The Kwara State Chapter of the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) has raised the alarm over the shortage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs) at hospitals in the state.
The Chairman of the association, Dr Kolade Solagberu, made the announcement while speaking in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Ilorin on Saturday.
According to him, PPEs provided at hospitals in the state have finished, a development that has exposed health workers to the risk of contracting the dreaded coronavirus.
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The NMA chief disclosed that some heads of government-owned hospitals in the state had been grumbling over the PPEs shortages.
“Some of them called me this morning that the PPEs are not enough and that they had been told to source for PPEs themselves.
“This should not be so because PPEs are consumables that are discarded after use. So they need to be replaced as they are being used.”
Solagberu stressed that every health worker should be treated well because they were exposed to a high risk of danger.
“Every health worker is at the front line and not necessarily only those working at the isolation centre.
“The other doctors working at different hospitals are health workers and they are also at the front line.
“Patients will not come to the hospital that they have COVID-19 but they will come with symptoms. Any patient now is a COVID-19 suspect.
“The best thing to do now is not to attend to any patient with proper PPE.
“That was why we gave an order last week that our doctors should not treat any patient without PPE.”
He, however, called for a review of the lockdown by the Kwara Government to limit the spread of COVID-19 in the state.
Solagberu argued that relaxing the lockdown for a few hours would only amount to rushing, which would make social distancing impossible.
He said that instead of relaxing the lockdown for hours in a day, a full days should be set aside for people to restock their needs.
“If people have a full day to themselves, there won’t be need for rushing as we have seen in the past few days.
“But if we should continue this way with the five new cases confirmed in the state on Friday, we might be preparing for a disaster to happen.
Kwara recorded five new cases of COVID-19 on April 17, all of the health workers at the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital, bringing the number of active cases in the state to seven.