Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo said on Sunday that a worker who worked at a fish-processing factory in Tema infected 533 other workers at the facility with the coronavirus, reported Reuters.
The country’s health authorities reported the outbreak at the industrial facility on Friday, but did not provide details.
“All 533 persons were infected by one person,” President Akufo-Addo said.
However, the president did not provide any other detail of how the disease spread in the facility or if safety measures had been in place. He reiterated that the new 921 cases announced last week was from backlogs dating as far back as 26th April, and not necessarily over a 24 hour window.
The president said Ghana’s case count as at Sunday, May 10, 2020, stood at 4,700 confirmed cases, out of which 497 have recovered with the number of deaths at 22 and five persons critically ill.
Akufo-Addo said his government had carried out an aggressive testing regime with over 160,501 tests conducted since the outbreak. The number of tests performed per million people is more than any other country in Africa.
“The implementation of our strategy of aggressively tracing, testing and treating is our surest way of rooting out the virus,” Akufo-Addo said.
The Ghanian president also announced an extension of a ban on public gatherings until the end of May as part of measures to stop the spread of coronavirus in the country. Notably, all schools and universities will also remain closed until the end of this month.
Akufo-Addo eased lockdown measures imposed on the two main cities, Accra and Kumasi, on April 19 amid concerns over a prolonged lockdown on the economy.
According to an update by Africa CDC, the total number of coronavirus cases in Africa has surpassed 60,000. As per the new figures released on Sunday, some 2,114 people had died due to COVID-19, while 20,792 recovered.
