The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) says By the end of this
week, there will be four new molecular diagnostic laboratories for
testing the COVID-19 in Kano, Kaduna, Jos and Maiduguri.
The
Director-General of the NCDC, Chikwe Ihekweazu, said this on Monday in
Abuja at the sixth joint national briefing of the Presidential Taskforce
Force (PTF) on COVID-19. He said: “We are working to activate two
labs in Kano and Kaduna at the same time from tomorrow (Tuesday), and
two labs in Jos and Maiduguri from Thursday. By the end of this week, we
will have four new laboratories in Kano, Kaduna, Jos and Maiduguri
fully active. We are solely assessing every state in the country, but we
are starting with states that we already know have a baseline capacity
to build on. “The five key targets we are setting for our teams in Abuja
and Lagos are to make sure that the collection of samples from
symptomatic individuals happens within eight hours of notification of
the state team.
“Secondly, that the turnaround time for
testing and resulting will be less than 24 hours. This is the case
because sometimes samples come in late in the evening and have to be
resulted the next day. The third is we plan to test 200 samples today in
Lagos and 100 samples today in Abuja by the end of this week. “Number
four is to isolate patients in less than six hours after they have
received a positive result at the state level and we plan to isolate
every confirmed case. So, we will measure ourselves with percentages on
each of these indicators and use that to improve the effectiveness of
the response.
“In addition to case finding, the second most
important thing is contact tracing, that is, listing all the contacts
and making sure we find all of them. There used to be a lot more when
the flights were still coming in but now each case would have about 30
to 40 contacts to follow up. He said about 30 percent of all the cases
had been found through contact tracing and that to make this possible
the centre was using an electronic platform to track all the cases,
“understand who is linked, which contact is linked to what case, and
through that they can monitor which contacts are developing symptoms and
then continue the chain of transmission from there.” Nigeria has nine
molecular diagnostic laboratories to test for COVID-19 which are the
NCDC National Reference Laboratory, Abuja; the Nigeria Institute of
Medical Research, Lagos; the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital
and Irrua Specialist Teaching Hospital, Edo State.
Others are
the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases,
Osun State; the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Oyo State; the
Virology Laboratory of Alex Ekwueme Federal Teaching Hospital Abakaliki,
Ebonui State; the Bio-Security Centre, Lagos State and Defence
Reference Laboratory, Abuja. The Minister of Health, Osagie Ehanire,
said there were additional treatment centres in Utako and Mabushi in
Abuja that would give a minimum of 400 beds.
He said the centres were currently under renovation and repair.
