Ninety nine persons have fully recovered from the coronavirus disease with nine persons dead as announced by the Ghana Health Service on Saturday 18th April 2020.

Meanwhile Ghana's case count has catapulted to 843 from the modest figure of 641 as announced previously.

In total 722 person are well or responding to treatment as announced by the Ghana Health Service.

While four persons are critical or moderately ill,with 99 persons having fully recovered and discharged bringing Ghana's active case count to 726 with 60,916 tests done so far.

According to the Ghana Health Service (GHS) the rise in the numbers is due to the enhanced contact tracing and testing that is currently underway.

Ghana has so far taken 57,000 samples with testing being done on them but there was a backlog of 12,000 samples out of which this new spike is emanating from.

193 new positive cases were recorded from the first batch of the backlog

“The Ghana Health Service is supervising the completion of a backlog of laboratory samples which have been picked for testing as part of the COVID-19 testing exercise. This is after some 57,000 samples have already been successfully tested as at April 15th 2020. In the first batch of this backlog, an additional 198 have been found to be positive. This will bring Ghana’s total case count to 834 at the moment. The general public is however advised that this does not represent new infections that are occurring. It represents results from tests of a backlog of samples,” the Ghana Health Service indicated.

Total samples tested so far now stands at 60, 916 with 1.37 % testing positive. The results of these backlog of samples when released does not mean the number of new cases recorded on the day of the report. Regions that have reported cases are Greater Accra, Ashanti, Eastern, Northern, Volta, Upper East, Upper West, Central, Western and North East.

Regional Breakdown:

Greater Accra - 685

Ashanti Region- 59

Eastern Region -51

Northern Region -11

Volta Region - 9

Upper East Region - 8

Upper West Region- 8

North East Region - 1

Western Region - 1

Central Region - 1