The Nigeria Centre
for Disease Control (NCDC) has said that government is targeting to test two
million Nigerians in three months at 50,000 per state.
The Director General
of the NCDC, Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, said this on Tuesday in Abuja at the 21st
joint national briefing of the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19.
He also lamented
that the nation was lagging behind in testing capacities and needed to catch
up.
According to him,
the goal of the response team is to avoid any case in any of the three states
(Cross Rivers, Kogi and Yobe states) still without any reported case of
COVID-19.
"How are we
going to do this? Nigeria has learnt from countries that the only way to
achieve this is to test many people.
"The laboratory
strategic group that is responding to this outbreak has set itself a target of
testing two million people in the next three months.
"This is a very
ambitious target. We are working very hard with our development partners and
all our friends to equip our labs to be able to do this.
"It is going to
cost us a lot of money but we can't do this without a lot of collaboration from
everybody. A country that has achieved a lot more in terms of testing is South
Africa. Not only that they have tested more, they have tested more as a
proportion of their population.
"We are lagging
behind, but now we have to catch up. So, when I referred to this, it is really
an epidemiological indicator of how well a response is doing.
"In order to
test two million people in three months across the country, we need to test
about 50,000 per state plus-minus, depending on your population size," the
NCDC boss said.
'Kano deaths not
extra-ordinary'
The Federal
Government has said that the sharp increase of COVID-19 positive cases in Kano
State concentrated in seven municipal council areas and also about the
'unexplained' deaths were not out of the ordinary.
The Minister of
Health, Dr. Osagie Ehanire, said: "There is national concern about the
sharp increase of COVID-19 positive cases in Kano concentrated in seven
municipal council areas and also about certain so-called 'unexplained' deaths.
The authorities have explained that the latter were not out of the
ordinary."
This is as he also
said that the Federal Government will deploy ambulances as well as a
fact-finding committee to Kano State to ascertain the true extent of the effect
of the COVID-19 in the state, as well as to improve the state's efforts in
fighting the spread of the disease.
He said:
"Advisories have also been issued for staying protected during this
Ramadan season, as risk communications has also been intensified by airing
jingles in local languages on physical distancing and stigmatisation across all
states."
As of Tuesday, 28th
April, 2020, 1,337 people have been confirmed to have COVID-19; 64 new
confirmations distributed with 34 in Lagos, 15 in FCT, 11 in Borno and two each
in Gombe and Taraba states.
255 persons have
been successfully treated for COVID-19 and discharged, and 40 deaths were
recorded.
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