15,000 Ghanaians could die from coronavirus according to Presidential Advisor on Health, Dr Nsiah-Asare

He said they got these figures through a model generated for the coronavirus infections in Ghana.

The model follows the lifting of the partial lockdown directive on some parts of the company on Monday (April 20, 2020).

Speaking on Joy News, Dr Nsiah-Asare explained that this projection is also based on a baseline projection that 10% of Ghanaians are likely to test positive for the virus before the peak of the infection.

The former director of the Ghana Health Service (GHS) said out of the 10% projected infections, the majority of the cases are likely to be asymptomatic.

“We expect that about 10% of the population may be infected and out of the 10% of the population 80% may not show signs or symptoms at all and 5% of them will be very ill, that is the projection.”

This means that if Ghana has a population of 30 million people, 3 million may be infected with 5% of them falling seriously ill.

By this figure, it is expected that 150,000 may fall within the seriously ill category. Out of which 10% will die. This means 15,000 people will be killed by the virus before Ghana gets out of the woods.

However, Dr Nsiah-Asare, said this modelling may not apply strictly to Ghana due to the dynamics of infected cases across the country.

“If you look at the cases that we are seeing, the cases that are getting critical are very, very small…it means, we have a situation where this hypothesis may be the case in Ghana.”

As of April 19, 2020, Ghana had recorded 1,042 cases with 9 deaths and 99 recoveries.

In a televised broadcast, President Akufo-Addo said the latest figure is due to an aggressive contact tracing and enhanced testing capacity by the Ghana Health Service.

He said 68,591 have been tested for the virus out of which 67,549 tested negative representing 98.5% while a 1,042 have tested (1.5%) tested positive for the coronavirus.