Coronavirus : Ghana confirms five more new cases

The West African country, Ghana on Friday, confirmed five new cases of the coronavirus (COVID-19), increasing the number of confirmed cases to 16.

The Ghana Health Service (GHS) announced this on its website, created exclusively to update the nation’s citizen on the recent development of the outbreak.

All five new infections were reported from the Greater Accra Region and include a 29-year old Ghanaian lady and a resident of Accra, with no history of travel, but whose sample tested positive.

Another Ghanaian woman, aged 34 years, also, residing in Accra, had a contact with a person suffering from the virus (COVID-19) at her place of work and her sample was confirmed positive in a laboratory test.

The third case is a 53-year old man and he resides in Tema. He has no history of travel or evidence of close contact with any confirmed case, but tested positive for disease.

The other person, a Ghanaian, aged 41 years, arrived in the country on a KLM flight, on March 15, indicated exposure with family members in Amsterdam exhibiting respiratory symptoms and also on the flight with some passengers sneezing and coughing.

The fifth case, involved a 36-year old Ghanaian male resident in Paris, France whose date of arrival in the country could not be confirmed. He also had no evidence of contact with an infected person.

The GHS said contact tracing had been initiated in all the confirmed cases.

With over 242,000 infections and nearly 10,000 deaths, the epidemic has stunned the world and drawn parallels with painful periods such as World War Two, the 2008 financial crisis and the 1918 Spanish flu.

U.N. chief, Antonio Guterres, has warned that a global recession, “perhaps of record dimensions”, was a near certainty.

“This is a moment that demands coordinated, decisive, and innovative policy action from the world’s leading economies,” Guterres told reporters via a video conference.

“We are in an unprecedented situation and the normal rules no longer apply.”