COVID-19 deaths are not being massaged - Ghana Health Service

According to its Director-General, Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, those claims are not true.

He said there was no cause for anyone to suspect that the numbers were under-reported due to the purportedly late release of updates, saying the GHS always followed laid down procedures in updating the public, which explained the delays in its announcements.

“So you may see a region recording a certain number but we are not only interested in a number, we want to know whether the treatment was appropriate and where they are coming from and that is how it is being done,” he explained.

He said nobody was deliberately holding numbers and that the situational reports were always made available for every Ghanaian to see what was happening, after due processes had been followed, adding that the process would not be rushed.

Dr Kuma-Aboagye further explained that such evaluations were made to enable the Service to know what to do.

Pressure group Occupy Ghana had accused the government of massaging the death figures.

According to OccupyGhana, some anomalies it had detected in the data presented by the GHS as at midnight of June 15, 2020, when the number of COVID-19 related deaths stood at 54, showed that that could not be the true reflection of the situation on the ground, giving cause to suspect that the figures were being massaged.

It said; “The reported 54 deaths so far cannot be right because even though 38 deaths have been reported from the Ashanti Region alone, less than 20 of those deaths are included in the national count.”