President Nana Akufo-Addo has revealed that a worker at a fish processing factory at Tema in the Greater Accra region of Ghana has infected 533 of his colleagues with coronavirus.


The factory infection was detected from a backlog of 921 samples collected for testing last month that health officials just reported, Akufo-Addo said. He did not give further details about the operations or measures to be taken about the situation.

The mass infection at the facility brings the total number of confirmed cases in the West African nation to 4,700, the president said, adding that 22 people have died of coronavirus-related illnesses since the outbreak was reported in the country in March.

Akudo-Addo said cases have continued to increase due to improved testing, saying the "more people we test for the virus, the more persons we will discover as positive."

Ghana has carried out more than 160,000 tests and it has added seven more testing centers to speed up turnaround time.

The president extended the existing ban on public gatherings and said schools and borders across the country would remain closed.

Photos: Fish workers in Ghana and demolished hotels in Nigeria

Meanwhile the authorities in Nigeria's oil-rich southern Rivers state have demolished two hotels over an alleged breach of lockdown rules intended to contain the spread of coronavirus.

State Governor Nyesom Wike, who supervised the tearing down of Edemete Hotel and Prodest Home on Sunday, said the operators had flouted an order that hotels should be closed.

He said that people who had tested positive for the virus had been found in hotels across the state. But he did not say if anyone who had Covid-19 had been staying in either of the demolished hotels.

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