This, he said, is due to the fact that the measures instituted to help reduce person-to-person contact, and help defeat the pandemic are working.
In his ninth Coronavirus address to Ghanaians, President Akufo-Addo noted that as of Sunday, 10th May, “the country [had] conducted a total of 160,501 tests, with the total number of infections standing at 4,700 with 494 recoveries, five persons being critically ill, and 4,179 persons responding to treatment.”
“Twenty-two persons, virtually all of them with underlying illnesses such as hypertension, diabetes and chronic liver disease, have unhappily died,” the President added.
Akufo-Addo explained that the more people we test for the virus, the more persons we will discover as positive, and, thus have the opportunity to isolate and treat them.
He added: “If you do not test people for the virus, you will not find the persons who are positive, let alone isolate them from the population and treat them, and prevent them from spreading the virus".
The president further observed: “Indeed, had we not been proactive in undertaking enhanced contact tracing of infected persons, and had relied solely on testing persons who reported to hospital, which is the practice followed by some other countries, i.e. routine testing, our total case count would have stood at 1,413.”
He continued: “the other 3,232, i.e. two-thirds of the population of positives, would have been undetected, and still be within the population, unknowingly infecting others.
“I know some political actors will want you to believe that our current numbers represent a failure on the part of Government. Do not begrudge them. They need to make such comments for their political survival. On the contrary, we must be emboldened in the knowledge that the 4,700 persons infected, so far, with the virus, have been identified, taken out of the population, isolated and are being treated.”
