President Nana Akufo-Addo made this statement during his 10th Address to the nation on updates to Ghana’s enhanced response to the coronavirus pandemic, on 31 May 2020. (Source: https://www.myjoyonline.com/news/national/full-text-of-akufo-addos-10th-address-to-the-nation-on-coronavirus-crisis/)
Has Ghana become a reference point for others in combating Covid-19? Here are the facts.
Ghana ranks fourth in Africa by the number of total cases of Covid-19, after South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria.
Ghana ranks 15th in Africa (out of 57 countries and territories) by the number of total cases per million of population.
Ghana ranks 13th in Africa by the number of tests per million of population, outperformed by Mauritius, Cape Verde, Djibouti, South Africa, Morocco, Botswana, Gabon, Rwanda or Ecuatorial Guinea. On this indicator, Ghana does not belong to the top 20% performing African countries.
Ghana ranks 122nd out of 213 countries and territories in the world by the number of tests per million of population. Mauritius, on the other hand, ranks 16th in the world on this indicator. Cape Verde is 40th in the world, outperforming Austria or Germany. Djibouti is 57th, better positioned than Finland or the Netherlands.
Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Guinea, Mauritius, Niger, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia and, to a lesser extent, Sao Tome and Principe, Somalia and Sudan are the African nations that managed to decrease the number of active cases (although the total number of cases is increasing), which means they managed to cure people at a faster pace than the increase of Covid-19, and thus to control the disease. Ghana is not on this select list: here, the number of active cases is continuously increasing.
(Source: Worldometers.info, https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)
Based on the data, there is one conclusion: Nana Akufo-Addo’s claim that Ghana has become “a reference point for others in combating Covid-19” is false. According to the indicators, Ghana does not belong to the group of best-performing countries, and therefore it cannot be a reference point for others.