A leading provider of telecoms infrastructure, ATC Ghana has together with the American Tower Foundation donated an amount of $100,000 to the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research to assist in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.

The company’s Chief Executive Officer, Yahaya Yunusa, speaking at the presentation ceremony at the Institute, stated that Noguchi - where tests are conducted for Covid-19 - is very strategic to the fight against the virus.

According to Mr. Yunusa, the institute deserves all the support it can garner and the gesture by ATC Ghana and the American Tower Foundation is their way of supporting the research institute to continue to execute their mandate during the period of the pandemic.

“We have seen that they made a tremendous impact and progress with regard to fight the pandemic in Ghana. We expect that we should be able to get the maximum impact of our donation through this channel because we have seen that they are into research, testing and at the forefront of fighting the pandemic.

As the leading biomedical research centre in Ghana, we applaud your leadership and the key role you have played, and continue to play - in testing, research and training of frontline workers during this Covid-19 pandemic,” the chief executive officer added.

Prof. Abraham Kwabena Annan, Director, Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, who received the donation on behalf on the institute praised ATC Ghana and American Tower Foundation for their gesture.

He argued that the fight against the pandemic has reached a stage where the support of corporate entities will be crucial in attaining the institute’s mandate.

“This donation is a highly welcome one because it has been planned strategically to advance the mandate of the institute. Our plan for this donation, is to use some of the funds directly on Covid-19 response through testing and detecting infections in vulnerable people.

"This is to ensure early detection so that people who are infected and have the potential of spreading the disease are identified while isolation measures are put in place to augment the infection prevention control protocol,” Prof. Annan said.

According to him, as the lead test center, Noguchi receives samples in thousand folds which stretches its resources and donations from corporate entities like ATC Ghana and others make it easier to continue to test more people.

Ghana’s Covid-19 case count as at Tuesday July 7 is more than 21,000 with the number of recoveries/discharged far in excess of 17,000.