Give credit to the President in the COVID-19 battle – Health Minister

The Minister of Health, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, has asked Ghanaians to give praise and credit to President Nana Akufo-Addo for the hard work put in place in the fight against COVID-19.

He noted that due to his direct involvement in the COVID battle, Ghana, together with South Korea, has been recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the only two countries that managed the virus well globally.

The Health Minister said this yesterday in Accra at a press briefing organised by the Information Ministry.

He announced that from March 2020 to February 2022, Ghana had recorded 2,272,998 cases. As at February 5, 2020, the country had recorded 157,917 cases. He said the numbers included five severe cases, two in critical conditions, 527 active cases, and 1,426 deaths, adding that “this is not want we expected or wanted but if we compare it to daily lives of 2,000; 4,000 and 100,000 elsewhere, ours has been a success story.”

“When we started, there was pressure on government for hospital beds, emergency response. Were we prepared? Did we have commodities to buy the vaccine? We managed to sail through all these as I speak today, there was only one person on the ventilator across the entire country,” he said.

“At times, we were casting insinuations at him because it looked like he was stretching us too much. This our President wouldn’t sleep; he was always present in every single meeting with us right from March 2020 up to date.

“The COVID taskforce meeting, our president never missed; those of us in health were doing our things somewhere else, but the National COVID Taskforce that was chaired by the President, he made sure that he was always with us,” the Minister added.

More time

He urged Ghanaians to give the Akufo-Addo government more time to adopt steps to address the country’s problems, noting that the pandemic had wreaked havoc on the economies of most countries, including Ghana.

As a result, the government is working hard to revitalise the economy in order to alleviate the citizens’ hardships.

Responding to the demands of the #FixTheCountry Movement, he noted that the government had done well in managing the economy through the difficulties posed by Covid-19.

“We couldn’t get import from China because of lockdowns and factory closures. And even when we were easing to allow people to trade, how to get ships to transport their wares to Accra, Ghana, became another issue, so freight charges started increasing. And we know that when freight charges go up, there is imported inflation and definitely we will feel something in our country that will accumulate to some little charges,” he said.