Ghana has seen a steady rise in the case counts for the coronavirus disease with 193 new cases recorded.
It is the steepest of rise since the pandemic was first recorded in Ghana on 11th March 2020 as announced by the Ghana Health Service.

Up from the last case announced from 641 to a staggering count of 834 cases recorded with one more person dying increasing the death count to nine.

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