By Aiyeku Timothy
The Federal Government has said that the compliance level of Nigerians will determine whether a fresh lockdown will be imposed, amid the second wave of the pandemic.
The National Coordinator of the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19, Dr Sani Aliyu made this known on Tuesday morning in a television program as he insisted that no decision has been made on a fresh lockdown.
His words: “The behaviour of the public when it comes to these rules matters. We have countries abroad that have very strict non-pharmaceutical intervention measures and everybody follows it.
“The flights are coming in, schools are open, churches are open, and they don’t have COVID-19 problems because everybody observes the rules.
“We definitely don’t want a lockdown and because we don’t want to lock down, we need to make sure we do everything we can to prevent ourselves from reaching that state where the government will have to take action,” he said.
It would be recalled that a lockdown was imposed by the Federal Government in March 2020 in Abuja, Lagos and Ogun States for over five weeks during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The effect of the lockdown led to job losses as airlines, hotels, banks, among others were forced to cut their workforce due to the crushing economic effect of the lockdown.
With the increase in the number of cases recorded in the last one week, the federal government is under pressure to impose another lockdown but adamant for fear of the consequences on the economy.
