The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) on Thursday recorded 182 new cases of the Coronavirus, (COVID-19) in the country, bringing the total number of cases in Nigeria now to 8,915.
The NCDC, on its official Twitter handle, said that as at May 28, 2020, out of the country’s total infections of 8,915, a total of 6,064 are active cases.
In the same vein, it noted that 2,592 persons have been discharged while 259 deaths of COVID-19 patients have been recorded.
The NCDC said that the new 182 cases were spread across 15 States of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), with Lagos accounting for the highest number of infections for the day with 111 cases.
Other new cases recorded shows FCT has 16, Akwa Ibom (10), Oyo (8), Kaduna (6), Delta (6), Rivers (5), Ebonyi (4), Ogun (4), Kano (3), Plateau (2), Gombe (2), Kebbi (1), Kwara (2), Bauchi (1) and Borno (1).
Meanwhile, the Kogi State government has rejected the two COVID-19 positive cases announced by the NCDC on Wednesday as coming from the State.
Until the report on Wednesday, Kogi and Cross River States were the only States not to have recorded any case of the virus.
However, during his appearance on Politics Today on Thursday on Channels Television, Kogi State’s Commissioner for Information, Kingsley Fanwo, described the NCDC reporting process as fraudulent.
“We are completely rejecting such declarations because they do not even conform to the protocols set by the NCDC itself. When you look at the history of the cases they declared, the patient was admitted at the Federal Medical Centre in Lokoja for symptoms that were far from COVID-19 symptoms.
“But they were not attended to there and the next thing was to bring them to the National Hospital in Abuja. And within a few hours, they were tested, and under 24 hours, the man was declared COVID-19 positive. It is fraudulent as far as we are concerned and we are rejecting them in its entirety.”
But during the briefing by the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 in Abuja on Thursday, the Director-General of the NCDC, Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, said the Kogi Index Case was a referral from the Federal Medical Centre in Lokoja.
“There is actually no dilemma in the two cases,” he said. “They followed absolutely normal practice. A patient that was referred from the Federal Medical Centre to the National Hospital. This is a normal referral pathway when you have a case. The physicians in the National Hospital, I don’t have any influence over the work that they do. They suspected COVID-19 based on the clinical symptoms of the patient, asked for a test, and the test came out positive.
“The individual lives in Kogi state and public health response is based on where you live because that’s where your contacts are. So this is not controversial in any way. Standard practice was followed. Once the results came out, the state’s Epidemiologist was informed that he has to do contact-tracing around this patient. It is the state’s responsibility to do that contact-tracing. So we hope they do it. There is nothing actually controversial in any way about this.”
