Nail them

By Editorial

Tackling the COVID-19 conundrum presents its own challenges in humongous dimensions. Already, the authorities are fast running out of space to continue to keep the bevy of patients that emerge daily.

Hence, hotels, schools, seized private properties and every available space are now being converted into isolation centres.

On another front, the authorities have had to contend with exasperated patients bolting away from isolation centres in parts of the country; there have also been restive ones who have taken umbrage at their conditions of stay and visited their spleen on hapless officials who are risking their lives to keep them alive.

The task of managing the COVID-19 pandemic is, therefore, daunting enough for the authorities to be distracted by the infamy of some disingenuous Nigerians who are now said to be selling fake COVID-19 test kits via the black market.

“There is a growing black market in rapid diagnostic test kits in Nigeria,” the Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, raised the alarm at a press conference in Abuja.

He said some organisations were selling “what they call antibody tests,” which he warned are incapable of giving valid COVID-19 results.

This distasteful piece of news is a sad commentary on the declivity of our humanity and moral probity as a people. It is bad enough that the coronavirus pandemic is ravaging the world without hope of a solution in sight.

It is also bad that we do not have sufficient means of determining who has the virus or does not. That some crooked Nigerians have seen this as a means to play smart by selling fake test kits in the black market worsens matters. They have brought our culture of faking things to an intolerable level.

The problem is that many unsuspecting persons or institutions will buy the fake test kits in circulation, thus wasting scarce resources in the process. Yet, the kits cannot accurately determine the status of those they are used to test.

The NCDC boss shed more light on this. He said: “It is important to understand what an antibody test is. When an antibody test works, it only tells you if you have been exposed and infected.

It doesn’t tell you if you have an active infection or not. Therefore, on its own, it is very difficult to use it to make a clinical decision.”

Dr. Ihekweazu emphasised that the test kits will only show if one has the virus at present and nothing more. “It won’t tell you if you have had it before or if you will have it in the future.

So, even if he is positive, it tells you, ‘Yes he’s infected now.’ But if it is negative, it gives you a false sense of security around your susceptibility to future infections”, he explained, warning: “We have to be careful in what we buy, how we use it and how we interpret the results that it provides.”

Yet, the implacable coronavirus does not give any sign of abating soon, with casualties rising both globally and nationally.

This, therefore, is not the time to allow distractions from some unpatriotic elements who seek pecuniary gains at the expense of human life.

So, the sellers of those fake test kits must be arrested. The ruinous ‘Nigerian factor’ should not be allowed to creep in and worsen an already precarious situation.

The law enforcement agents should move in quickly, work on the appropriate clues to determine where those kits are being brought and bust the ring. The masterminds of the fraudulent chain should be fished out and prosecuted to deter others.