Featured, Health
Osagie Ehanire, Minister of Health has said that only those with symptoms such as fever, cough, difficulty breathing or shortness of breath in an area of medium or high prevalence of COVID-19, could test for the disease.
He added that only results of test from one of the six molecular laboratories for COVID-19 in Nigeria were reliable because the rapid diagnostic tests gave unreliable results.
Also on Monday, the Director of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, Chikwe Ihekweazu, said government was tracing 6,000 people who came in contact with 111 COVID-19 patients.
Ihekweazu, who disclosed this in an interview on Channels Television, said 2,000 people that had been tested for the virus.
The NCDC director-general said the best way to prevent further spread of COVID-19 was for people to limit movements and contacts.
He stated, “We are following over 6,000 contacts of these 111 confirmed cases across these two cities. Every time we have a new case, we add about 50 to 60 contacts that we then have to follow every single day for 14 days.
“We hope that we can really use this time to buy some time to get ahead of the cases and ultimately see that curve start going down but in the next few days, we still do expect an increase in cases.
“We have currently tested well over 2000 people, we will update those figures today or tomorrow. We have increased the number of labs in our network to six. We are activating Abakaliki today. There will be seventh lab in our network.
Ihekweazu said it would take between 24 to 48 hours to conduct a test, adding that the centre was working to reduce it to 12 hours.
He further explained that some tests are delayed because it is carried out twice to ensure that the results are accurate.
The Oyo State incident manager, Dr Olabode Ladiipo, in the interview with The PUNCH on Monday, said although the state had been able to trace 50 people, who had contact with persons infected with COVID-19, it had been able to take samples of 28 of them for test.
A former Chief Medical Director, University College Hospital, Ibadan, Prof. Temitope Alonge, at the Oyo State Infectious Disease Isolation Centre, Olodo disclosed that he had the mandate of the state government to set up an infectious disease isolation centre. – punchng.com
– Mar. 31, 2020 @ 8:39 GMT |
Tags: We will only test people with symptoms — Ehanire
