The Minister gave this information in Abuja at the daily briefing of the presidential Task team while fielding questions from newsmen.
“In response to morbidity pattern of the fatalities we had had to COVID infection, 70 percent of them had hypertension and diabetes and the rest were kidney diseases and HIV, tuberculosis,” He said.
The Minister also noted that findings from the analysis of death pattern show that 70 percent to 30 percent of male and female are the death ratio of the ailment.
He posited that about 70 percent of the fatalities were persons who are 60 years old, while the majority of positives are between the ages of 29 and 49 and these are the most active cases in life.
On officials sent on finding mission to Cross River state, he said, “The fact finding mission from the federal Ministry of health sent to Calabar has returned successfully with a report and we have identified areas in need of help and upgrade including laboratory infrastructure.”
“The state of readiness of the state with respect to covid 19 is reasonable and includes setting up of taskforce, production of PPEs,facemasks of which samples are provided for our team and would be forwarded to NAFDAC for validation.
“The areas of strengths and weaknesses, are being analysed to improve areas of collaborations. The critical findings is that no case of Covid 19 has since. Been reported since the team returns from Calabar to Abuja.
He emphatically noted that,”16 cases were tested and of which all were negative.28 persons of interests have been followed up of which none of them presented symptoms after their 14 days of quarantine.”
“We are going to be working with states to establish protocols and improve communications of reporting to be reporting to our reporting centre in Abuja.”He said.
On efforts to protect health workers against covid infection, he said, “We are scaling health and training of health workers in order to prevent infection and control,and so infection among health care workers is reducing.”
“In Kano, the health care workers, patent and proprietary medicine vendors are retraining to be sustained so that nobody would forget the protocols for this highly infectious disease.
“State level infection prevention and control measures and training are being carried out working with partners also being standardised and stepped down to community level.
He noted that “The new medical team has been assembled to take over the management of the Thisday dome centre which was donated to the government by the private sector.”
“It is a very comprehensive treatment centre for second, third and fourth level treatment which has dialysis machines, ventilators and facilities for waste disposal. Admissions in Thisday dome commences now.”
On proposed industrial actions by Lagos doctors, he said, “Ahead of the threatened industrial actions in Lagos state among doctors,I spoke with the Lagos state chapters president of the associations yesterday evening to dissuade the doctors from the sit at home protest that they wanted to conduct.
“I also listened to their complaints of harassment at security checkpoints and I communicated this to the commissioner of health in Lagos with the suggestion that he facilitates issuing of special pass that identifies health workers to ease their transit from and to their works and to ease screening by security agents.
“It is also my recommendations that this is issued to health workers in all states and FCT to forestall misidentifications.
