Hydrogen Peroxide Protects against Covid-19 Pandemic - AM Talk on Joy News (26-1-21)

[Music] now let's speak to our immunologist with the university of ghana research fellow west african center for cell biology of infectious pathogens dr yarbidiako good morning to you doc thank you so much for joining us here on the am show good morning thank you for having me okay great i want to ask the issue of you know these days people are reporting on malaria in fact some tests positive for malaria and then thai food and then they get treatment they don't get better eventually uh if they are lucky enough in some cases to get the covered 19 tests then they test possible cover 90 and they start getting the treatment but what has changed what is happening um well we have greater we have we appears that we have much more transmission of kobit at the moment um the the numbers are as everybody can tell the numbers are rising significantly um and there's a lot of overlap between the symptoms of malaria and the symptoms of covid you know fever headache joint ache those are all things that are characteristic of febrile illnesses now covid and malaria obviously are caused by two very different pathogens but on the surface especially in the beginning some of the symptoms would overlap and in ghana up until kovid if you ever had fever the assumption straight away was perhaps you had malaria and that was sort of the first thing that people doctors would look for the good thing is you know it's very easy to test for malaria in ghana we have a rapid diagnostic test that you you know i'm sure we've all done at the clinic you can even do it at the pharmacy um and so it should be quite easy to eliminate malaria um or to confirm malaria in cases so of course it is possible to be affected by both in unfortunate cases where you probably have malaria as well as covid but i think that the normal practice is to eliminate something like malaria and then the next step should be then to do a corvid test the the hope is that everybody who requires a covetous can have access to one um of course currently the practice in ghana is to at least public institutions are only testing people who are symptomatic so if you don't have symptoms um uh of course at least symptoms that are you know associated with covid then it's much more difficult to get tested and i think many of us have been talking about the asymptomatic burden they have a person is he on contributing to transmission sorry virologist with the university of ghana medical center professor kwamina segal the school i beg your pardon also join us in the course of this uh conversation when he's on okay he's on so we i can have him share okay when he when he's ready he will join us uh so dr yabidako in that sense if i test positive for malaria should i insist on the cover 19 tests at the same time not necessarily i wouldn't say so if you test positive for malaria then that would be what you should be treated for but of course if you have there are certain symptoms that are unique to covet so malaria doesn't really cause upper respiratory tract symptoms so cough sniffling sore throat those are not symptoms of malaria so if you went in and you have sort of these flu-like symptoms um and you happen to test for malaria and you are positive for malaria at that point i would say yes you should probably request that you get a test for covid because you have certain symptoms that are not associated with malaria but if all you have is a headache fever joint ache and you do a test and it comes possible for malaria then i think the first thing would be to take the malaria treatment and see what happens ideally like i said ideally in this day and age it would be great if you could get a covet test as well that's what you know i would probably recommend the challenge is the ghana health service recommendations currently for people to get public access to testing you have to you know a doctor has to have reason to believe that you might have covet um of course if you can afford it i would say go to a private clinic and get yourself a covetous just to be on the safe side um but publicly if you are waiting for the ghana government to pay for it you're probably going to have to justify by having some upper respiratory tract symptoms in addition given that they would probably say that the fever symptoms are more likely due to the malaria that you've been diagnosed with this may sound very basic because we've gone past but can you just remind us again of the symptoms of cover 19 just in case all right well there are a variety of symptoms actually over time kovit has acquired seemingly more symptoms so initially it was headache um cough sore throat so things that you think of as flu-like fever which is running a temperature some joint pain so you know feeling achy in your joints diarrhea has also been has been associated with people with covid so some people have gastrointestinal symptoms so you know running diarrhea and general feeling of malaise as doctors would say um sort of having um you know just feeling feeling quite weak and tired so i think those are the general the common symptoms that people have reported um but i would say at this time you know given how much covid is around anyone who feels unwell um and can't quite figure why they are unwell um obviously if you have trouble breathing those are one of the most severe symptoms of covariate but if you're feeling extremely unwell under the weather it's not you're not shaking it off uh my recommendation would be if you can um go and get a covey test you may have to pay for it if if it's deemed that your symptoms don't quite align but if you can afford it there are places now you can get a covet test for 300 cities also i would say get the test just not just for your peace of mind but also for the safety of those around you because you may be relatively you you may have relatively mild disease but someone around you a close family member an elderly uncle or a parent who you potentially could infect might not have this a similarly mild infection so it's really our responsibility to those around us if we are feeling unwell to determine whether or not it is covered and if it is covered to seek appropriate care and certainly to isolate ourselves from from anybody else i've had humidity fights flew and these days the weather is more humid is it a good thing with the fight against cover 19 i i uh personally i tend to stay away from these broad statements um initially it was hot the hot temperatures are going to kill covid that hasn't worked um you know things like humidity yes if if the air is very dry it can irritate your airways so sometimes this is the same as steaming steaming is not going to kill core with 19 but if you had a blocked airway if you had a little bit of qatar or you know flu-like symptoms it might make you feel a little bit better because it might help to you know to open up your airways and make it easier for you to breathe it's not curing the disease so i think the same thing with humidity if you if you have a cold and it's humid you may not feel quite as uncomfortable as if the weather the air was very very dry but that has nothing to do with the pathogen the virus it's not doing anything to the virus the virus is perfectly happy in humidity it's perfectly happy in some levels of heat you know the idea of hot temperatures yes if you found the virus on the surface and you heated it up you would kill the virus eventually but the virus is living inside of us so when i walk outside in accra on a 38 degree celsius day the virus is not really exposed to 38 degrees celsius right the barrack is exposed to my body temperature um so to be honest i think you know as the doctor who was on before me said nothing substitutes for the the original protocols which are social distancing wearing a mask washing your hands and to be honest the most important of all of those the only one in those three that actually protects you almost 100 is social distancing if you're not close to somebody they cannot infect you if you're wearing a mask but they are not wearing a mask they can infect you if you wash your hands unless you're always washing your hands and of course you might wash your hands but then you might breathe in something you could still get infected so we tend to adhere to the masks and the hand washing relatively well at these so called you know all protocols observed events like she said we don't adhere to the social distancing and it's difficult how do you talk to somebody when they're three meters away from you um but i think that's where we are we have to recognize that without social distancing and in the absence of a vaccine in ghana at the moment that is really the best shot we have there are people who you know they get it and they can't remember how they even got it because people would say i haven't been going out much and i've always been wearing my mask is there a reason i mean like what do specialists like you attribute that to this virus is i mean um it's it's just the nature of the virus the virus is is very especially the newest variants of the virus which you know we have certainly found at the airport yet to confirm whether they are in the community but there are chances that they are no this virus is highly transmissible it it passes in droplets from person to person and you don't see these droplets so um yes you may not have gone out much but our definition of much right is is relative um somebody's definition of not going out much is going out once a week someone else's is going out once a month um and also if you go to a shop you may not have gone to a party but you might have gone to a supermarket and you were you know you saw that you know you saw that cabbage that you wanted to get and there was somebody standing right there and you you were showed shoulder to shoulder with a person looking in the on the shelves perhaps that person is covered infected they may have been wearing a mask but like we said the masks are not 100 foolproof and there may have been some cover droplets around you in that point and you breathe them in that that is what is so difficult about this virus is because even when you follow all the protocols you are still not a hundred percent protected um but it's the best we have the best we can do um and and so yes it's it's very dif it's a very challenging problem there's a reason why a hundred million people around the world have been infected so far um two million or over two million have died this is unprecedented we will probably never see anything like this in our lifetimes again but so it is a challenge that we all are facing um and we have to do the best we can to minimize the risk no one is talking about eliminating risk that is impossible but minimizing risk means being smart about where you go when you go maybe shop at a different time when it's not so crowded um if you can work from home as much as you can do that if you see somebody next to you not wearing a mask i think you have a right to ask them respectfully to put on a mask especially when you're in shops and places that are supposed to be enforcing these guidelines but all we can do is is try to to minimize our exposure um and hope for the availability of vaccine locally akama can ask you about our young learners who are in school yesterday the ghana health service director disclosed that only about three you know people have been infected with the reopening of schools um but i would ask you more on that let me just bring into the conversation professor cuminasego who's a virologist with the university of ghana medical school good morning to you sir if you can hear me thank you for joining good morning and how are you doing oh very well thank you i hope you are too yes i'm fine dr vidyaku good morning good morning sir and then thank you for the hard work you're doing in the sequencing oh would you want to let us in you said in the sequencing is it the new variant basically he's working hard on looking at the variants that are in the country and you need some special techniques to do that there are quite a number of people who can do that in the country and he's one of them so he's working hard i think people should know that he's working hard okay because my first question was going to be about the the south african variant and the uk variant uh to you prof uh in terms of what we're learning about that with the recorded cases so i i i prefer to take it this way i'm sure dr vidyak was spoken a lot about the period i was i just joined it i'm sorry for that so not not quite not quite on the new variant so go ahead oh okay okay so so basically viruses change when they are in the population and this is a new virus that is alleged to have come from a different environment into the human population so as it grows and continues to grow in the population will continue to change over time some of the changes may not be significant in that it will not affect how it behaves there will just be quiet changes they will be there but yet will not affect the behavior of the virus but others may affect the behavior of the virus it either makes it more efficient at growing in the environment or it can even slow it down so the changes would be the changes that would occur can ultimately determine how the virus would behave now the fear is that the the south african variant has quite a number of changes and the fear is that it will not be efficient the vaccines that are being produced may not be efficient against that by a period but they are still not sure but the possibility is there i've been trying hard to think of a simple illustration to help everybody understand it's a difficult thing but you see when you have um let me put it there if you build building blocks of cubes of sugar normal sugar cubes okay and then you remove one from somewhere inside you realize that someone sometimes it caves in and it changes the structure of the kind of um structure you've built just ordinary cubes of sugar you put them up and they pile them up and you remove one from um inside somewhere inside it may not collapse the entire structure but it may change how the entire structure looks like so you still see your sugar built up there but with a slightly defense structure when sometimes the proteins of the virus change because of some of these mutations it changes how they look like in nature so that if they have to bind to something they may not bind efficiently or they may bind more efficiently because of the changes that have occurred and that is what it seems that we are seeing we are seeing sometimes i use a simple key and then the lock you know that we make copies of keys a lot and if you put it in the keyhole the keyhole doesn't change but you keep the key changes so if you make several copies of keys from an experienced blacksmith to an inexperienced one the ones that you get from an experienced classmate or somebody who's using current technology may be more efficient at opening the door it's the same key that you've given to all of them but the one that is made by a less experienced blacksmith maybe less efficient than opening the door so the one which is more efficient is able to go and open the door as though it was the original but the one which is less efficient may not be able to open the door well you will need to adjust the block several times just to open it so the mutations behave like that once there's a mutant it can affect the behavior of the virus in this case they say it's making it more efficient at spreading dr it's just now that we are seeing the effects of it it's not something that just came probably even during christmas it probably was having before christmas but because it's more efficient at spreading it's spreading much faster and because it's more efficient as spreading it will gradually push out the one which is less less efficient at spreading and gradually become the dominant one the fear is that if the virus continues to change and we don't get a hold on it as soon as possible we'll still have some more mutants to deal with and more variants to deal with and that will make the world even more harder and i think i heard him at the end till then talking about you see that traditional things have to be done social distancing wearing your mask all these things are not 100 effective but then if you do them well it reduces your risk to a very low very low chance of you acquiring the infection okay well uh prof i'll let dr vidyako continue from there and if you can just reposition yourself a bit so i can see the full of you uh on the zoom this morning that will also be great doctor vidyajo uh tell us a bit more about this new variant and whether or not activities of christmas the elections also contributed to where we are today all right thank you um i think prof has said it really has explained it really well the the virus continues these viruses mutate all the time um it's not unusual for them to mutate and they mutate as a way to survive because they are under they are always under pressure from the immune system um and so they evolve away from whatever the immune system is doing so they are constantly there the way their nature is to always be changing which is why we have to move quickly when you talk about you know deploying a vaccine because over time the virus will naturally move away from from what the vaccine can basically recognize um these new variants that have sort of made the news there's a uk variant south african variant and actually now a brazilian variant these are variants that are particularly interesting because they appear to be associated with increased transmission um and in the case of the uk variant there is some talk about it being more pathogenic causing more severe disease um now we call them the uk south african brazilian variant that is that's where they were first identified so i think prof is right we cannot necessarily say that this one started in the uk that would be um a mistake the uk has done more viral sequencing than any country in the world so far they've done 200 000 um sequences so they were more likely to identify a variant than anyone else but what is called the uk variant anyway b117 is the sort of the technical name for it has been identified in a number of countries and has been identified at kotoka international airport in a number of passengers now what is most interesting about that and this speaks to what i think prof was talking about is that we found it in people who are not necessarily coming from the uk um i think the director general of the ghana health service mentioned it in the briefing yesterday that actually we identified this so-called uk variant from people traveling from within our sub region coming from tan you know from nigeria from burkina faso i think there was some from tanzania so even though we call it the uk varian these people actually not traveling from the uk which suggests that this variant is already present in the number of countries around ghana and in fact may already be present in the country we are currently working really hard sequencing locally collected samples to see if we can find it um with this sometimes looking for a needle in a haystack so we have to do a lot of sequencing to identify the variance among a bunch of other variants that may be there but the reason these variants are particularly concerning is because it appears to have changed how the virus behaves so there are other variants of the virus that all appear to behave relatively similarly but with these variants there is evidence that they are much more transmissible they are being this the uk variant for instance is being credited for the surge in cases you've seen in the uk um and the south african variants similarly for the surge in south africa if we indeed have these here then that might explain some of what we are seeing because if it is 70 more transmissible than what was around before it would explain why all of a sudden we're seeing a ballooning in our own cases now whether this is you know there's been talk about the election talk about christmas i'm not going to split heads and say whether it was the election it was christmas it is social gatherings of any kind we saw an increase in funerals we saw an increase in weddings from november to december when the restrictions were relaxed we are still seeing funerals and weddings going on any events where people are gathered in large numbers where they may be wearing masks but they'll pull them down to talk get on the phone sip a drink eat food whatever it might be bars and pubs were open right people they say they're outdoors so it's not as bad you are still sitting very very close to somebody else all of those situations cause or create opportunities for the virus to spread and once that spread you know occurs then you're going to see increases in infected people and unfortunately now we are seeing increases in sick people um so it's no longer adjusting to asymptomatic cases but we are seeing a significant increase in the number of number of people requiring intensive care treatment requiring oxygen and unfortunately the number of fatalities so it is definitely linked to our behavior i don't think anyone is disputing that i think it's unhelpful to argue whether it is yuletide versus election it is just people being together whatever the reason they were standing together that is how the virus doesn't care if it's an election or it's christmas all the virus knows is i can transmit from one person to another and if you know if if you're doing that then that spread is great prof yesterday there was the headlines of the hydrogen peroxide the recommendation for it to augment covered 19 treatments uh i i was excited about it in the beginning when we're doing our paper review but later on uh i learned that there is also a danger and the fact that it was just put out there like that people rushed to some of the pharmacies to grab it uh talk us through why that may not be an option or the dangers associated with that and i'm only asking you because it is already out there and people are going to pharmacies to get it actually let me say this i use hydrogen peroxide so i i can understand where you're coming from and i've been part of the group doing the literature search on hybrid peroxide now how did the use of hydrogen peroxide is not to say that you cannot be infected or you we should leave every other thing and just use hydrogen peroxide we're just saying that assuming you have come into contact with large doses of the virus which may have escaped the basic protection measures you have used or you are using then you can probably use that let me explain you know that the dentists have used hydrogen peroxide and other gargling solutions for a very long time and what happens is that they use it to try to reduce the amount of the virus or any infections that they may come into contact with because they are opening your mouth and working in your mouth and so it's not a new practice they've been doing this there's a university in germany if i'm right it's their belly filled or something you can check i can check the actual name where they are now gaggling as an official thing because they realize that a farmer's a pharmaceutical company and the university have the dental department of the university have come out with some sort of formula where people gargle and then they they what do you call it they they prevent the idea is that you prevent people from shedding copious amounts of the virus so that people around you even if it escapes from your mast are not likely to get it because the concentrations are low now if you look at the bhwa chose um formula for for uh sanitizer there's a three percent hydrogen peroxide in it correct and that is because it is effective against the virus so now let's come back to your issue i think i should give this preamble okay just to establish the issue of gargling among others now you see if we have we have cells in our mouth normally in a viral infection you can have what you call primary replication in the natural route of infection if it's going on you can have a primary application at the site of energy and then it can descend when the numbers the the number number of particles or virus increase because of the growth it can descend into your lower parts in this case for saskov2 so we are saying that if in case that the virus escapes your mask and manages to settle in your mouth or your nasal cavity what is going to likely happen is that it will settle there grow a bit and then descend further depending on the host there are several factors that actually that course will make you sick it depends on how much you've come into contact with the virus with how much the virus you've come into contact with it depends on even the type of strain you've come into contact it depends on you the individual how your body is also going to respond to it so there are several factors so the assumption is that if you you um gaggle the hydrogen peroxide and you have any of the viruses which have attached to the surfaces of the epithelial cells viruses will normally attach for a while and then enter the cells replicate come out again and spread to other cells and replicate okay so so that i prof sorry i want to ask you um an ordinary question because i'm an ordinary person so i go to the pharmacy do i go to the pharmacy and grab the hydrogen peroxide i'll just finish with this then i'll tell you this so so the idea is that if you gargle and there are any other viruses attached to your epithelial cells and your upper respiratory tract which have not established that infection or which having established an infection are coming out to try to spread that hydrogen peroxide will inactivate them and reduce the amount that are likely to spread further down into your lungs or spread that spread in your respiratory tract now what we are recommending is that 0.5 percent of hydrogen peroxide is known to be able to disinfect if you use them on surfaces so what we're recommending is that three percent is harsh we want to recommend is for you to use just one percent to gather one percent meaning that if you take one part of the hydrogen most of the bottles on the counters are six percent so if you take one part of it you add you add five parts of water so let me make it simple if you take 10 10 ml of hydrogen peroxide you want to add 50 mils of warm water lukewarm water something you can gather to give you a one percent 10 and then add 50 ml yes it's a one part in one part plus five parts so it's a one part in six parts which gives you a one percent from the six percent that you have most of the ones i've seen on the counter i've not seen any other concentrations i've seen um six percent most of the time bells and another one but they are mostly six percent so basically what we are trying to use what we are encouraging people to use this has some sort of a prophylaxis we're saying wear your mask do all the things you're supposed to do i use it when i get into meetings i mean dr vidyako i heard him saying it some no matter how you tried there are some people around you who will not put on their mask you try to avoid them but sometimes you are in circumstances where all the best you can do is probably to keep your distance and not completely to avoid them so in that case when i think i've come into contact with people i mean something a situation like that then i gaggle or we are recommending therefore that if you have people who have been infected living in the same house they could then use it as a goggle to just to reduce the possible chances of the virus establishing infection in the upper respiratory tract infection there are more uses that some others have put to i think but i don't want to bring it up here okay because i think it will probably create um more suggestions just the final one on this what what happens if you swallow it if you swallow if you happen to swallow oh unfortunately we can't hear you yeah i think you have to if uh either we have you have to unmute yourself prof hello prof okay so i'm asking what happens if you swallow the substance no i think we have an issue there with uh profs audio okay i can hear you now i can hear you now sir i can hear you hear me now yes i can oh so my question again i i asked what if you were to swallow in the process you swallowed the substance what's the danger it can give you it can give you an irritation in your stomach because of the nature of this thing but so the idea is that the reason why we are recommending that you should reduce the concentration to one percent is to be able to take care of the possible irritation but you are supposed to gather and pour out and that's why we say that you don't recommend something like that for children below a certain age because they cannot gather my son is 10 years old and he's learned how to calculate he knows how to calculate i don't make them gaggle all the time but depending on circumstances and where we've been i sometimes make them gather and he manages to do it so it's a matter of gargling and throwing out it's a matter of not giving it to children proposing below even 12 years because they are likely to swallow it but for people who can't gather let them gather there's also a recommendation there that if the person cannot gather for once or better for a reason maybe age or having problems swallowing what you can actually do is to put it on some sort of cotton back and then you can then um swap or clean the orifices so that the person then does not have to gather and swallow so it depends on the circumstances and who is that okay let me state this we are not saying that this is replacing everything we are saying that is just an addition to what is being done and then i also should mention that we should remember that vitamin c itself in the process of metabolism in our host actually produces hydrogen peroxide so it is not strange to our body but it is not for gargling it is only for topical use and and that is it okay i'm curious it's not for swallowing it's just for topical use okay dr vediako do you gaggle too no i don't i um i goggle for dental health reasons i don't go for for coving prevention um i guess i i hear what profit is saying and i think um all i would say from my perspective not to get into a long drawn-out debate is that um you know i i i think i'm happy to hear him say that this is not meant to replace any of the existing protocols um um and i think if people choose to to gargle that is you know that is perfectly fine i don't see any for provided they do it properly with the right concentration i don't think they have they will come to any harm necessarily by gargling um but i guess and i fully understand i fully agree with the reason why dentists use it to minimize the amount that is shed in a particular amount of time where i would perhaps question is the we don't yet have sufficient evidence that it is has prophylactic benefits for instance i think in the in the in the write-up that prof iit has shared um there's discussion about um a family of people who did not transmit you know that is not sufficient we need a larger trial and perhaps you know prof might be able to say whether or not they are currently conducting a well-controlled clinical trial to really establish this but you know at this point we don't have a vaccine and so you know we are calling people need to protect themselves as best they can as i said gardening on its own i don't think it's harmful provided you do it properly so if people would like to do that that is fine i i would say that i haven't yet seen convincing evidence that gargling has prophylactic benefit i can see how it would temporarily reduce the amount that an individual was shed so if we're using it in infected people perhaps before a doctor goes to see someone in a treatment center you ask them to gargle i can see how that potentially would have some effect some benefit for a short period of time but in terms of protecting myself if i'm in a room and somebody's not wearing a mask you know i could gargle but if the thing is ready in me um and has already entered the cell provided you know i'm not taking enough hydrogen peroxide to destroy the cell so unless if the virus on the surface maybe it will get rid of it but once it's entered the cell the virus is relatively protected i believe from the peroxide so um i think we are you know at this point it becomes a scientific debate and we don't actually have to get into that yeah we will not even understand that i would say we need we need a clinical trial before i would before i would say gargling is prophylactic i'll need to see a proper clinical trial with sufficient controls to convince me okay um but yeah that's where i fall on okay great so prof just the last bit on this issue uh and for the purposes of you know better clarity uh is this for prevention or this is for treatment the recommendation for prevention okay all right so so and that's to just to mention um yeah i know that scientists disagree uh even amongst us the medics non-medics scientists are disagreeing on it so that's that's part of science science also agrees to disagree on some concept but yes we are doing a clinical trial we submitted a proposal to the ghana health services committee we've almost finished with a revision and we are sending it back and we want to do an observational study on two groups of people one group gaggling another group not catholic and then follow them up for a minimum period of exceeding the likely incubation period to see how many people will become positive at that point in time but the point we're trying to make is that i don't lose anything if i got though i mean people are gardening other things i know somebody who gaggles a particular thing i wouldn't mention it because i'm sure people would charge to the pharmacy and go and grab it as well but and this is this is observational and he tells me that anytime he has a flu he gathers this and he feels better so i go and i check the contents of that particular thing and i realize how well scientifically it makes sense looking at the content of what he's been gathering and that is actually can be used as a drink as well so yes i mean yeah but if we haven't done that we need to get we need to get um we are saying that from the observations we've made this is what we feel but he's made a point and we're going ahead with that we're going to do a clinical an observational uh study just to follow up people who are gargling and who are not gathering look at the incidents and then when we come up with the findings we'll be able to convince probably people like dr radio okay well i'll just go just going to chip in and say that should we have perhaps waited for that clinical uh trial you know to come out before publicly you know making this known scene that people are already rushing to get it and i wonder if they can actually do the diluted properly but we have to end the conversation somehow and i want to end you know people are people are uh inhaling neem tree in addition to everything that they're doing yes people are inhaling all sorts of things and buying all sorts of chemicals and which without proven at least for hydrogen peroxide our believers that it has some proven effect on reducing viral load so okay extinction is what probably encourages us to encourage within our circles and we are not selling it out there but within our circles but we are still talking okay so there was a recommendation a recommendation that you made have you have you received some sort of response which one please the the use of the hydrogen peroxide to augment the cover 19 treatment have you received uh any response from any state institution we are still talking to them talking with a number institutions they collected whatever information we had and we are looking at it so we would wait um for to hear from themselves okay great uh just the last bit of this conversation dr vidyako children are back in school should i still and i asked dr hackman the medical doctor i spoke with just before you came on and i asked for my personal purpose this is personal should i still keep my children in school at this crucial time yes okay yeah sorry i was muted um that is that is a tough question actually i'm a parent myself and it's something that i i i'm grappling with um you know students have been out of school for over a year we cannot underestimate the impact that that has on their education so i fully understand the challenge the ministry of education indeed the government has in trying to figure out when it's safe to send kids back to school i think i would say it is a it's a decision that has to be made on a sort of a personal level children it appears that children are less susceptible to the severe effects of kovid that is not to say that some children have not had very severe disease i think even in ghana their future and who have died they are children who are permanently you know paralyzed as a result of having you know cns engagement in cobit so this is not to minimize what covet can do to children but in general overall children are are appear to have less severe disease than adults um so i guess for me if a school can guarantee that they would you know if we can actually so if we can create classrooms that are not as crowded as as typical if there can be certain um guidelines in place and most of all frequent testing i i i'm a big proponent of testing and i have i've been saying over and over again the best way to control this virus is to have sufficient testing so that people who are positive can be isolated from the rest of people who are negative so i think we need to think very carefully i i think our current strategy of only testing symptomatics is dangerous because children are less likely to be symptomatic and the danger is the child may be fine but they will come home hug a grandparent hug an uncle or an aunt or a parent and then that person may get very sick and because children especially younger children you know it's going to be very difficult to get them to not to play together and pass virus from each from one to another children may actually serve as a medium to enhance the amount of spreading that we see so i think the idea to say you know friends of mine have called me up should i send my kid to school or not i think you know if it's a difficult thing to say i don't know i don't want to say oh don't or do but i think if we do send them we have to think very carefully of how are we managing this do we have capacity in place to routinely especially now that antigen testing has been approved by our fda i would recommend if i was advising ministry of education or anyone i would say can we roll out um a staggered antigen testing program in our schools antigen testing is much cheaper than pcr it's what is being done at the airport so you know we are trusting it that is relatively sensitive if we could do that in schools or from time to time to hopefully capture children who may be asymptomatically you know positive then we potentially could see a future where you know we are we are safeguarding um the population even though children are in school but it's a very difficult one i would say one thing to do though if your children are in school when they come home make them take a shower make them wash wash down you know protect those who may not be as resilient as the children basically in your home so i think that is one thing to do but i really do think as a country we may need to think about you know rolling out targeted antigen testing in our schools we say we've only found three people who were who were infected but we're only measuring symptomatic i can guarantee you that if i go and test in a school right now i will find more than three people who are positive um i'm willing you know i'm sure even profit will agree with me you know our our several prevalence studies i go back to it we found 20 people who had been infected in our cry alone if we go into schools we will most likely find people who are asymptomatic um so we need to think of a way where we can perhaps routinely just get a sense of the prevalence in schools and i think a newly approved fda approved antigen testing provides perhaps a more economical route to do this um than you know pci is probably not not not economically viable okay let's roll out an antigen testing scheme and let's get a sense of how many school children really have covered 19. okay well thank you dr vidyako uh prof you know i'll let you have a saying on uh essay on this as well with the children back in school uh and the fact that we we haven't seen schools suffer or record cases but dr vediako reminds us that only because we are not even testing in the first place so with the with the issue of children i have for children in school as well um so for me in the absence of everything if you do the best you can sometimes so those things may not have kind of a strong scientific basis but it's a basic hygiene process so unfortunately profs uh connection is frozen uh hopefully it de-freezes and so we can get that tiny little bit of tip before we wrap up this conversation uh still ahead though uh it's the second day uh today's the final day the malta remains of former president george rollins will be laid in state again today at the accra international conference center i will go there after this conversation but we're talking about covert 19 uh the figures that we're recording we've been talking about the new variant we've talked about the hydrogen peroxide i want my guests to leave us with some tips even as some children some of us still take our children to school uh prof if you're back and if we have a stable connection oh okay unfortunately ah okay this hurts because prof was just going to take us through the hygiene protocols for children when they return from school

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Keywords: Ghana Political Issues, Ghana Politics, Matters Arising in Ghana, NPP, CPP, NDC, PPP, National Budget, Chieftaincy, Ghanaian lawyers, Economy, Constitution, Election, campaign, YouTube, joy News, Latest News, headlines, News in Ghana, AM Show, AM Talk

Id: qetrlv5o3Og

Length: 44min 55sec (2695 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021