The 39 health workers of the Ho Teaching Hospital (HTH) who have been prevailed upon to self-quarantined was for security and precautionary reasons, Mr Amos Dzah, Public Affairs Officer of the Hospital has said.

He said samples of 38 staff excluding the positive case by a patient was being tested at the Ho COVID-19 Testing facility saying, ‘not all health workers in the pool had direct contact with the patient’.

Mr Dzah told the Ghana News Agency that a joint team from the Ho Municipal Hospital and the HTH have begun contact tracing for possible testing towards containing the spread of COVID-19.

He said the woman in question was brought in unconscious and foaming, but staff on duty resuscitated her after which they noticed she had difficulty in breathing.

The Public Affairs Officer said the patient was then subjected to the protocols and had her swaps taken and analysed, which turned out to be positive.

He said the precarious nature of this particular case made it impossible to isolate the patient from the onset in an answer to a question of avoiding the bureaucracy or laborious processes in these times.

Meanwhile, Dr Archibald Letsa, Volta Regional Minister has received a cutting edge testing and research (PCR real-time) equipment with its accessories for the Ho COVID-19 Testing Centre through the Ministry of Health, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Ghana’s Atomic Energy Commission (GAEC).

The equipment has the capacity to test up to 2,300 samples within 24 hours with the Centre which hitherto could test between 100 and 300 samples within the same time frame.

The Region as of Thursday has recorded 34 confirmed cases, 28 recoveries with no deaths whilst five patients are responding to treatment from the facility designated for that purpose.