The Minister of Health, Kwaku Agyemang-Manu, has said the Akufo-Addo-led government has built 41 new COVID-19 testing laboratories in addition to the existing two before the outbreak of the pandemic.
He said the government has established the Laboratory Network Coordinating Committee(LNCC) to assist in developing relevant guidelines and standards to monitor the activities of the laboratories in the country.This he said is meant to follow keenly to monitor the standards of the laboratories for both public and private laboratories in the country.
The Health Minister said this in a press briefing by the Ministry of Information on Wednesday, June 16.
“We have established the Laboratory Network Coordinating Committee which assists in developing guidelines and standards and monitors the activities of the laboratories. This is ongoing and I know it will continue in good time to make sure we have standards that we are monitoring within the laboratory setup for both public and private laboratories” he said.
“At the beginning of the response, we had only two laboratory testing but as I speak we have expanded and we can now boast of 43 laboratory testing centers in our country. And the type of these laboratories, we have 32 that can do PCR testing, 8 antigen testing, then combined PCR and antigen we have 3 centers.
“And then genexpert machines that we use to detect tuberculosis pathogens, we now have 35 that can also do some aspects of PCR testing. Antigen tests that have been conducted in Kotoka, so far we have 311,000 and we have detected 1821 people who were actually bringing the disease into the country that we confronted at the border”, he added.
By Barima Kwabena Yeboah|3news.com|Ghana