The sharp spike seen in the spread of the new Omicron coronavirus variant in some sub-Saharan African countries is occurring without reflection on Nigeria’s epidemic curve, a week after the variant emerged.
Nigeria’s course of COVID-19 infection has maintained a daily average of 80 cases in the last one month, free of any repeat of the last daily peak of 711 cases recorded in October, which stoked fears of a fourth wave.
Cases in the last one week have hovered below 200 daily.
However, the emergence of Omicron has seen cases surge by 105 percent through the African continent to 52, 300 cases, with South Africa solely accounting for 31,000 new COVID-19 infections, the Africa Centre for Disease Control states.
Data from South Africa, for instance, demonstrates Omicron is driving an upswing that is steeper than Delta as daily new cases and hospitalisations have risen more than five times in a week.
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But the lack of widespread testing in Nigeria and the low capacity for genomic surveillance has had experts cast doubts on whether the figures aggregated by the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) captures most cases in several parts of the country.
Diseases experts say the detection of the new variant by South Africa and the evidence of rising infections that has come to light is both a result of resilient surveillance and testing, an area Nigeria is yet to fully develop.
The rate of testing for COVID-19 in Nigeria at 3.4 million lags behind 19.5 million in South Africa, 10.4 million in Morocco, 3.8 million in Ethiopia and 3.6 million in Egypt, data on Worldometer, a COVID-19 data gathering site, shows.
South Africa has tested 323, 509 of every one million persons compared with 16, 309 in one million in Nigeria.
Oyewale Tomori, a professor of virology told BusinessDay that testing in Nigeria is not enough, untimely and inconsistent, noting that countries serious about curbing the virus test as many contacts as they can reach and go after community testing of regular people who are not sick.
Although Lagos, Nigeria’s epicentre of COVID-19 infection stayed put on testing for a period, with follow-ups on contract tracing, such efforts have been dwindling.
“The risks are high for Nigeria, especially with low vaccine coverage, insensitive surveillance system (genomic sequencing in particular), and uncoordinated lab testing. NCDC is charged with coordinating lab activities among other duties. But rather than coordinate, it tends more to controlling and states end up doing what they like,” Tomori said.
According to the former vice-chancellor at Redeemer’s University, Ede, while there is no benchmark rate on testing as it depends on the epidemiology of the disease, anything below 10 per cent of the population is poor.
Going by NCDC data, Nigeria has done slightly over 3.5 million tests, marking 1.6 percent of the population.
According to the Africa CDC, a total of around 8.6 million infections have been registered in Africa so far, causing more than 223,000 deaths.
As of December 1, 52 new confirmed cases and 1 death brought confirmed cases to a total of 214, 270 cases and 2, 978 deaths recorded in 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.
This, on low ebb, has been fuelling arguments that the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t a real threat to the country’s health systems of economy.
But Nigeria has experienced three waves of the virus and a fourth wave could be looming if Omicron finds its rhythm in Africa’s most populous nation.
“Of course, there is a high and great opportunity for the emergence of more variants in environments with low COVID-19 vaccine coverage and disregard for and poor compliance with non-pharmaceutical interventions. Since we do not know how the next variant will behave, this is a delicate situation with possible dire consequences,” Tomori said.
John Nkengasong, head of Africa CDC last week expressed concern over the holiday season and fears a sharp increase of COVID-19 numbers due to gatherings over Christmas and New Year.
Severity profile
The World Health Organisation on Thursday said it has seen reports of cases of Omicron that go from mild diseases to severe diseases.
There is also some indication that some of the patients are presenting with mild diseases but again, it’s early days and we do have a surveillance bias right now in terms of the cases being detected.
In addition, scientists in South Africa tracking the spread of Omicron said Thursday they are seeing a rise in coronavirus reinfections in people who had recovered from COVID-19 as the country reported another sharp daily rise in new cases.
Their conclusions suggest previous infection provides less protection against the new variant than against earlier versions.
They also offer a possible explanation of why Omicron has been able to spread so quickly in the country, outpacing even the highly transmissible Delta variant, which is currently dominant in much of the rest of the world.
South Africa’s biggest private health insurer and other health experts estimate that around 70 percent of the country’s 60 million citizens have already had COVID-19 and hence some immunity against new infection. Omicron appears to be able to evade some of this immunity, giving it an advantage in a population with a high infection rate, the scientists said in a research paper, which hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
