COVID-19: Rivers races to prevent community transmission

By Mike Odiegwu, Port Harcourt

Rivers State health team has intensified its efforts to prevent community transmission of the Coronavirus pandemic in the state following the circumstances surrounding the latest case of a patient in the state.

It was gathered that the health team led by the Commissioner for Health, Prof. Princewill Chike, were making frantic moves to identify persons, who came in contact with the latest case identified as a hotel manager.

Chike earlier confirmed that identifying the latest case, a 61-year-old resident of the state was difficult lamenting that the patient compounded the situation by being evasive.

While some sources said the health team traced him to a community, Chike explained that the hotel manager cared for his boss, the owner of the hotel, who returned from Abuja in February but took ill and died mysteriously.

Chike said: “A 61-year-old hotel manager, who had attended to his boss, the owner of Mingi Suites, who returned from Abuja in February 2020.

“The rapid response team was notified of the sudden and mysterious death of the owner of the hotel last week and decided to place all his contacts under watch.

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“The positive confirmed case is a resident of Rivers State, a manager in one of the hotel suites in the state.

“Once the testing guidelines were expanded, samples were collected from the hotel manager for COVID-19 testing. His result is the positive sample for COVID-19 in the state”.

Chike also said as part of measures to prevent the spread of the virus, the response team initiated environmental decontamination of all the affected areas.

“A lot of members of the public had become evasive, hence it took us time to come to this particular patient because of the level of his evasiveness and we are not happy about that”, he said.

He vowed to severely deal with any private health facility or pharmacist without government accreditation caught treating COVID-19 patients.

He said: “Any private health facility, pharmacist or chemist caught by the Ministry of Health, treating COVID-19 patients would be shut down and taken over by the state government, except that private health facility is accredited and permitted to treat COVID-19 patients, if you suspect any patient exhibiting symptoms, report to the rapid response team.”