As infections decline, Nigeria’s COVID-19 deaths remain high

While Nigeria’s COVID-19 daily infection figures have significantly reduced in the past two weeks, the death tally from the disease has remained high indicating that the country is not yet out of the woods.

About 1,982 deaths have now been recorded from coronavirus in Nigeria after 13 more people died on Monday, health authorities said.

This is according to an update by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) Monday night.

Monday’s fatality figure is higher than the five deaths recorded on Sunday and raised the fatality toll in the past six days to 75. Nigeria has thus averaged about 12 deaths per day in the past week compared to the average of about five daily deaths since the virus was first detected in the country.

Nigeria also recorded 371 new COVID-19 cases Monday bringing the total number of known cases in the country to 158,906.

Nigeria suffered its worst phase of the COVID-19 outbreak between December and January as daily infections averaged over 1,000.

Recently, however, infection figures have been relatively low with daily cases hovering between 200 and 700 in the past two weeks except for the 709 infections recorded on Thursday and the 195 recorded Saturday.

But health experts believe the official data under-reports both infections and deaths because of the country’s limited testing capacity.

Specifics

The 371 new cases were reported from 17 states – Lagos (102), Enugu (65), Edo (56), FCT (23), Ogun (20), Osun (18), Bayelsa (18), Rivers (15), Kaduna (14), Plateau (10), Oyo (8), Bauchi (7), Kano (5), Delta (4), Nasarawa (3), Niger (2) and Ekiti (1).

Lagos had the highest toll in Monday’s tally with 102 new cases followed by Enugu and the FCT with 56 and 23 infections respectively.

Since the pandemic broke out in February last year, the country has carried out over 1.6 million tests.

More than two-thirds of the over 158,000 people infected by COVID-19 in Nigeria have recovered after treatment.

According to NCDC data published Monday night, a total of 138,502 have recovered after treatment

Meanwhile, over 18,000 infections are still active in the country.

Vaccination

Nigeria on Friday commenced the vaccination of its citizens after receiving almost four million doses of the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccines.

Priority is being given to health workers and other essential service providers.

President Muhammadu Buhari and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo were vaccinated on Saturday.

On Monday, the government announced that the vaccines are being distributed to various states.