New worrisome dimension to COVID-9 transmission as hospitals become danger zones

A new worrisome dimension to the transmission of the coronavirus pandemic is fast evolving as more and more health workers, who are frontline care givers, are now testing positive for the virus, making hospitals in Nigeria danger zones.

Many doctors, nurses and other indispensable health workers, even outside COVID-19 testing and isolation centres, have tested positive for the virus, meaning that many ‘innocent’ patients with undetected coronavirus infection are out there being attended to innocently by these health workers.

Only last weekend, the president of Association of Resident Doctors (ARD) of University College Hospital, Ibadan, Adedayo Williams, was reported to have tested positive for coronavirus.

“Having been on the field caring for others, I thought it wise to subject myself to a voluntary screening for COVID-19,” the ARD president said, revealing that the result of the test was positive.

Williams’ case came on the heels of three out of five doctors that attended to an ‘innocent’ patient at the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital that tested positive. The patient they attended to was later tested for coronavirus and she returned positive.

“This kind of situation can also explain the huge increase in the number of confirmed cases we have seen in the past few day,” said Aliyu Sokomba, the president of the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD), at a media programme in Lagos on Monday.

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Just last night, Sunday, 19th of April, 86 new cases of Coronavirus were confirmed by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), taking the total number of confirmed cases in Nigeria to 627. Out of the 86 new cases, 70 were in Lagos, 7 in FCT, 3 in Katsina, 3 in Akwa Ibom, 1 in Jigawa, 1 in Bauchi and 1 in Borno.

Lagos remains the epicenter of the disease and by the last confirmed cases, the number of confirmed cases in the state has jumped to 376, up from 306 in just 24 hours.

High impact areas in the state are Lagos Mainland Local Government which has the highest number of cases with 114, followed closely by Eti-Osa with 86 confirmed cases and Ikeja with 41. Others are Alimosho with 15; Kosofe 12 and Shomolu 8. Mushin and Oshodi/Isolo local governments have seven confirmed cases each.

Sokomba fears that there will be sharper rise in numbers in the days and weeks ahead with the sharp rise in community transmission. He noted that transmission has graduated from people with travel history to local transmission and, sadly, now to hospital transmission.

Some doctors say Lagos is now ramping up testing, meaning that the number of new cases will inevitably rise faster in the days ahead. But Sokomba insists that the hospital transmission is a huge factor, explaining that many people from the community go to hospitals and infect the doctors and nurses who come in contact with them.

“Doctors, in the course of their duty, come in contact with many people in a single day and the possibility of these doctors getting infected is high. Patients can also contract this disease from the doctors who are infected,” he said, calling on the government to go beyond only doctors who work at isolation centres to also provide personal protective equipment (PPE) for doctors in the hospitals.

Sokomba commended the Lagos State government and the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) for their house-to-house testing initiatives, saying however that they can do more. He advised that the country as a whole needs to do more testing and even review the testing approach.

Nigeria with 627 confirmed cases as at 11pm Sunday night has tested less than 10,000 cases which lag behind its African peers. Ghana is said to have tested over 60,000 of its citizens while South Africa, according to reports, has done over 100,000 tests.