First Coronavirus: FG, Lagos collaborating to contain spread- Sanwo-Olu

IBRAHIM QUADRI

The Lagos State governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu on Friday explained how the Italian, who became first patient to test positive to the dreaded Coronavirus in Nigeria, came to Lagos, noting the State and Federal Government are working together to contain its spread.

He also explained that the patient has records of visiting Ogun State in the past few days, after arriving the country from Italy on Monday.

The governor, who made the disclosure during a press conference he addressed in Lagos added that the Italian citizen is clinically stable, “with no serious symptoms, and is being managed at the Infectious Disease Hospital in Yaba, Lagos”.

In company of the State commissioner for Health, Prof. Akin Abayomi and his counterpart from the Ministry of Information and Strategy, Gbenga Omotoso, Sanwo-Olu assured that efforts were being made by the Federal Government and his administration to curtail the spread of the disease in the state as well as in the country.

He speaks: “We have a traveller that started his journey from Milan on Monday, February 24t; he transited through Istanbul through a Turkish airline and arrived in Lagos on Tuesday night, and spent the night in an hotel near the airport.

“On Tuesday, February 25th morning he moved out to his business in Ogun State, where he is engaged by a corporate entity. He carried out business in Ogun State within the confines of that company on Tuesday and in the early part of Wednesday.

“In that company, he spent the night in their accommodation within the confine of the environment. By afternoon, he started to develop symptoms of high fever and body pains.

 “He was presented to the company’s medical facility, where investigations began. Because, he gave the history of his origin from Italy, where the disease had broken out, he was later confined before we were contacted at the biosecurity unit in Lagos for assistance and we immediately asked them to transfer the case to Lagos.

“He was brought to our high containment facility in Yaba on Thursday morning. Immediately, he arrived, he was put in strict isolation and appropriate tests were ordered. Within hours we received signals that the test in the laboratory was showing signs of positivity.

“At that point, we informed the Federal Minister of Health, the incident commander, Babajide Sanwo-olu and the minister informed higher authorities in Abuja. It was self important at that time to put together information for the public.

“The patient remains in strict isolation at our containment facility in Yaba and he is doing well with supportive therapy.

“As of now, we have started to trace the movement from the airport through Lagos to Ogun State. And we are busy identifying any possible persons that may have come in contact with him, so that we can start our isolation and containment exercise to esnure we break the circle of transmission.

“In Lagos, we have been building capacity steadily , fortified support at the airport and sending state- health personnel to support federal authorities. A form has been developed and all travellers are to fill the form as they arrived. At our infectious facility, we have ramped up our capacity to isolate cases.

“We are now sitting on an 80-bed facility because of the urgency fund that has been released by the incident commander.

“We are continuing to build more capacity, should in case we have an increased number of cases in Lagos. We have an aggressive public awareness campaign going on and we have engaged in extensive training across the hierarchy of health professionals in Lagos state. In addition, we are building our capacity to diagnose the case in Lagos and right now, we can run the test in two centres. One in our bio-security facility and the other at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital.

“We are in constant contact with the National Centre for Disease Control and the minister of health and we are exchanging information continuously. The important thing is that the patient is confined and we have aggressively started to identify all his contacts all the way to the airline and that process started around 3am this morning and it continues as we speak.

“We like to ensure everybody that we are on this case that we can identify everybody that came in contact with. The symptoms are subsiding; he does not have any symptoms of respiratory disease. It is probably a good thing, but he does have fever and body pain. If he had respiratory symptoms, it is probably it may be more contagious than it is likely at the moment,” Sanwo-Olu noted.

For a better society