The Federal Ministry of Health through the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has formally announced the inclusion of four new molecular diagnostic laboratories into the coronavirus laboratory network.
In announcing the formal inclusion of the laboratories to the newsmen on Monday, Director General of NCDC, Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu said work is ongoing towards activation of two laboratories in Kano and Kaduna on Tuesday, while the remaining two laboratories will be activated in Jos and Maiduguri on Thursday,
He promised that the agency, in collaboration with relevant stakeholders, plans to establish a laboratory for testing coronavirus in each state but NCDC has decided to start with states that already has the baseline capacity to build on.
It would be recalled that with addition of four laboratories in the last one-and-half weeks, Nigeria has nine molecular diagnostic laboratory centres for coronavirus tests. These existing laboratories are African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID) in Osun State, University College Hospital, Ibadan, Virology Laboratory of Alex Ekwueme Federal Teaching Hospital Abakaliki, the Bio-Security Centre in Lagos State, and Defence Refence Laboratory in FCT.
Others are, National Reference Laboratory in Abuja; Nigeria Institute of Medical Research in Lagos; Lagos State University Teaching Hospital and Irrua Specialist Teaching Hospital in Edo state.
Read the Director General’s full statement below:
“We are working this week, activating two labs in Kano and Kaduna at the same time from tomorrow (Tuesday), and two labs in Jos and Maiduguri from Thursday.
“By the end of this week, we will have four new laboratories in Kano, Kaduna, Jos and Maiduguri fully active and then we will continue.
“We are solely assessing every state in the country, but we are starting with states that we already know have a baseline capacity to build on”.
“The Presidential directive was to enable case finding, contact tracing and bringing in cases into hospitals. To improve on the efficiency of these process we have agreed on certain targets for all the states actively involved in it.
“The five key targets we are setting for our teams in Abuja and Lagos are to make sure that the collection of samples from symptomatic individuals happen within eight hours of notification of the state team.
“Secondly, that the turnaround time for testing and resulting will be less than 24 hours. This is the case because sometimes samples come in late in the evening and have to be resulted the next day. The third is we plan to test 200 samples today in Lagos and 100 samples today in Abuja by the end of this week.
“Number four is to isolate patients in less than six hours after they have received a positive result at the state level and we plan to isolate every confirmed case. So, we will measure ourselves with percentages on each of these indicators and use that to improve the effectiveness of the response.
“In addition to case finding, the second most important thing is contact tracing, that is, listing all the contacts and making sure we find all of them. There used to be a lot more when the flights were still coming in but now each case would have about 30 to 40 contact to follow up.
“To date, about 30 percent of all our cases have been found through this contact tracing. To make this possible who use an electronic platform, which helps us track all the cases, understand who is linked, which contact is linked to what case, and through that we can monitor which contacts are developing symptoms and then continue the chain of transmission from there.
“The WHO has helped us with a lot of their expertise, so people working across the country have literally all been withdrawn into supporting this response in Lagos.
“The policy on the use of face masks has almost been completed, in fact, the draft is now being looked at by various colleagues to make sure that we are all aligned and tomorrow or next, we will be releasing that policy for all of us to align with together”.
