![A medical official performs a throat swab on a resident of Mabushi in Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory Abuja as part of the community testing for COVID-19 on Wednesday, April 15, 2020. [Photo: Sodiq Adelakun/Channels TV]](https://media.premiumtimesng.com/wp-content/files/2021/01/covid.jpg)
Nigeria on Saturday confirmed 1,588 new COVID-19 cases across 20 of its states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
Lagos was top of the list with 535 new cases on Saturday, followed by Anambra with 218 and Oyo with 155.
With the new cases, the country’s total number of confirmed cases stood at 139,242 Sunday morning, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) said.
Nigeria also recorded six COVID-19 deaths on Saturday, raising the total fatality in the country to 1,588.
Nigeria’s daily COVID-19 infections have averaged over 1,000 since the beginning of this year, indicating how fast the disease has spread compared to when the country recorded its first case of the virus in February last year.
There has been a spike in daily cases in Nigeria since early last December. The adverse impact has been more deaths.
Specifics
The 1,588 new cases were reported from 20 states – Lagos (535), Anambra (218), Oyo (155), FCT (150), Kano (124), Gombe (60), Kaduna (49), Ebonyi (48), Plateau (46), Akwa Ibom (39), Niger (37), Edo (33), Katsina (23), Rivers (18), Taraba (15), Nasarawa (14), Ogun (11), Delta (9), Ekiti (2), and Jigawa (2).
Of the over 139,000 new cases, a total of 112,557 patients have recovered across the country.
Meanwhile, there are nearly 25,000 patients still receiving treatment in isolation centres.
Since the pandemic broke out in Nigeria in February last year, the country has carried out over 1.3 million tests.
Nigeria has not started COVID-19 vaccination for its residents but the country is expecting about 16 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines this month, officials have said.
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