• Friday, March 29, 2024
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BusinessDay

These numbers show Nigeria’s poor outing among West African countries in COVID-19 fight

COVID-19 in Nigeria

Nigeria has some of the worst coronavirus statistics among countries of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), according to data published by the West African Health Organisation (WAHO), a specialised institution in the region responsible for health issues.

Among the 15-member countries of ECOWAS, Nigeria, which has about half of the region’s population and accounts for over 70 percent of regional GDP, has recorded far more number of infected cases and deaths, as well as a low number of people who have recovered from the virus, BusinessDay analysis of the data published on Monday shows. This is an indication that Africa’s largest economy needs to step up its game in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

Nigeria with a total of 12,486 confirmed cases of the virus has recorded 3,959 recoveries (or 31.7 percent of total positive cases) as of June 7.

That’s poor when compared with the country’s next-door neighbour, Ghana, which has had a recovery rate of 37.7 percent. Ghana with a total of 9,638 confirmed cases has reported 3,636 recoveries.

For Senegal, which is the third highest infected country in the region, more than half of its infected patients have so far recovered from the virus. Some 2,588 or 59.8 percent of its 4,328 coronavirus cases have recovered.

Similar cases hold when compared with Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Togo, Liberia, Benin and the Gambia.

The aforementioned countries have had a recovery rate of 69.1 percent, 48.6 percent, 56 percent, 89.1 percent, 62 percent, 86.8 percent, 48 percent, 50 percent, 54 percent, 57.9 percent and 80.8 percent, respectively.

Nigeria’s recovery number was only much better than Guinea Bissau whose recovery rate was calculated at 11.2 percent.

Critics say the Nigerian government has to do more in liberating its citizens from the disaster that accompanies the virus, especially since the country has opted to reopen its economy for businesses to commence gradually.

“Nigeria was never prepared for the pandemic as it got the timing of the response wrong at different levels,” Debo Odulana, founder/CEO at Doctoora E-Health Ltd, a real estate start-up operating an online marketplace for healthcare.

“The poor statistics in deaths and recovery cases show two things. First is that a lot of people are dying before they get admitted and the second being that a lot of people are spending too long on admission because their conditions have deteriorated before they were admitted,” Odulana said.

He explained that because of the lag in testing and the inability of the government to upscale the country’s health infrastructure, the virus was quick to get into community transmission before it was officially announced, hence it put the country in a space where it had to cater for more people than the available resources.

“If you look at Lagos, for example, where testing is higher, we are seeing a better picture but other states that have contributed more to the deaths, for a significant period, they were either not testing or providing the capacity of treatment,” Odunlana said on phone.

In terms of deaths from the virus, Nigeria has far more deaths, accounting for about half of the total 772 deaths in the region.

BusinessDay analysis of the figure shows that Nigeria has the sixth highest number of deaths as a percentage of infected cases.

In Nigeria, three out of every 100 persons infected with the virus die from it. Nigeria’s death-to-confirmed cases ratio is only better than Liberia (8.4 percent), Niger (6.7 percent), Burkina Faso (6 percent), Mali (6 percent), and Gambia (3.8 percent).

However, the death per 100 infected cases in Nigeria, at 3 percent, is higher when compared with Ghana (0.5 percent), Senegal (1 percent), Guinea (0.6 percent), Côte d’Ivoire’s (1 number), Guinea Bissau (0.9 number), Cape Verde (0.9 number), and Benin (1.1 number).

Nigeria has done far lower testing when compared with many other countries in the region due to its limited number of testing centres, yet it has been slow in on-boarding the private sector to assist in ramping up testing.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that countries must carry out aggressive testing in order to help in tracing and isolating early those who must have been infected with the virus.

As of June 8, Nigeria has done 78,244 tests for the virus, data from the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) show.

As a percentage of the population, Nigeria has only conducted 380 tests per one million population, data compiled from Worldometer show, lower than Ghana’s 7,588, Senegal’s 3,245, Cote d’Ivoire’s 1,228, and Guinea Bissau’s 763.

Nigeria has defended the slow pace of testing for the coronavirus, saying authorities have adopted a strategy of “managed acceleration” and won’t pool samples to multiply testing capacity as is currently being done in Ghana, which has rolled out one of the largest testing programmes in the region.

But health experts still say there needs to be more testing done in order to get the curve flattened.

Saliu Oseni, national deputy secretary, Nigeria Medical Association (NMA), said the only parameter that looks close to realistic in Nigeria’s COVID-19 numbers is the death rate.

His position was based on Nigeria’s insufficient testing capacity that would enable it get a true picture of those infected with the virus.

“We are not testing enough to enable us monitor people that have symptoms, meaning we might be having more cases of the virus than the numbers published,” he said.

Oseni explained that though Nigeria has not been doing badly in the fight against the pandemic, he believes the country can do better.

“If the recommendations of the association were keenly taken from the beginning, we might not have had the high cases we are seeing as we could have succeeded with the first lockdown. However, we are here because we didn’t succeed with that,” he said.

Oseni said the steepening curve is due to the backlog test that is coming as the country is running the test of disease contracted weeks ago.

He said the government should improve on its testing capacity, and also improve on the timing of test results to be not more than 24-48 hours so that a patient infected with the virus can be treated immediately.

Since the first index case was reported in late February, Nigeria has recorded some 12,801 cases of infection, 4,040 of which have recovered while 361 have died.

With the lag in testing, health experts say the country is yet to reach its peak in COVID-19 numbers.
The country’s health sector is currently overwhelmed due to poor infrastructure to meet an increasing number of cases. Nigeria’s over 8,000 active coronavirus patients are jostling for 6,994 available bed-spaces.

As confirmed cases of the virus rise, the government is proposing a rationing of bed-spaces such that those infected with mild cases of the virus will be treated at home while those with underlying health conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and hypertension would be treated in isolation centres.

Odulana of Doctoora said Nigeria has to admit that the pandemic situation is here to stay, and thus design its healthcare model or health system to be able to cater for COVID-19 cases.

He admonished that the same way the country has centres for HIV management, tuberculosis management and malaria control, it should have a portion of its health system directed at managing COVID.

This might require the government to rethink the health stricture by having dedicated COVID treatment centres and dedicated home isolation centres, he said.

“Reducing the infection spread boils down to citizens playing their role as well as the government making strict the needed guidelines to ensure social distancing and proper hygiene are upheld,” he said.