The Ghana Health Service (GHS) has insisted that the country’s recovery rates are real and incontestable.

The GHS reaction comes after a special aide to ex-President John Mahama, Joyce Mogtari Bawa faced a barrage of insults for questioning Ghana’s recovery rates.

She wondered how at least 786 persons were able to recover overnight after the Ghana Health Service updated the number of recovered cases to show that the said number had recovered of the virus in 24 hours.

“How the hell did 790 more recover overnight! We need to subject this to strict proof” she tweeted in response to the announcement, attracting chorus of condemnation especially from supporters of the governing New Patriotic Party(NPP).

But in an interview on Anopa Kasapa on Kasapa 102.5 FM, Director of Health Promotion at the GHS, Dr Da Costa Aboagye said the figures released so far in terms of the recoveries are not cooked by health officials.

“I’m a researcher, and also believe in peer-review. In Ghana the method that we use in declaring people free from the virus is that the person must have two negatives after a positive test following 14-days of the person having the virus. When we undertake the first test, and it proves negative, after 48hrs we conduct another test. If you’ll recall, we told Ghanaians that we have a backlog and thankfully we have cleared the backlog and expanded our lab centres and our testing capacity is now 5000 per day. And these are the areas we’ve scaled up our operations and now turning attention to the case management. But I can assure you that the numbers are real, ” he explained.



Covid-19 Stigma

Meanwhile, Dr. Da Costa Aboagye wants all hands on deck to ending COVID-19 stigma hampering the progress in the national fight.

Chairman of the National Risk Communication and Social Mobilisation for COVID-19, Dr Da Costa Aboagye told Kasapa 102.5 FM that collaborative education with stakeholders is the game-changer.

“We at the GHS, are committed with other stakeholders to ending stigma,” he assured, saying his outfit has trained some 450 Journalists across the country to support the public education campaign.