The National Democratic Congress(NDC) has stated that the partial lockdown that was imposed in some parts of the country to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus has failed.
Speaking on Eyewitness News on Thursday, a member of the NDC’s COVID-19 team, Dr. Grace Ayensu Dankwa said the lockdown should have taken immediate effect instead of the delayed implementation date.
According to Grace Ayensu, because the partial lockdown delayed, it gave people who have infected with the deadly coronavirus the chance to leave epicenters.
“It was actually a lockdown of the people in the geographical area. So, in other words, it was more like we wanted to quarantine all the people in Accra. So you make an announcement two days, three days that you are going to lockdown Accra on Monday and what happened was more of what we predicted–the human beings that we were sort of concerned about, most of them left the area to other regions in the country…The way this lockdown happened we think it has backfired in the sense that, the lockdown was not a geographical lockdown,” Grace argued.
The President of Ghana, H.E Nana Addo-Dankwa Akuffo Addo announced a partial lockdown in the Greater Accra and the Ashanti region in Ghana as a measure to prevent the spread of coronavirus.
On Thursday,2 April 2020, the opposition National Democratic Congress(NDC) COVID-19 team asked the ruling government to conduct nationwide mass testing to stem the spread of coronavirus.
“The NDC has called for mass testing because we don’t feel that currently, the contact tracing is actually working. We went from vertical cases to the horizontal cases with people who didn’t have any travel history testing positive and when that happened we (NDC) knew the case numbers will go up. Then, the numbers went up in Accra and Kumasi and before that, we (NDC) had already called for the lockdown,” Dr. Ayensu Dankwa noted.
