The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), says as part of effort to ensure the safe reopening of NYSC orientation camps across the country, all reporting youth corp members will be tested with one of the new Antigen-based test.
Chikwe Ihekweazu, the NCDC DG who said this at the PTF briefing on Tuesday in Abuja, informed that the process of procurements of the antigen-based test is almost complete.
“We will test everyone and that will enable us to keep our camps safe and also help us understand what is going on in the rest of the country”, he said.
The DG also informed that government has launched an IPC call vanguard in all the states and young people interested in IPC are being trained for self management and self regulation in the camps as they open.
Ihekweazu also noted that risk assessment of all the camps have been happening over the last few weeks while assuring parents that everything possible has been done with other stakeholders to ensure that youths are safe in camps and there won’t be an outbreak.
The DG said even if an outbreak occurs, plans have acted been to respond. He however urged parents to support their children fo tue right thing before resuming camps.
He also noted that though youths are at lower risk, lower risk does not mean no risk.
“We know that corp members are normally young mobile population.
Again we are counting on not only the young people going to camps, but parents, so we need the parents to support young people to do what they have to do”, he said.
“We have been working extremely hard over the last two months with NYSC to reopen youth service camp we have made a lot of progress to ensure that we can do that safely”, the DG assured.
