The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control says it’s running out of bed space for COVID-19 cases in Lagos.
The Agency’s Director General Dr. Chike Ihekweazu said this much on Thursday at the Presidential Task Force COVID-19 press briefing.
In his words “Lagos is the only place where we are struggling with bed spaces for now. We will always tells Nigerians the truth.
Lagos currently has three operational isolation centres at the Infectious Disease Hospital, Yaba, Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) and at Onikan Stadium. However, the Cardiac and Renal Hospital has been converted to an isolation centre by the state government According to the NCDC Boss.
The Agency is drawing up a new plan to make testing more effective in the country. But with increasing number of cases expert say they are concerned the state wont cope.
“We are in the process of scaling up testing across the country and the key component that has changed is that in Lagos, Abuja and Kano, instead of waiting for people to call us, we are now going to where the patients are, so we have setup specific testing locations and of course in collaboration and under the leadership of the state in these three states to increase the samples collected from cases that actually do meet the case definition,”
“So, we are going into the communities, health centres to identify those with these case definition and bring them in. We are doing this because we are certain that we have ongoing community transmission especially in these three cities. We have to adapt our response to this situation. We adapted to the circumstances in every state, every city where the nature of transmission changes.
“These changes means that more and more people will be going into the community. We really need Nigerians to support the work that they do and not stigmatise them. Currently, we are living with COVID-19, but not the way we thought about it during the HIV era.
This is about communities. How can we as a country manage this as we transit into the next weeks? As we release the guidelines for implementing the non pharmaceutical intervention that will be released very soon, we are doing this in the context of rising cases. We have to recognise that we still have cases and we have start up some level of activity.”
(C) Control TV 2020.
