New Telegraph

Tomori: States creating doubts about reality of COVID-19

Oyewale Tomori is a Professor of Virology and former Vice-Chancellor of Redeemer’s University. In this interview with APPOLONIA ADEYEMI, he discusses the need for state governments to increase capacity for COVID-19 testing to enable the nation determine the true burden of the coronavirus pandemic. He also debunked claims that the declared daily number of new infections were mere scam

Strategy to make states take ownership of COVID-19 fight
While a few states have shown responsibility over the measures taken to prevent and control COVID-19, many others have been delinquent in taking ownership of the control of the pandemic. They have abandoned their role in protecting the life of the people or in palliating the hardship brought by the lockdown.
In fact, some of the states have blatantly refused to comply with federal government guidelines. They have taken laws into their own hands, contradicting approved control measures, of social distancing by going ahead to open places of worship contrary to the decision of the federal government.
If we must see the end of COVID-19, then there must be coherence and unity among our governments with the people playing the important and crucial role of protecting lives through strict compliance with life-saving guidelines. Lockdown or no lockdown, if we fail as citizens to play our part, the sky will be the limit of Nigeria’s COVID-19 curve.

Tackling overcrowded and overflowing Isolation centers?
If all positive symptomatic COVID-19 cases were admitted into isolation centers, there will be serious and severe overcrowding in our isolation centers. The governments are looking at using hotels and free public halls as additional spaces to mitigate the potential overcrowding of the isolation centers. Another option is to introduce home- based care, but this should be carefully considered so as not to create new home-based hubs of infection and community transmission.

Claims that COVID-19 is a scam
As of the claim by some people that the government is brandishing fake and high numbers of COVID-19 infections, my response is that the numbers are not only genuine, but are also not high enough.
The more we improve and increase our capacity for testing, the higher the number will be and the better for us to truly understand the magnitude of the problem we have in our hand.
My prayer is that none of the doubting Thomas will join the number of COVID-19 cases in Nigeria.

Controlling new COVID-19 infections
With our national character of living by lessons forgotten and preparing for battle at the war front, we have done reasonably well. It could have been worse! Could we have done better? Yes, of course, we could have done much better in certain areas- creating and increasing awareness, government thinking through and deeply on the issue of lock down and the citizens being a little more disciplined in complying with approved and tested steps to prevent the spread of the disease.
One more point is that our states and federal governments should have been more coherent in the efforts to control the disease; having one state going one way and another going the opposite direction, both not in the direction the federal government is pursuing, gives room for creating doubts in the minds of the people about the reality of the disease.
While the federal government was telling us about the danger of COVID-19, one state government demonstrating a high level of arrogant ignorance kept saying there is no COVID-19 in his state and used his executive power to wish off COVID-19. The other plastic professor governor displayed enough arrogance to show his limitations, propounding theories that are closer to fake than stale. He also deliberately put stumbling blocks in the path of truth with flamboyant display of masterful acting. We have not seeing the end of COVID-19, yet, with improved testing, we will see the rising, not the flattened curve, and the true burden of the disease.

Policy of discharging patients in the country – ranging from testing twice negative to testing negative only once
The Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has provided clear guidelines for discharge of recovered patients. This is a new disease and we are learning new things every day. Therefore, there cannot be any rigidity on the guidelines, which must be updated as more information is available.

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