The Greater Accra Regional Chair of the Ghana Medical Association (GMA), Dr Ernest Yorke, has acknowledged that his outfit is undoubtedly under-testing Covid-19 cases, especially with the new Delta variant that has entered the country.
He said there is a surge in the Covid-19 cases in recent times because the Association is inadequate in actively testing for new cases of the virus in the country and the relaxing of the safety protocols by the general public.
Dr Yorke, therefore, urged government to seriously revamp the testing regime in the country to embark on thorough testing within the communities in order to be abreast of the real Covid-19 situation in the country.
He, however, refuted claims that his outfit is under-reporting the true Covid-19 cases in the country and that the true numbers are doctored for political reasons and purposes by the government.
Dr Yorke made this declaration in an interview with Emmanuel Samani on Midday Live on TV3 on Monday, July 12.
He was reacting to the question that government is under-reporting and under-testing the cases in the country, especially with the prevalent nature of the new Delta variant, which has been detected in Achimota School, necessitating a campus lockdown to curtail the spread into the wider society.
He said: “I will approach the question in another way, yes we are under-testing and that is a fact. That will also mean that the infection is more prevalent as we will have or it’s been portrayed but to say that we are under-reporting, which suggests a deliberate scheme or attempt to hide information, as we speak I have no proof of that, so I won’t go that far.”
“But we know that we are under-testing and the prevalence has been recorded because of the under-testing regime and these are falsely low numbers. And if you don’t know the true numbers, how then do you adequately plan for that?
“And that is why some of us have called for the revamping of the testing regime to identify anybody, everybody who has died with Covid-19 or has Covid-19 so that we can isolate them and institute the appropriate mechanisms and treatment regime to forestall the spread of the Covid-19,” Dr Yorke pointed out.
According to the Ghana Health Service, the current Covid-19 data in the country stands at 97,585 and the recovered cases are 94,537.
And the active cases stand at 2, 247, as of Thursday, July 8, 2021.
By Barima Kwabena Yeboah|editors.3news.com|Ghana
