we have results for each day and each day there are positives,” he said.
“There as some days that you get so many positives that you wonder,” he stressed.
According to him, Noguchi also submits results of tests each day to the Ghana Health Service, however, it seems the GHS decides to wait a while based on criteria he’s not privy to.
“We give them reports every day so, for example, we tended it in today but from Sunday we have been testing and results are being given them all the time.
“So they could have put the results that we had on Friday there, on Saturday there, on Sunday there, on Monday there before Tuesday. But maybe they decided to wait. Because everyday samples goes out there.
“Today, sample results have gone out, but maybe they decide to get some number or maybe a way, I don’t know the criteria they use in reporting but every day we send results to Ghana Health Service,” he told host of the programme, Winston Amoah.
He gave the explanation to address concerns that the facility may be to blame for long delays that characterise updates on Ghana’s coronavirus caseloads on the dedicated website.
“Look the lab is testing, we have the capacity to test, but we have gone beyond and we are stretching ourselves to do it so certainly there will be a backlog. We can say that, partly, we are the reason [for delays in release the caseload numbers],” he explained why there is a backlog of suspected cases to be tested.
Public concerns have been that there is always a significant jump in the numbers when there have been updates on the number of positive cases.
Ghana’s current Covid-19 situation is 1,279 confirmed cases with 134 recovered and 9 deaths.