The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases rose steeply from 442 on Thursday to 493 as of 9.30pm on Friday due to the implementation of a new case-finding strategy, as well as the result of rising community transmission, minister of health, Dr. Osagie Ehanire said.
The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) confirmed fifty-one new cases bringing the total to 493 with 159 discharged and 17 deaths.
According to the agency, 32 of the new cases were reported in Lagos, six in Kano, five in Kwara, two each in FCT, Oyo and Katsina, and one each in Ogun and Ekiti states.
A breakdown of the 493 cases showed that Lagos has 283 followed by the FCT and Kano with 69 and 27 cases respectively; Osun, 20; Edo and Oyo, 15 each; Ogun, 10; Kwara and Katsina, 9 apiece; Bauchi, Kaduna and Akwa Ibom, 6 each; Delta, 4; Ondo and Ekiti, 3 apiece; Enugu and Rivers Niger, 2 each; Benue and Anambra, one each.
Speaking at the media briefing by the Presidential Taskforce on Covid-19 in Abuja, the minister of health, Dr. Osagie Ehanire said health officials had commenced house-to-house and cluster testing, using the revised criteria for sample collection.
Ehanire explained that more people with COVID-19 were being detected and transferred to treatment centres.
He added that there will still be need for more social mobilisation for community testing at grassroots level and Isolation of positive cases.
“We shall ensure the right message is disseminated to control ongoing transmission. In this regard, I must again emphasise that citizens are obliged to disclose complete and accurate information to health workers, especially about their travel history or contact with persons who have or had COVID-19. This is important for two main reasons: full disclosure allows health workers to promptly, investigate, diagnose and treat correctly, to improve chances of patient survival and recovery.
“The right information also keeps the health workers safe. Withholding the truth puts both the user and caregiver at risk, but also other patients on site,” he said.
Also speaking, the director general of NCDC, Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu said the centre had approved a new testing strategy which will be uploaded on its website so that all interested stakeholders can have access to it.
“Today (yesterday) we are pleased to announce a national strategy to scale up the Coronavirus disease testing in Nigeria and we are putting it up on our website. People can tell us their thinking about state governments and other private sector stakeholders. The strategy shows the direction NCDC is headed and how they can come in. This leverages on validated technologies available for testing at the moment,” he said.
He said one of the key aspects of the strategy was not only to leverage on existing infrastructure for testing, but also to rapidly include other facilities that are used for other infectious diseases.
He explained that first thing would be to expand the existing laboratory network and secondly to convert facilities used for testing HIV infection for use in testing COVID-19 cases.
He said the centre had secured supply of reagents on to test-run the converted machines at the national reference laboratory in Abuja.
He said another option was to utilise an equipment known as Gene Expert machine to also scale up the testing for COVID-19 in the country.
He said there were 400 Gene Expert with 41 ready for use for COVID-19 testing.
He further said plans were afoot to decentralise COVID-19 testing to all the 36 states and to rapidly improve the turnaround time for getting test results.
On the country’s late commencement of mass testing for ravaging virus, the director general said as a novel disease it requires very critical and fast thinking.
“I know that we might have been slow to get things scaled up, but anyone that had followed discussions around this disease outbreak will know that it is not only Nigeria that has struggled with initiating mass testing in their settings,” he added.
