Medical doctors flee Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Accra, Ghana after a reported case of suspected coronavirus infection for fear of been infested. Soon as the news went round for the two suspected cases, doctors at the hospital started running home.
Dr Philip Amoo, head, Public Health Department at the hospital told a radio station this morning “yesterday I saw something funny, “There is something we call malicious panic: panic that is not founded on anything. Just doctors wanting to go home…it’s sad. This one will shout, ‘hey I have little children’…and disappear from the scene. That is the reason why as soon as the epidemic thing steps in into the environment, the case needed to be moved away quickly from routine sites,”
He blamed the lack of well resourced holding bay at the hospital for the panic. As reported earlier, on Wednesday 5th February 2020 two patients a Chinese and an Argentine, reported at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital after they developed some symptoms suspected to be coronavirus.
Health authorities say they two foreign nationals live together but travelled on different dates from China to Ghana. The two persons have since been quarantined while their blood samples taken have been sent to the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research (NMIMR) for further analysis. Results are due by noon on Thursday.
The head of public health department at Korle Bu Teaching Hospital bemoaned what he believes to be an unfortunate failure by government to include the major health facility in a national strategy to deal with the Novel Corona Virus Infection.
In a press release, The Ghana Ministry of Health said it has informed all health Regional Directors across the country to designate holding or treatment centres in their respective regions.
“We are preparing to designate more centres in the highly populated areas of Accra, Kumasi, Takoradi and Tamale,” the Health Ministry said in a statement.
Also, Case Management Teams have been activated to manage cases at the designated national centres and are currently receiving orientation on the management of possible coronavirus cases, the statement said.
So far, the new coronavirus, dubbed 2019-nCoV, has led to more than 20,000 illnesses and more than 560 deaths in China, as well as more than 200 illnesses and two deaths outside of mainland China. The most common symptoms are fever, cough and shortness of breath. Some patients also reported sore throat and runny nose while others experienced diarrhoea, nausea and vomiting
