Nigeria recorded its first index case of Covid-19 pandemic in February 2020. Since then, the government through the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has been battling with the novel pandemic. Health workers who are in front-line of this battle along sides other volunteers fought passionately to ensure contact tracing of confirmed cases in order to avoid community spreading.
At the initial stage, only few cases were detected due to low availability of testing kits and few isolation centres. However through interventions and donations from international bodies, corporate organizations and individuals, the government was able to increase the daily testing capacity and several isolation centres were put in place.
In order to curtail the spread of the virus, the Federal Government gave a lockdown order on Lagos, Abuja and Ogun which are the most affected states at the initial stage. The stay at home order was backed by a promise of palliatives to assist the ‘poorest of the poor’ to survive as they will not be able to generate any income. It however turned out that majority of Nigerians who live on daily income find it difficult to feed their family as a result of the lockdown. This created anxiety for people as the government does not have the capacity to cater for the need of everybody.
Meanwhile, during the lockdown the number of confirmed cases of covid-19 infection began rise as we have been able to increase our testing capacity. As a matter of fact other states except a few have also recorded cases of the viral infection.
On the other hand, people are hungry, stranded and anxious as the lockdown tenure keeps extending. Groups and a few individuals had started demanding easing of lockdown due to the damage it has cost businesses, families and survival.
Nigeria relaxed its 35-day lockdown in Lagos, Abuja and Ogun states following President Muhammadu Buhari’s order. The president admits the lockdown has hurt the Nigerian economy, especially in non-essential sectors that depend on daily income for survival.
However, the decision to relax the lockdown came as Nigeria’s number of coronavirus cases has been increasing. Daily figures publicly reported by Nigeria Center for Disease Control (NCDC) has reached over 4,600 cases.
This is the period to lockdown but unfortunately people have been kept home for too long. There is this anxiety. Some people have not even collected March salary, talk less of April salary. So keeping people further at home and no money in their pocket, there is nothing the government can do about it than to allow people to come out.
Unfortunately, we are going to see spikes in the number of people that will get the virus in the coming weeks as people are not keeping the social distancing rule and other safety measures. Our markets are now being flooded with crowd just like it was before the lockdown.
Due to the spike in number cases we may soon experience as a result of community transmission, we are going to have too much pressure on our healthcare system and unfortunately we are not equipped to take care of large number of people.
Just a day after the easing of lockdown, the Presidential task force on the fight against Covid -19 expressed their worry on the conduct of people as regards social distancing and also threatened that easing of lockdown might be reversed should people not follow the safety guideline given.
Looking at the total number of tests on Covid-19 done so far, compared to the number of tests done in other African countries relative to our population, we can categorically say that we have not done enough tests to warrant easing of lockdown. We recall that that the Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Professor Akin Abayomi, in his projections at the initial stage of this outbreak, projected a worst case scenario of 39,000 cases for Lagos; and if well managed the projection it could be reduced to 13,000. Last week, the projection for Lagos alone has increased to 120,000 cases. At that, we ought to have done more tests during the lockdown to determine the rate of infection so that our health worker can act promptly in order to avoid community transmission.
So far, Ghana has conducted over 137,000 tests out of which they recorded a little above 3,000 confirmed cases. I doubt if Nigeria has done up to 30,000 tests, yet we already have more than 4,600 confirmed cases.
There may be need to call for a fresh lockdown so that our effort of the past weeks is not counter-productive.