The Federal Government has said that the results of the COVID-19 tests carried out on the 15-member Chinese medical team that came into the country a little over two weeks ago are not ready.
The Minister of State for Health, Dr. Olorunnimbe Mamora, said this on Friday in Abuja, at the 19th joint national briefing of the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19.
The Chinese medics, who came to offer technical support to Nigeria in its fight against the coronavirus pandemic, completed their mandatory 14-day quarantine on Wednesday after which their samples were taken for testing by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC).
“For one reason or the other, we do not have the test results of the Chinese yet. I want to assure you that once we have the result of the tests, we will inform the country about the development. I will advise all Nigerians to be patient because the government is also anticipating the result of the tests in order to ensure that we protect the health and wellbeing of every citizen of the country,” Mamora said.
Also, the Minister of Health, Dr. Osagie Ehanire, urged health workers to make judicious use of the Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in the line of duty as more frontline workers are testing positive for the coronavirus and others are in quarantine.
On his part, the Director-General, Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, said the door-to-door collection of samples for testing is not the federal government’s strategy as it focuses more on targeted testing.
According to him, only those who meet the case definition for COVID-19 will be contacted for testing.
He said the cases definition include, those returning from a country with high burden of the disease; persons that have made contact with a confirmed case; persons living in communities with high cases of the disease; and persons having symptoms of COVID-19 like coughing and high fever.
“It is not really our strategy to go door-to-door to over 200 million Nigerians to collect samples. We have the strategy of going to people that meet the case definition. Even in communities where we are testing, we are not testing everybody. We only collect samples from people who meet our case definition.
“Our challenge at the moment is not really in identifying contacts, our challenge is for people to accept the importance of what we are doing. We are not the Police trying to find criminals, so Nigerians need people to cooperate with us.
“In terms of isolation centres at the local government level, I think we are not quite there yet. Some states have set up these centres at the sub-national level. States like Ogun, Delta, have isolation centres at the sub-national levels,” Ihekweazu said.
