Nana Kofi Quakyi, a research fellow at the New York University College of Global Public Health, has suggested to the government to adopt the use of key variables in determining the nation’s infection rate rather than percentages.
He explained that it was rather important for authorities to project the number of people who had tested for the disease instead of the number of tests done and stressed that “it’s important for us to use the number of people who have been tested instead of the number of tests that have been done which is a key variable we need to estimate our infection rate”.
This follows an announcement by President Nana Akufo-Addo suggesting that the country has since recorded “a low infection rate of 1.5 per cent in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic”, hence lifting the three-week lockdown.
According Nana Quakyi, looking at the number of people who had been tested meant you are looking at the coverage of your tests and replacing that with the number of tests done, which is something different, and misleading, adding that “mistaking the samples tested for people being tested is a very shrewd and inappropriate coverage of the outlook.
There’s the need to also highlight the need for Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research and the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research in Tropical Medicine to constantly update the public about their testing capacity to prove the country’s ability to place responsive measures in real time to ongoing infections of the virus.
“There has been an argument about whether the country’s medical laboratories will be able to conduct research on samples for as many as 85,000 as announced by the president on April 19, 2020,” Nana Quakyi intimated. -ghanaweb.com
