The School Health Education Programme (SHEP) is monitoring strictly basic educational institutions in the Kumasi Metropolis, to promote a high level of adherence to the COVID-19 safety protocols.

This is to help mitigate the spread of the pandemic, which had so far been detected in 85 schools in the Ashanti Region, the majority of the cases being recorded within the Greater Kumasi jurisdiction.

Mrs. Vida Owusu, SHEP Coordinator at the Metropolitan Education Office, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA), said the authorities were leaving nothing to chance.

“We are supervising the schools to ensure that all the pupils, students, teachers, and non-teaching staff do the right thing to create a safe environment to advance academic activities,” she noted.

The SHEP Coordinator insisted that the wearing of face masks, social distancing, hand-washing, and application of sanitizers were mandatory for all the stakeholders.

The various schools, according to her, had been supplied with the requisite protective materials to enable them to comply with the existing protocols.

Additionally, school-based health facilitators were also present to enforce the protocols to the letter, while spaces had also been provided to make room for emergency situations.

For the Senior High Schools (SHSs), isolation centres had been created to keep students with suspected cases.

Mrs. Owusu advised parents to also observe the safety protocols while at home with their wards since everybody was at risk.

The Greater Kumasi area recorded over 200 COVID-19 infection cases, with 10 mortalities between July 1 and 13, this year, according to the Ghana Health Service (GHS).

This was fueled by the emergence of the new Delta variant, which was fast spreading in Ghana’s second-largest city.