false positives are better than false negatives. as long as the symptoms are mild you just tell them to stay put at home. czech republic and spain ended up buying corona tests from china with 80% not working and not identifying the positives. many countries ended up returning the faulty equipment recieved form china.
I saw from other posts from nigeria that their smartphone ownership is at 65% (perhaps its similar in ghana), so with google and apples new update that hopefully comes up, you ping with bluetooth phones near by and say hello, and if any of those phones get sick, then each phone contains the data of any smartphone that has been near by. it is about to be implemented in europe and usa. this is a software solution for getting contact tracing, hence cheap to implement once developed. not sure if it will be deployed also in ghana.
considering that ghana is still to peak the daily new cases, and has not reached the end of this wave, i would say its a bit early to lift lockdown. also when opening lockdown many countries first try opening only book shops and small shops. u dont jump into water u first test the water with ur pinky toe.
i see food has become an issue in many african countries. many would rather buy food from the little money than a mask or soap, since their daily salary is cut. this is certainly a problem. if people are not aware of the risk or unable to collectively respond to the disaster than ghana looses.
this is though just my opinion. im no expert in such matter.
I attached below the screenshot of daily recorded cases in ghana and you tell me if statistics say ghana "contained the spread".
also the logarythmic chart in cases seems to follow a linear trend now, meaning exponential growth in this pandemic, so ghana is no where near the peak.
Thanks for the well delineation, indeed from the charts one would indeed say the cases have not yet been contained. The case of poverty too is an issue as many had run dry in terms of finances after staying at home mandatorily for one month, perhaps the crirs and wails were too much for the government to bear? Either way the COViD19 trust fund that was set up to support the crisis has seen massive turnout from philanthropist and may organizations maybe more would be done later on and this lift may be a test phase to the next move, either way we can only hope things don’t get out of hands.
Ghana recently also came up with an app however it is unlike what you described, this is to provide detailed information about cases and to report or solicit for help when one develops symptoms or want to be sure that their not feeling well is not as a result of having been infected. Perhaps this would be incorporated later on. The ministry of information has said that Rapid Diagnostic Tests are been developed that would allow a drive through test to be done which would scale up the testing process, I question however remains how best this is gonna help the whole situation.