The city of Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital city and the epicentre of the country’s COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic reached a major milestone on Monday 6 April 2020, when it did not report any confirmed case of this virus that has continued to spread across the globe including new cities in Nigeria.
According to the official records of the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), six new cases were confirmed in Nigeria on April 6: 2 in Kwara, 2 in Edo, 1 in Rivers and 1 in Abuja, the country’s capital city.
“As at 09:30 pm 6th April there are 238 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported in Nigeria. Thirty-five have been discharged with five deaths,” NCDC stated.
Lagos has been critical and central to Nigeria’s COVID-19 outbreak, accounting for 50.4% of the total number of confirmed cases. The state has also been at the centre of discussions around evaluation of the effectiveness and feasibility of lockdown measures to curtail the spread of the coronavirus in Nigeria.
Experts noted that the development may not indicate that the disease is slowing down in Nigeria; they however noted that it could serve as motivation for health workers and those that are directly involved in the control of the outbreak in the city while also encouraging more residents of the city to comply with the government’s stay-at-home directive.
Expanding COVID-19 testing capacity has also been identified as a major requirement to stem the spread of the virus in Lagos and across Nigeria.
According to the NCDC, the next targets are aimed at scaling up testing, isolate cases early and improve contact tracing.
Speaking at the daily press briefing by the COVID-19 Presidential Task Force, the Director General of the NCDC, Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu noted that the center’s five major targets for disease response this week are Collection of samples within 8 hours of notification of team, turnaround time for testing and results must be less than 24 hours, 2000 tests conducted daily in Lagos and 1000 daily in the FCT by end of week.
The task force is also aiming to achieve isolation of patients within less than 6 hours after confirmation of positive results while also ensuring the isolation of each confirmed case.