From Moses Emorinken, Abuja
Four new molecular diagnostic laboratories for testing Coronavirus (COVID-19) are to be activated this week, Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) Director-General Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu said on Monday.
Ihekweazu, who broke the news at the daily briefing of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 in Abuja, said the facilities will boost local testing capacity.
He said: “We are working this week, activating two labs in Kano and Kaduna at the same time from tomorrow (today), 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. They are – NCDC National Reference Laboratory in Abuja, Nigeria Institute of Medical Research in Lagos, Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), and Irrua Specialist Teaching Hospital in Edo State.
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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 the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
The NCDC boss added: “The Presidential directive was to enable case finding, contact tracing and bringing in cases into hospitals. To improve on the efficiency of this 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 to make sure that the collection of samples from symptomatic individuals happen within eight hours of notification of the state team.
“Secondly, that the turnaround time for testing and resulting will be less than 24 hours. This is the case because sometimes samples come in late in the evening and have to be resulted the next day. The third is we plan to test 200 samples today in Lagos and 100 samples today in Abuja by the end of this week.
“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 contacts to follow up.
“To date, about 30 per cent of all our cases have been found through this contact tracing. To make this possible, we 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 (World Health Organisation) 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.”
Health Minister 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.”
