Fellow Ghanaians, good evening.
Before I start, let me use this opportunity to thank you all and Almighty God for enabling me to swear, for the second time, the oath of office as President of the Republic. The ceremony took place after I last spoke to you. I promise I will do my very best to live up to your expectations.
I am coming into your homes tonight with some rather unpleasant news. When I delivered Update No. 21, some two weeks ago, I urged all of us to continue adhering to the enhanced hygiene and mask-wearing protocols that have served us well, and which led us to the situation where we were witnessing a gradual decline in the number of active cases.
However, since that time, we have seen an upsurge in the number of active cases, from a little over nine hundred (900) to one thousand, nine hundred and twenty-four (1,924). Our COVID-19 treatment centres have gone from having zero patients to now being full because of the upsurge in infections.
Particularly worrying is the fact that the Ghana Health Service is recording, on the average, two hundred (200) new cases of COVID infections daily. The number of patients requiring hospitalisation and intensive care is rising. The number of severe cases, which stood at eighteen (18) a week ago, has increased sharply to one hundred and twenty (120). Two weeks ago, there was no critical case, we now have thirty-three (33) in our treatment facilities. Again, according to statistics from the Ghana Health Service, the considerable number of persons who are severely ill are, surprisingly, relatively youthful persons, with no previous underlying health conditions. The number of confirmed deaths has increased, sadly, from three hundred and thirty-eight (338) persons to three hundred and fifty-two (352) within the period.
Recent genomic sequencing undertaken by our scientists have established that some arriving passengers tested positive for new variants of COVID-19. These passengers have all been isolated. Furthermore, work is ongoing to determine the presence and extent of spread of the new variants in the general population.
Detailed investigations of the cases indicate that, apart from arriving passengers at our airport who tested positive, infected persons have recent histories of attending parties, weddings, end of year office programmes, family get-togethers, and funerals. At these gatherings, most of them abandoned the use of the masks, and were engaged in actions that led to them contracting the virus.