Covid-19 Lockdown has Backfired – NDC
According to the NDC, since implementation date delayed it gave people possibly infected with COVID-19 to leave the epicentres.
Jonas Danquah 
The opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has described the partial lockdown aimed at reducing community spread of covid-19 in certain hotspot areas as a failure.
A member of NDC’s Covid-19 team, Dr Grace Ayensu Dankwa, in an interview with Accra based Citi FM said, the lockdown would have been more successful if it took immediate effect instead of the delayed implementation date.
According to her, because the implementation date delayed it gave people possibly infected with COVID-19 to leave the epicentres.
“It was actually a lockdown of the people in the geographical area. So, in other words, it was more like we wanted to quarantine all the people in Accra. So you make an announcement two days, three days that you are going to lockdown Accra on Monday and what happened was more of what we predicted–the human beings that we were sort of concerned about, most of them left the area to other regions in the country…The way this lockdown happened we think it has backfired in the sense that, the lockdown was not a geographical lockdown,” she argued.
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Ghana joined South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Mali, among others, in Africa to restrict the movement of citizens in a bid to curb the spread of the virus which has infected over a million people worldwide.
President Nana Akufo-Addo imposed a partial lockdown on Accra, Tema, and Kumasi effective Monday, March 30, 2020, when he addressed the nation on Friday, March 27, 2020.
The National Democratic Congress (NDC) COVID-19 team had called on the Akufo-Addo government to conduct a nationwide mass testing to curb the further spread of the novel coronavirus in Ghana.
“The NDC has called for mass testing because we don’t feel that currently, the contact tracing is actually working. We went from vertical cases to the horizontal cases with people who didn’t have any travel history testing positive and when that happened we (NDC) knew the case numbers will go up. Then, the numbers went up in Accra and Kumasi and before that, we (NDC) had already called for the lockdown,” Dr. Ayensu Dankwa noted.
