Lockdown drummed home presence, impact of coronavirus – Doctor

Titus Beyuo, deputy General Secretary of the Ghana Medical Association, GMA, has said a lockdown as painful as it is serves important purposes.

Speaking on Accra – based Joy FM; the medic stressed that the targeted lockdown of 2020 served the purpose of public education but more importantly buying government time to plan coronavirus prevention intervention.

“We did understand from our first lockdown that the lockdown buys you time. There are advantages of lockdown. It buys you time to put certain things in place, to do more testing. If you don’t have the necessary things needed and you just lock the people down, then there are other consequences of that lockdown.

“When that lockdown came, apart from restricting the movement of the virus, it brought people to become conscious of the presence of the virus in our environment.

“We think that if these restrictions are there, apart from restricting the mass gathering which may serve as super-spreader events, they play an additional role of making people conscious of this virus in our environment,” he added.

He further stressed that the GMA was not calling for a lockdown at this stage and that they were looking at the data and other factors before coming up with such a call. Their latest press release has principally called for restrictions to be placed on especially public gatherings.

Ghana’s cases continue to rise, raising concerns that a lockdown could be imposed. The lockdown of March 2020 was imposed on Greater Accra and Greater Kumasi areas. The measure was lifted in April.