Moses Emorinken, AbujaThe Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has said the nation’s testing capacity will receive a boost as four new molecular diagnostic laboratories for testing the coronavirus (COVID-19) will be activated this week.
The Director-General of the NCDC, Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, made this known on Monday during the briefing of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 in Abuja.
According to him: “We are working this week, activating two labs in Kano and Kaduna at the same time from tomorrow (Tuesday), and two labs in Jos and Maiduguri from Thursday.
“By the end of this week, we will have four new laboratories in Kano, Kaduna, Jos and Maiduguri fully active and then we will continue.
“We are solely assessing every state in the country, but we are starting with states that we already know have a baseline capacity to build on”.
Nigeria has nine molecular diagnostic laboratories to test for COVID-19. The labs are – NCDC National Reference Laboratory in Abuja; Nigeria Institute of Medical Research in Lagos; Lagos State University Teaching Hospital and Irrua Specialist Teaching Hospital in Edo state.
Others are – African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID) in Osun State, University College Hospital, Ibadan, Virology Laboratory of Alex Ekwueme Federal Teaching Hospital Abakaliki, the Bio-Security Centre in Lagos State, and Defence Refence Laboratory in FCT.
Ihekweazu said: “The Presidential directive was to enable case finding, contact tracing and bringing in cases into hospitals. To improve on the efficiency of these process we have agreed on certain targets for all the states actively involved in it.
“The five key targets we are setting for our teams in Abuja and Lagos are to make sure that the collection of samples from symptomatic individuals happen within eight hours of notification of the state team.
“Number four is to isolate patients in less than six hours after they have received a positive result at the state level and we plan to isolate every confirmed case. So, we will measure ourselves with percentages on each of these indicators and use that to improve the effectiveness of the response.
“In addition to case finding, the second most important thing is contact tracing, that is, listing all the contacts and making sure we find all of them. There used to be a lot more when the flights were still coming in but now each case would have about 30 to 40 contact to follow up.
“To date, about 30 percent of all our cases have been found through this contact tracing. To make this possible who use an electronic platform, which helps us track all the cases, understand who is linked, which contact is linked to what case, and through that we can monitor which contacts are developing symptoms and then continue the chain of transmission from there.
“The WHO has helped us with a lot of their expertise, so people working across the country have literally all been withdrawn into supporting this response in Lagos.
“The policy on the use of face masks has almost been completed, in fact, the draft is now being looked at by various colleagues to make sure that we are all aligned and tomorrow or next, we will be releasing that policy for all of us to align with together”.
The Minister of Health, Dr. Osagie Ehanire, said: “We have also identified additional treatment centres in Utako and Mabushi in Abuja, which will give us a minimum of 400 beds and they are presently under renovation and repair. We inspected these sites over the weekend.
“The hospital accreditation committee which is led by the Honourable Commissioner of Lagos state and the team from Irrua and includes the NCDC AND Directors of the Ministry of Health, has inspected and accredited three centres in Abuja and will continue with that as time goes on”.
On the local manufacturing of personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators etc., Ehanire said: “I did say that the Ministry of Health held meetings with the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment and the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, to explore these prospects and we actually did talk about the possibility of being able to generate products here. The discussion was fruitful and they included in fact, the production of ventilators.
“The driving for at the time was the concern that if other countries are competing for the available resources in protection, particularly PPE and as we known at that time, other countries were looking for reagents, ventilators, masks, and even if you have your money you might not get it.
“So we were looking at our own options here, and the interest was very high, and there is a company that even wanted to be able to manufacture ventilators.
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