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Professor Ransford Gyampo, a senior lecturer at the University of Ghana, wants the government to impose a two-week lockdown to help contain the alarming spread of COVID-19.
Speaking to Asaase News, Prof Gyampo said Ghana’s failure to tap into the experience of countries that held elections amidst COVID-19 is to blame for the upsurge.
Case update
Ghana currently has 4,665 active cases with additional 15 fatalities increasing the death toll to 405, according to the Ghana Health Service.
“The COVID cases that we are having now is a self-inflicted issue. What were we expecting, in the lead up to the 2020 elections, some of us argued on the need for us to tread cautiously, countries had held elections amidst COVID,” Prof Gyampo said.
He added: “Some of us asked that we should go and study how they were able to hold their elections in the midst of COVID. I don’t think we did that properly, and so in the lead up to elections, parliamentary primaries were held, we all saw what happened, people who were eventually diagnosed to be having COVID, you saw how they were talking to their delegates and how they were spitting on them.”
Leadership failure
Prof Gyampo argued that political leaders flouted the COVID protocols before and during the elections contributing significantly to the upsurge in coronavirus cases.
“We saw how people became physical, fighting among themselves and had thrown all caution and all COVID protocols to the wind. These were the environment that ushered into the 2020 election, and before the election we were tickling ourselves that we were not going to hold campaign rallies, and yet what did we see, the rooftop rallies were more dangerous than the campaign rallies,” Gyampo noted.
He further took a swipe at Information Minister-designate Kojo Oppong Nkrumah for recently claiming that there is no empirical evidence that the election period contributed to the recent upsurge in cases.
“I heard a government appointee arguing that there is no empirical evidence to suggest that it was the election season that brought the spike, and I thought that was a bogus and useless claim to make,” he stressed.
Source: Asaaseradio
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