Ghana's coronavirus caseload has now exceeded 1,000, President Nana Akufo-Addo, announced, Sunday, April, 19, 2020.

This is a significant leap of 208 cases from the last update of 843 posted by the Ghana Health Service on Saturday.

The President said in a televised broadcast that the latest figure is the result of an aggressive contact tracing as well as enhanced testing capacity by the Ghana Health Service.

The President said a total of 68,591 have been tested for the virus out of which 67,549 tested negative representing 98.5% while a 1,042 have tested (1.5%) tested positive for the coronavirus.

The 99 persons who have revocered constitutes 9.5%, total number of deaths recorded still stood at nine (0.9%), the president told the nation.

He explained that "The main reason our country has seen an increase in the number of confirmed cases over the last three weeks is because of the decision we took aggressively to trace and test contacts of infected persons."

"This has enabled us to identify and isolate infected persons, protect the population from further infections, and contain better the spread of the virus,” he said.

The President added, “Indeed, Ghana is the only other country in Africa to have conducted more than sixty thousand tests, and we are ranked number one in Africa in administering of tests per million people.”

Lifting restrictions

President Nana Akufo-Addo also announced the lifting of the restriction to movements of persons in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area and Kasoa, and the Greater Kumasi Metropolitan Area and its contiguous districts.

According to President, the decision to enforce the three-week lockdown was taken to give government the opportunity to try to contain the spread of the virus, scale-up effectively the tracing of persons who had come into contact with infected persons, test them for the virus, and quarantine those who tested positive and isolate them for treatment.

In effect, the President stressed that Monday, April 20, “will see the partial lockdown in Accra and Kumasi being lifted.”