Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna state, says the state government has blamed the spike in the number of COVID-19 cases in the state to the almajiris who returned to the state from Kano.
El-Rufai, who spoke on Saturday at the 24the edition of The Platform hosted by the Covenant Nation, ssid that 21 persons among the people received from Kano have tested positive for the dreadful disease.
He said, “As I announced some days back, we received 169 Almajiris from Kano, and so far 21 of them have tested positive. We expect more to test positive; the spike in our numbers have largely been the Almajiris and other people that have come in.”
According to bim, the state government has converted a hotel to isolation centre to take care of the almajiris received into the state.
El-Rufai said his state was the first to implement a lockdown in Nigeria due to the fact that they considered that the best strategy was to stem the spread of the disease because the state did not have the capacity to deal with it.
He said the state had about 20 intensive care unit beds at the beginning of the pandemic, with the entire country having less than 400.
The governor said if they recorded 1,000 cases, it would not have a place to treat them, so it had to lock down to prevent the spread.
“This is an opportunity to strengthen our public health infrastructure. We are in the process of building a permanent infectious disease hospital. The one that we have is just 16 beds,” he added.
“We are building a 139-bed infectious disease hospital to be completed in the next eight weeks. We are building infectious diseases wards in each of our general hospitals in each of the 23 local governments.
“This will be 20 to 30 beds in each local government. We realised from Wuhan that the way to deal with this is to trace, test, treat.”
The governor ssid that the state had taken extra measures to protect and encourage frontline workers.
El-Rufai said that the government has procured a life insurance package for frontline health workers dealing with COVID-19 to the tune of N5 million.
“We took extraordinary steps to get PPEs for our health workers, we didn’t want to expose any of our frontline workers. We also insured their lives to the tune of N5 million, anyone that dies in this process, his family will get N5 million,” he said.
“We have additional disability insurance for those that get sick and cannot work but are not dead. We are also giving special allowances to all health workers, as well as extraordinary allowances to those on the frontline. “
The governor, who was the index case in the state, said he infected four people, all of whom have now recovered.
He said the state had tested about 400 people, and now has three testing centres, from zero when the outbreak hit Nigeria.
He said, “We have been successful in closing down our state, in reducing the traffic into our state, every case in the state has been imported.
“I was the first case, fortunately, I’d say, because it served to scare everyone about reality. COVID is real, it’s not a joke. I was the first case, I got it in Abuja and infected four other people, all of us are OK now.”
Kaduna state has recorded 35 cases, six recoveries, and one death.
