The special centres springing up in Lagos to manage the deadly coronavirus might be empty today while the total number of confirmed cases in Nigeria is yet below 200, but doctors fighting the outbreak are warning against letting down guards in delusion as the worst may still be ahead of the country.
Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, began a 14-day lockdown only on Monday and residents have been caught flouting the stay at home order or are complaining, but one senior doctor at the centre of battle to contain the debilitating disease told BusinessDay in Lagos that the level of compliance with the lockdown still needed to be raised.
And this is why.
“Working with a population of 20 million in Lagos, if we assume that 0.1 percent of this may become infected, that will give us something like 200,000 cases in Lagos alone,” the doctor told our reporter.
“And you cannot even say this is the worst-case scenario yet. The number of beds in the centres today is around 300 and not all have ventilators. So, you can see the kind of risk we are talking about and why the people must be made to fully comply with the lockdown,” he said.
According to the doctor, “The modelling we are doing assumes our peculiar handicaps – small testing size and our not-so-successful efforts at contact tracing. If you imagine that a high percentage of those infected may not even know and these people are out there still infecting people. So, you could really have an explosion in a matter of weeks as has occurred in many other cities around the world.”
He said if anyone is complaining about the lockdown, he or she would need to consider what is happening in Italy and Spain where hospitals have been overwhelmed by the number of cases of infected people for whom beds and ventilators cannot be found.
“We are talking about planning for an emergency,” he said. “You don’t just plan for only what you can see as this will no longer be emergency. You have got to go beyond what you know or can see. We cannot afford to underestimate or under-prepare.”
While urging strict adherence to the lockdown, the doctor said, “Yes, it is true that we are not yet seeing a deluge but it will not be until another four-six weeks when all current infections including those infected quietly run their course that we can know what is happening.”
On Tuesday, doctors at the epicenter in China shared experiences with their Nigerian counterparts via a webinar to which BusinessDay was invited.
Junwei SU, one of the doctors on the call who works with the Zhenjian University Teaching Hospital in Fahzu (where 1,300 patients have been treated for the coronavirus infection without any death or infection to its staff), told her Nigerian colleagues it was very essential to mount an effective ‘identify and isolate’ programme that keeps all confirmed cases in approved isolation centres for treatment.
According to her, “This Covid-19 virus is so powerful in transmission and no effort should be spared in protecting the general population.”
Nigeria now has 151 confirmed coronavirus cases with two deaths but has been unable as yet to ramp up the number of those tested daily.
By March 25, 2020, only 262 persons had been tested in Nigeria, but that figure is expected to go up significantly on back of the testing kits donated by the Chinese billionaire Jack Ma.
ANTHONIA OBOKOH
