President Nana Akufo-Addo
The partial lockdown in some major cities of Ghana due to coronavirus has been lifted.
President Nana Akufo-Addo announced this on Sunday night, April 19, after three weeks of lockdown.
The lifting of the ban is to take effect from 1am on Monday, April 20,2020.
However, earlier restrictions on school closures, public gatherings, social distancing remains firmly in place.
I have taken the decision to lift the three (3) week old restriction on movements in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area and Kasoa, and the Greater Kumasi Metropolitan Area and its contiguous districts, with effect from 1am on Monday, 20th April. In effect, tomorrow will see the partial lockdown in Accra and Kumasi being lifted.
“I must make it clear, at the outset, that lifting these restrictions does not mean we are letting our guard down.”
All other measures are still firmly in place. For the avoidance of doubt, the earlier measures announced on Wednesday, 15th March, which have been extended, are still very much in force, and have not been relaxed. I am demanding even greater adherence to these measures, he noted.
” Here, I am referring to the suspension of all public gatherings, including conferences, workshops, funerals, parties, nightclubs, drinking spots, beaches, festivals, political rallies, religious activities and sporting events.”
“All educational facilities, private and public, are to remain closed,” he says.
He says Ghana has recorded a total of 1045 confirmed cases of coronavirus.
This is coming from the 68,591 aggressive testing carried out.
“There is, thus, a backlog of some eighteen thousand (18,000) tests whose results are yet to be received,” he says.
The overwhelming majority of these contacts have been established in the last three weeks of the partial lockdown in Accra and Kumasi, he added.
“The main reason our country has seen an increase in the number of confirmed cases over the last three (3) weeks is because of the decision we took aggressively to trace and test contacts of infected persons.”
Recounting the reason for imposing the lockdown, he stated that “The decision to impose restrictions on movement was backed by the data at hand, and our next course of action, again, is backed by data and by science.”
He added “Indeed, all that Government is doing is intended to achieve five (5) key objectives – limit and stop the importation of the virus; contain its spread; provide adequate care for the sick; limit the impact of the virus on social and economic life; and inspire the expansion of our domestic capability and deepen our self-reliance.”
He appealed for the use of face masks in the coming days.