One Italian in, 1,905 dead: Nigeria’s race against COVID-19

The collection of samples and testing remained challenging as the government’s facilities neared a tipping point.

When COVID-19 hit Iyabo’s 70-year-old mother, she and her siblings whispered to the doctors not to disclose it to her, though the “COVID-19, Infectious Diseases Centre” sign was visible all over the isolation centre in Yaba.

They feared she would die of anxiety long before the virus pounced on her underlying illnesses – diabetes and hypertension.

But when the Lagos Commissioner for health visited, and COVID-19 kept springing out of his words as he moved around the ward, Iyabo’s mother started panicking.

Though Mama Iyabo was semi-literate, the children successfully convinced her that COVID-19 was not the only disease treated at the centre and that she only had a simple infection well under control.

“God bless you,” she said to Iyabo, after being discharged and told she had been down with COVID-19 and would have to restrict interactions with others for the next two weeks.

“If I had known that it was COVID from the onset, I might not be here. Maybe fear and high blood pressure would have killed me,” the old woman said.

The septuagenarian is among the 131,722 people, who though in the vulnerable demography, survived the pandemic in Nigeria, officially.

The first of the 1,905 who have died was Suleiman Achimugu, the ex-managing director of Pipelines and Products Marketing Company, a subsidiary of the national oil company. Among the high profile deaths are Abba Kyari, chief of staff to President Muhammadu Buhari, and Abiola Ajimobi, former governor of Oyo State.

What began as a public health crisis imported by an Italian in Lagos who tested positive to SARS-CoV-2 on February 27, 2020, morphed into many things, escalating insecurity and causing a major economic crisis. The pandemic has unsettled individuals, small and large businesses.

How Nigeria’s public health sector responded to the Ebola outbreak offered optimism. The structures used to curtail the more deadly virus were still in place and could buy the country some time. The coronavirus proved evasive and its rate of transmission sent many quickly into hospital wards, exposing lapses in already fragile healthcare infrastructure.

All over the world, the spread of the disease was fast and furious, outmanoeuvring measures to curb it and overwhelming even countries with the most advanced healthcare facilities. The number of those dying from the virus alarmed the world as it tracked pandemic in real-time. What was the fate of those with poor healthcare systems?

In Nigeria, the picture got even clearer when some of Nigeria’s high and mighty had to be whisked into Lagos because the hospitals that could come to their rescue were all in the commercial capital and so few.

Average Nigerians on the other hand grappled with rejections at public hospitals that were ill-equipped to detect the virus.

The country initially had to make do with the available equipment for checks at all its entry points while it waited for makeshift isolation and treatment centres built from scratch across many states thanks to one of the largest private-sector interventions in Nigeria’s recent history, estimated at N21 billion.

But the collection of samples and testing remained challenging as the government’s facilities neared a tipping point. Thirteen laboratories country-wide with the capacity to test 1,500 samples daily were producing only 600 tests daily on the back of low sample collection.

By June, Nigeria had completed only 48,000 tests compared with Ghana’s 197,000; Mauritius’ 104,000; Uganda’s 86,000; Kenya’s 61,000 and South Africa’s 550,000. More than half the tests done in South Africa were accounted for by the private sector.

In most cities in Nigeria, it took an average wait of four days to get samples collected because of the number of those waiting to be tested at the available government testing centres. And even after the sample had been taken, it took another three days to receive the result.

In those seven days, an individual with the virus is left to infect several others while waiting for a test result before being taken into isolation.

With all available resources devoted to testing for and treating the virus, patients with other illnesses in need of medical attention were denied access. Doctors who lacked rapid testing kits and personal protective equipment ran the risk of exposure to the virus if they attended to patients without testing them.

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) licensed private laboratories to join the government effort to diagnose the virus months after the queue for those desperate to test for the deadly virus grew longer.

By then Nigeria had confirmed nearly 20,000 cases and 500 dead at the peak of the first wave of the pandemic.