COVID-19: We are not experiencing a spike in Nigeria — NCDC

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has said that Nigeria is not experiencing a spike in COVID-19 infections.

The Director-General of NCDC, Chikwe Ihekweazu, made the disclosure to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Thursday in Abuja while giving an update on the disease in the country.

“For over two months we fought between a 100 to 200 cases a day… but we really haven’t seen a spike in our national data.

“There has been a recent increase in a few cases in Lagos, mostly among the younger people, younger populations, and we are monitoring that very closely,” Mr Ihekweazu explained.

According to him, NCDC has worked very hard to contain the spread of the virus.

“If you look at our testing numbers, yes, they have not gone up as high as we would have loved to, but apart from a small decrease during the peak of the demonstrations a few weeks ago, we have managed to maintain our testing numbers of about 30,000 tests per week.

“So generally, I would still say, we need to be cautious and continue with the preventive measures but we have not seen a spike in the country,” he stated.

Mr Ihekweazu said that the announcement of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccines against the COVID-19 gave Nigeria a significant “ray of hope”.

He, however, pointed out that many processes needed to be carried out on the two vaccines before they could be used.

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The NCDC boss said that the centre was also working to make sure that Nigerians fully understood the value of the vaccines.

Meanwhile, Mr Ihekweazu said that there was no case of COVID-19 outbreak in the various orientation camps of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC).

He explained that two cases were detected before the infected corps members got into the NYSC camp.

(NAN)