A Senior Research Fellow at the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research (KCCR) says data collection by health institutions in Ghana on Covid-19 cases has been underpowered.

Speaking with Winston Amoah on the Super Morning Show Tuesday, Dr John Amoasi stated that “not enough data has been collected.”

According to him, the hospital-based data collected by the country's health institutions is not sufficient especially when “we see this astronomical increase in the number of deaths” due to Covid-19.

“What we have is the test results of people who report to the hospital either because they are sick or they worried because they may have been exposed. This is not good enough, it does not tell you the real picture.

“You are only as good as your eye sight is and this pandemic, our eye sight to help us navigate out of trouble is our testing regime and out data collection and analysis,” he said.

What needs to be done in such a pandemic, according to Dr Amoasi is to measure the rate of infections, rate of hospital utilisation and also death rate as accurately as possible.

In his explanation, he stated that “the infection rate will help you know how quickly the disease is spreading. It is such a critical number that informs every decision that is taken around what we doing to avoid the spread of the disease.

“You need to be able to on a regular basis be testing people in the general population and be checking what the positivity rate is. This gives you an idea of how quickly or otherwise the disease is spreading. It helps you to measure changes over time.”

Citing an article from The Guardian, Dr Amoasi indicated that Africa lacks data on coronavirus, hence making it hard to make any useful projections regarding the need of vaccines.

“Ghana is doing much better than several African countries but it is still not good enough. We need to make serious investments in our data collection and analysis mechanisms.

“If you want to know the real figures, you go out there, you measure systematically over a period of time. This is the only way you can tell the reality,” he emphasised.