Some 43 persons who had contact with the first Covid 19 patient in the Upper West region have been traced, identified and placed under surveillance for effective monitoring, the regional minister, Hafiz Bin Salih has disclosed.
He therefore assured the people of the region of government’s preparedness to implement the necessary measures to curb the spread of the virus as more contact tracing was being conducted in order to keep the region safe.
Mr Bin Salih gave the information at the start of a disinfection exercise in the Wa Municipal Assembly which had sprayers deployed to disinfect seven markets and other public places such as lorry parks and streets with WHO approved chlorine solution.
This was part of a regional exercise where 110 markets sparsely located across the region have been designated for spraying under the national disinfection exercise being supervised by the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development and implemented by Zoomlion, a waste management company.
As part of efforts to prevent the spread of the virus in the municipality, the Wa Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) Tahiru Ishakku Moomin indicated that aPublic Health Emergency Management committee has put in place measures “to prevent people from sneaking into the municipality on the blind side of the authorities”.
He explained that checkpoints have been mounted at strategic entry points to capture personal details of persons and vehicles while thorough examination of persons coming into the region were being carried out by health professionals.
“Any vehicles that is coming in, they stop the vehicle, and first of all you will be require to provide basic information and secondly we check the vitals of persons for pointers on the particular disease we talking about, then they subject you to thorough examination” he said.
The region announced its first recorded case of the disease in Wa last Friday where the patient was reported to be a 42-year-old Ghanaian who returned to the country from highly infected countries and managed to travelled from Accra to Wa via public transport.
By Issah Mohammed