Nigeria now tracing 6,000 contacts after testing over 2,000 people for coronavirus

The Director General of the Nigeria Center for Disease Control (NCDC) Chikwe Ihekweazu has announced that the agency is now tracing 6,000 people after carrying out coronavirus tests on over 2,000 suspected cases.

Speaking in an interview on Channels Television on Monday March 30, Chikwe backed President Buhari on the lockdown order he issued in Lagos, Ogun and Abuja.

According to him, the best way to prevent further spread of COVID-19 is for people to limit movement and contact.

The NCDC DG said;

“We appeal to Nigerians to bear the few weeks of pain to come and let’s see whether we can get on top of this.

“These weeks will allow our teams to have access to the contacts that are living around Lagos, FCT. 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 6. We are activating Abakaliki today. There’d be a 7th lab in our network.

“We’re maximizing the opportunity of the equipment that we have and at the same time rolling out new labs. We’re very focused on increasing the testing capacity. We are being boxed down by people who do not require the test.”

Chikwe who also revealed that the test and result takes between 24 to 48 hours, stated that they are working on bringing it down to 12 hours.

At the moment, Lagos has 68 cases; Abuja – 21, Ogun – three, Ekiti – one, Oyo – seven, Osun – two, Enugu – two, Edo – two, Bauchi – two, while Benue, Kaduna and Rivers have one case respectively.