Ghana commences digital verification of COVID-19 test results

Ghana has turned out to be the first nation in West Africa to set up a system for the digital verification of COVID-19 PCR test results in accordance with the African Union Trusted Travel and ECOWAS BIOMARS standard.

The Ministry of Health, via the Ghana Health Service, led the project in which its purpose is to facilitate verification of Covid-19 test results to travellers.

This was enclosed in a statement endorsed by Minister of Health, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu.

According to the statement, the high-tech programme, which is both designed by the Ghana Health Service and the PanaBIOS Consortium, covers all the certified COVID-19 PCR testing laboratories in the nation and will assist to stop the spread of fake test results.

The statement read, “All travellers, Airlines and Diplomatic Missions, Port Health, COVID-19 testing laboratories and all other relevant stakeholders in Ghana are informed that only test results or certificates bearing Trusted Travel or BIOMARS codes will be considered valid for travel out of Ghana from 21st April 2021.

“Travellers arriving in the country have been advised to use a tool made available through the UNDP-supported Global Haven partnership [www.globalhaven.org] for COVID-19 test results certificate verification.

“All travellers are strongly encouraged to sign up for accounts on trustedtravel.panabios.org with the same e-mail address and mobile numbers they provided to the laboratories during testing.”

The full statement below: