The Head virologist at the Noguchi Memorial Institute of Medical Research (NMIMR), Prof. William Ampofo yesterday insulted Prof. Agyemang Badu Akosa of not being intelligent and thus unable to do the simple arithmetic which will make him and others arrive at the high figure the government has announced as the number of coronavirus infection tests that has been done so far in the country.
Prof. Badu Akosa and many others have raised concerns over the accuracy of data provided by the government since the outbreak of the novel Coronavirus in Ghana in said the authorities were manipulating the figures they give the public every day.
Obviously pissed off by Prof. Akosa’s claims, Prof. Ampofo chose to insult the former Director-General of the Ghana Health Services (GHS).
“We simply pool the samples. What is pooling? Pooling just means that if you have 1,000 samples, you put them in pools of thousands. Therefore, you test at a time 100 pools. So, at a time, instead of testing only 1,000 samples, you are actually testing 10,000 samples. This simple arithmetic is what some people cannot do?” he said in response to Prof. Akosa and others who are challenging the data the authorities are churning out.
Ironically, while the Presidential Advisor on Health, Dr. Anthony Nsiah Asare has said in an interview with JOY FM that the 68,591 figure mentioned by President Akufo-Addo includes duplicate cases of testing, Prof. Ampofo contradicted him when he said at an earlier press briefing that the figure represents the actual number of individuals tested.
“Out of the 68,591 tested cases … it includes duplicate tests because, as I said, when somebody is tested and is isolated and being treated, after 14 days you do a second test, the person can be positive…If he’s positive, he’s still counted as a test. So you don’t count the individual, you count the number of tests. This means that the number of patients will definitely be less than the number of tests,” Dr. Nsiah Asare said in the interview.
But Prof. Ampofo said that was not the case, asserting that the data presented showed the number of indivisuals tested.
“…every result that we get is from an individual. The 68,000, 70,000, 1,200 tests a day are individual data. Each respiratory sample is accompanied by a case investigation form. Our people refuse to accept a sample if it does not come with a case investigation form because, they need to understand where that particular individual came from….So each test results is based on a form. That’s how come we are able to tell you that someone had traveled or some people don’t have a travel history. This information is not on the tube but on the form and that is where we get the data from.”
These contradictions have cast doubts on the data the GHS AND President Akufo-Addo have been presenting to the public, lending credence to the belief that the figures are being managed or manipulated.
Source: DAILY POST
