The Chairman of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, Mr Boss Mustapha, said Thursday that Nigeria has ramped up its testing capacity from just a few hundreds four months ago to over 15;000.
He is however displeased by the attitude of Nigerians who have refused to abide the government guidelines aimed at halting the spread of the dreadful virus.
“In terms of even testing, we have ramped up our testing capacity from two to 64 (testing centres) within a period of three to four months. As a matter of fact, right now, the testing capacity in terms of volume is that we can test up to 15,000 samples in a day. But how many are we testing on a daily basis? So our major challenge as a Presidential Task Force has been the attitude,” he said.
Mustapha, at PTF briefing on the pandemic said everything was put in place to stop the pandemic from spreading as much as it has in the country. The only thing missing was the right attitude.
“Our biggest challenge has been the attitude of Nigeria; that is our biggest challenge,” he said.
Nigeria’s confirmed cases of coronavirus infections breached 50,000 earlier in the week with the death toll just shy of 1,000.
Mustapha is displeased that rather than follow guidelines, Nigerians think only about their rights, failing to realise that the rights came with “correspondent responsibilities”.
“We would have flattened the curve. We would have dampened this ravaging virus by now if we had just complied with the simple instructions,” he lamented.
Another area Mustapha took up issues with Nigerians is in testing.
Since the first case of the pandemic was confirmed in Nigeria on February 27 and as Nigeria struggled to contain the spread, there have been concerns about the country’s testing capacity.
Although the country has ramped up its testing capacity, the PTF Chairman is unsatisfied with the attitude of Nigerians towards getting tested.
Nigeria with a population estimated at over 200 million has not tested up to 500,000 samples while South Africa with a population of 57 million has tested more than three million people.
Meanwhile, Nigeria on Thursday recorded 476 fresh COVID-19 cases with seven more deaths, taking the fatality figure to 992, according the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.
disclosed the latest COVID-19 figures in a tweet on its official handle.
This new figure means that Nigeria has recorded 50,964 infections.
