By Levinus Nwabughiogu, Abuja
Deputy Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, Hon. Toby Okechukwu has decried the insufficiency of coronavirus pandemic testing centres in the country.
Reacting to the comments credited to the Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, NCDC, Dr. Chikwe Ihekwazu that only 2,000 Nigerians have been tested for COVID 19 in the last one month, Okechukwu said that the figure was grossly insufficient for a country of 200 million people.
The lawmaker who made the remarks in a statement he personally signed and issued to Journalists in Abuja on Thursday also hailed the total lockdown initiative in some parts of the country.
He said: “The Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control has told us that only 2,000 Nigerians have been tested in over one month of combating COVID-19. This figure is quite low for a country of about 200 million people.
“Our first line of responsibility on this, therefore, is to ensure that testing services are available in, at least, all the states of the federation. If we are tracking over 6,000 contacts, then we need more testing facilities.
“We just have to scale it up across the country to enable us to ascertain the true extent of the outbreak in the country. Let us know how many Nigerians that are exposed, let us isolate, and let us test maximally”.
Okechukwu also thanked all the donors and urged the Presidential Task Force to be project-specific with the donations, paying attention to such facility upgrades.
“There are critical aspects here, such as prevention, testing, tracking, isolation, case management, dealing with the social interventions, and of course evaluation.