Greater Accra approaches 10,000 cases as national count reaches 17,741

2,734 new covid-19 cases have been recorded in Ghana since our update last week. Ashanti passed 3,000 cases with Western North and Ashanti moving into triple digit number of cases.

Greater Accra contributed 43% of the new cases (1,167), followed by Ashanti with 26% of new cases (700). Western Region (343) and Eastern (216) contributed 13% and 8% respectively.

How to measure population change

Today we continue our introduction to basic population concepts by reviewing how to measure population change.

Population change over time can be measured in the following ways:

• Natural increase = (Live Births) – (Deaths)
• Net migration = (Immigration) – (Emigration)
• Population growth = (Natural increase) + (Net migration)

All the indicators of population change can be:

• Positive (population size is increasing)
• Zero (population size is not changing)
• Negative (population size is declining)

What are population processes?

World Population Day is on July 11th so we will spend the lead up to the day highlighting some basic concepts in the field of population. 

Today we start with population processes.

Population processes are the three factors that lead to changes in the size and composition of the population. These are fertility, mortality, and migration. 

Western Region passes 1,000 cases and national count passes 15,000

2,820 new cases of covid-19 have been confirmed in Ghana since our update last week bringing the total to 15,013 cases. A little over half of the new case (1521) were in Greater Accra and almost a quarter were from Ashanti (640).

Sources of population and health data

We utilize a number of publicly available data sources on this blog and today we highlight those sources to encourage data utilization. Data is important because it can be used to generate evidence to make informed decisions, to help solve problems, to plan and make predictions, provide support of arguments etc.


Most international development agencies have databases with a variety of indicators that do not require any statistical analysis and can be used by anyone. These include demographic data from the U.N; health data from the WHO; development data from the World Bank; labour force data from the ILO; and education data from UNESCO.

The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) collect a wealth of demographic and health information and conduct repeated  surveys in countries which allows for looking at time trends. These surveys produce detailed reports that present a considerable amount of data.

Over 2,000 covid-19 cases recorded in Ghana in the past week

Greater Accra contributed about a third of new cases, the highest percent as usual but the region's contribution to new cases has been declining - more than half of new cases were from Greater Accra a month ago. Ashanti contributed about a quarter of new cases with Western, Central and Upper East contributing about a tenth each. 

Upper East's numbers have increased substantially since our update last week - from 42 to 241 cases

Standardized covid-19 case counts for regions in Ghana

We discussed in our earlier post that differences in population size can make it difficult to compare absolute numbers across different populations. Today we present standardized covid-19 case counts by region for Ghana to compare the severity of the outbreak by region.

Almost 10,000 confirmed cases of covid-19 in Ghana

1,840 new cases were reported in the past week since our last update to bring the confirmed case count to 9,910. This is a significant increase from the previous week's increase  of 1,106 (+734) and the increase of 896 (+944) in the week before that.

95% of new cases came from the Greater Accra (65%), Ashanti (17%), Western (8%) and Central (5%) regions.

Why do we need standardized statistics?

Let's look at data on deaths from the WHO covid-19 dashboard for 31st May 2020. The WHO dashboard has two options for statistics - total numbers which is shown in the left column and numbers per 1,000,000 population shown in the right column.

Five out of the ten countries in the column on the left column do not appear in the right column. The United States, the country with the most deaths overall, did not make it to the top 10 in deaths per 1,000,000 population. It is ranked 12 with 307 deaths per 1,000,000 population. Rather, San Marino which has recorded 42 deaths in total is leading the list of countries with deaths per 1 million population. 

This illustrates why it is important to also standardize absolute numbers when reporting statistics. While the total death toll numbers are informative by themselves, standardized figures allow us to compare the impact on the population across different countries better than absolute numbers.

Ghana passes 8,000 cases; Greater Accra passes 5,000

1,106 new cases have been confirmed in Ghana since our last update bringing the case count to 8,070. That is an increase compared to the previous week's increase of 896 (+210). Greater Accra, Ashanti, Central and Western regions make up 96% of the new cases (1061). Almost two-thirds of the new cases were in Greater Accra (708).