The Lagos State government says it carries out 150 Coronavirus tests per day at the three reference laboratories in the state and the survival rate in the state is 100 percent.
Akin Abayomi, the state commissioner for health, disclosed this at a press briefing in Alausa on Tuesday.
“We still have excess testing capacity; we have three reference laboratories, each of those facilities is testing up 50 daily. If you add that up we have 150 tests per day and we are increasing that capacity by the day.
“Hopefully we will be able to get to 200 and soon we might be able to get to 300,” he said.
The reference laboratories are located at the Virology Laboratory at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, Idi-Araba, the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research, Yaba, Lagos, and the Infectious Disease Hospital, Yaba.
The state is not using the rapid test because it is inaccurate, Abayomi said.
“We are not using the rapid test at the moment. Rapid testing is inaccurate and unless we can validate the confidence of the result we are getting, we will not be deploying rapid tests because they will have severe consequences if we are misdiagnosing patients.
Read also: Coronavirus: Opera users to access information on its enhanced mobile browsers
“We will rather escalate our molecular biological tests which are harder to do, more expensive, more time consuming but at least we know it is 100 percent accurate.
“It also helps us to know if a patient is no longer contagious. And that is very important for us to determine when we can release a patient back into community,” he said.
While speaking on fatality rate, the commissioner said mortality rate of Covid-19 was variable from country to country, noting that an average from China was 2.5%, in Italy it appears to be a certain rate of 5 percent, in other words 5 out 100 people were dying of Covid-19 in some parts of Europe.
According to Abayomi, the fatality death of the virus is still very low. However, Lagos has 100 percent survival, and we have discharged eight persons and there is nobody in the ward that is looking like they are dying.
“Most of our patients are experiencing a very mild to moderate degree of illness. In fact, we don’t have anybody that requires ventilation at the moment, which is a symptom of what we will describe as severe disease.
“If we are to put some percentages on the 66, about 33 of them are showing mild symptoms, the remaining 33 are showing moderate disease symptoms just characterised by severe fever, feeling weak, some coughing, headaches and body pains. It is not extending to affect the organs such that we have lung or kidney failure,” he said.
On the Jack Ma donation, the commissioner said the equipment would be apportioned according to the needs of each state by the Federal Government.
“We are not under stress in terms of access to Personal Protective Equipment or testing capacity, and we know in due cause we will get our portion from Abuja,” he said.
