COVID-19 curve continues to grow slowly – NCDC

Moses Emorinken, Abuja

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has hinted that although the country has not experienced an exponential increase in the number of COVID-19 cases, the infection curve continues to grow slowly.

It encouraged everyone to take responsibility by adhering to the non-pharmaceutical preventive measures by wearing masks, social distancing, avoiding large gatherings and maintain hand hygiene.

The agency further stressed that achieving the ambitious target of having 2 million people tested in 3 months is not only the responsibility of the Federal Government but for the entire citizenry of the country.

Speaking during a television interview, the Director-General of the NCDC, Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, said: “There are two things about the curve that we need to remember. If you look at the curve in many other countries across the world, we must really be grateful that we have not seen an exponential increase in cases that many people predicted in Nigeria.

“At one point we thought cases will really rise very sharply. When we saw the outbreak in Kano state we were really worried and thankfully we are seeing improvement in the incidence of new cases in highly populated cities of Kano and many other parts of the country.

“Lagos is still driving the outbreak and we continue to work intensively with the government of Lagos State.

“Even though we present one curve nationally but remember that in real life there are different curves across the country.

“The good news is that we haven’t had the exponential increase in cases. The bad news is that the curve continues to grow slowly but as we continue to respond, where the curve goes is not inevitable – it is dependent on the actions that will take.

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“There has been a lot of discussions around the diagnostic and treatment side, yes, all of that is important and government is really focusing on scaling that at Federal and State levels but what will ultimately lead to a reduction in transmission and what has led to a reduction in transmission in countries that have succeeded is where you have a country and a population come together and do what is necessary.

“If you look at figures coming out of countries like Japan and many other countries in Asia and western Europe, you will hardly see anyone not wearing a mask. That is so important. The challenge of not gathering is difficult, but we keep saying that there is no other way at the moment. It doesn’t reduce the cases to zero but it will reduce the numbers.”

The NCDC boss added: “Testing in itself is not going to stop transmission but what it does is that it gives us a window into where we are as a country. We can’t really speak about whether we have peaked or not or how well our control methods are working or how people are coming into care if we are not testing. It is the only way we can know.

“So we set ourselves an extremely ambitious target of testing 2 million people in 3 months. We have gotten to 200,000 –  just under 200,000. We are nowhere where we want to be but remember that this is not a target for NCDC or the Presidential Task Force but the target is for Nigeria collectively.

“How do we as a country achieve this because other countries are moving ahead of us. We also have to demonstrate that we have the capacity to catch up not to compete but to show that we can find a way of managing this outbreak ourselves.

“The challenge now is not the lab capacity –  we have the labs, the reagents and we continue to manage an extremely complex supply chain to make sure labs are functional. Although there are some delays in getting results, we have built up a system now that can serve Nigeria and the system will keep improving everyday.

“What we need now are the States government, epidemiologists and clinicians to encourage the collection of the right samples and get them to the lab and we will test and give you your results back. This is not an NCDC effort alone; many of the labs are owned by the States government and some even by the private sector.

“Yes, we set ourselves an ambitious target, yes we are still going to push towards achieving that target, but even if we don’t achieve it, efforts have really led to some incredible progress already and we must keep pushing because at the end of the three months, the outbreak is not stopping.”