GHANA – Nilex Company Limited, a company that produces and supplies medical equipment, has donated 10,000 test kits and 10 analyzers to the Ghana Health Service (GHS) to tackle the uptick of COVID-19 cases.
The donations, which cost US$150,000 will help the Ghanaian undertake the testing and detection of the virus timely.
Dr Patrick Kuma Aboagye, Director General of the Ghana Health Service, said the donation was timely and needed to tackle the up rise of cases.
He said this would go a long to help their efforts in tackling the spread of the virus through early detection and treatment.
Dr Aboagye bemoaned the study rise in COVID-19 cases in the country and called on the public to adhere to the COVID-19 safety protocols including masking, sanitizing, and physical distancing.
“I call on all to continue to strictly adhere to the public health measures and to consult trained health workers anytime they experienced any of the common symptoms related to COVID-19,” he added.
Mr Nilesh Moore, Managing Director of Nilex Company, said this was part of the continuous support they have been giving to GHS since the outbreak of the pandemic.
He said these were modern equipment developed to increase the speed of testing and detecting of the virus in not more than 15 minutes.
Mr Moore said they made the donation due to the alarming rate of the spread of the virus recently and especially in some schools in the country.
“We have earlier donated Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) machines to the Ghana Health Service. However, this equipment are modern ones that speeds up the rate of tests, detection and treatment of the virus,” he reiterated.
Cases of Covid-19 are rising fast in parts of West Africa, in part due to the arrival of the Delta coronavirus variant which is considered more transmissible than other variants.
The increase has provided a conundrum for African countries, most of which have escaped the levels of infection and serious illness seen in other regions.
Many are reluctant to enter lockdown because of the impact on the economy but at the same time have been unable to procure vaccines at the pace of richer countries.
Over 101 000 people in Ghana have caught coronavirus and over 800 have died since the pandemic began.
To combat a rise in infections, Ghana’s government is in the process of buying 17 million Johnson & Johnson vaccines through the African Medical Supplies Platform in the third quarter of this year, the president said.
This would be supplemented by one million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine from the United States, nearly 230,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine from the African Union and 249,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from the United Kingdom in the same period.
Ghana is doing relatively well compared to many of its West African counterparts, with nearly 1.3 million vaccine doses administered. But it has fallen behind its goal of acquiring 17.6 million doses by the end of June due in part to a halt in deliveries from India under the vaccine-sharing Covax scheme.
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