Presidential Advisor on Health, Dr Anthony Nsiah-Asare says his projections on the number of people who could die from COVID-19 in Ghana was based on a World Health Organization (WHO) hypothesis.
Mr Nsiah-Asare yesterday made the headlines when he said some 15,000 Ghanaians could perish through the disease.
According to Dr Nsiah-Asare, this projection is also based on a baseline projection that 10% of Ghanaians are likely to test positive for the virus before infections peak.
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Many accused him of causing fear and panic among the public and also questioned how he came by those projections.
At a press briefing today he has clarified the comments and said they were only made based on a hypothesis from WHO.
"Yesterday I gave a hypothesis that WHO put out and I said if Ghana stayed without doing anything at all then we could have more deaths but they should have added that, it is not the case in Africa, based on facts and figures we have our actual figures surpass that, we have put several measures in place, social distancing, closure of borders among others. We even restricted movement in two of our big cities, so the data shows Ghana will not go in the direction of several deaths. It is never true that Ghana will record 3 million people with COVID-19 cases based on the WHO hypothesis"
With his projections, if Ghana’s population is pegged at 30 million, it implies some three million Ghanaians may get infected for the Covid-19.
Also, 5% of the projected three million infections falling seriously sick suggests that at least 150, 000 will fall within this category.
Out the 150,000 people whose infection will be serious, 10% of will be fatal; which means 15,000 deaths would have been recorded before Ghana gets out of the woods.
Ghana's COVID-19 cases as of April 22, 2020, stands at 1,154 with 120 recoveries with 9 deaths.
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