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The Director of Health Promotion at the Ghana Health Service has stated that it will take collective responsibility every Ghanaian to win the battle against the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to him, the nation has gotten to a point where a bold decision has to be taken in order not to go back to the lockdown era again; thus, the safety measures in place must be individual and collective responsibility.

Speaking on Okay FM’s Ade Akye Abia Morning Show that the instruction of President Akufo-Addo to the police to enforce the wearing of the facemask is not negotiable as it is part of the Executive Instrument (EI) to deal with anyone who flouts the law.

"We have gotten to a point where as a nation, we make sure that we take a very bold decision that we will not sit down and go back to the lockdown era again and so the measures which are individual and collective responsibility where people must wear their facemask, we will not joke with it.

“We all have to know that we have a responsibility on our hands and the facemask that the President has instructed that we wear them is not negotiable; it is part of our law and so every Ghanaian should make sure that they wear their facemask so that the police does not deal with them. If we see that people are not wearing the facemask, the police will deal with you. The government will carry out any punishment deserving anyone who flouts the safety protocols as prescribed in the EI64.

“We put certain measures in place for Ghanaians to comply with. The government put up many interventions in place and these interventions worked for the country to a point where we almost eradicated it from the country.

“But in recent time that we were going into the Christmas festivity, we were giving warnings that we should be careful about some activities we would be engaging in and therefore comply with the safety protocols we have put in place but it looks like Ghanaians lost their guard a bit as many people did not comply with the safety protocols”, he bemoaned.

Dr Dacosta Aboagye entreated Ghanaians to comply with the safety protocols as a country like New Zealand is among countries that have recorded zero active cases due to adherence to the safety protocols without any vaccine.

He encouraged Ghanaians to wear their facemasks, wash their hands regularly and eat food that can boost their immune system as New Zealand has adopted, giving them the result of zero active cases.

“We will plead that we should as a nation complies with the safety measures because there is a country like New Zealand, they have zero active cases and yet they don’t have any vaccine. All that they are doing is what we used to do in this country; they wear facemask, wash their hands and eat well balanced diet to boost their immune system. These are what the countries with zero active cases have been doing and so we should go back to strictly comply with the measures we have put in place and make the infection rate go down.

“We have evidence that when we were strictly complying with the safety protocols, the infection rate of the Covid-19 reduced to the point where we almost got rid of the virus. We moved to 200 active cases and so if we continue to do that, we can win the battle against the pandemic”, he argued.

He assured that better and effective measures have been put in place at the Ghana International Airport as the testing kits at the airport have been able to detect the new variant from other countries.

“The new variants which have been detected in other countries, the kind of testing system we have at the Airport were able to pick the new variants and stopped it from coming into contact with people. We have been able to quarantine them and giving some of them treatments at our various treatments and isolation centres”, he assured.

“We are now scaling up our interventions like the contact tracing which we were doing, quarantine and others. We will be looking at tracking those who have succeeded into coming into contact with people with the new variant”, he outlined.


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