The Ogun government on Wednesday said the three new cases of coronavirus recorded in the state were Nigerians returning to the country from Togo.
The Commissioner for Health in Ogun, Dr Tomi Coker, disclosed this in Abeokuta during an inspection tour of the Intensive Care Unit of a 250-bed public hospital at Oke-Mosan, Abeokuta, by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Coker explained that the three new cases were among the eight returnees from Togo travelling to Sokoto and Jos.
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She noted that the returnees, the driver and the bus conductor, who were 10 in number, were stopped at the border of Imeko-Afon.
The commissioner added that three of them tested positive to the virus within 48 hours of testing while five tested negatives, with two awaiting the result of the test.
“About 72-hours ago, we had eight returnees from Togo heading toward Sokoto and Jos. We housed them here with a driver and a bus conductor, making 10 of them.
“We ran a test on them about 48 hours ago and out of the 10, we got eight results of which three were positive.
“They are Nigerian citizens, returning back to the nation. They were met at the border of Imeko; we were notified of their return.
” They are Nigerians returning from Togo. The important thing is that these are reported cases and if we don’t deal with them now, we may have issues of community spreading,” she said.
The commissioner maintained that five cases were transferred from Lagos to Ogun because the patients were from the same cluster and got tested in Lagos.
She encouraged the people of the state to take advantage of the mobile testing across the 20 Local Government Areas of the state to know their status.
“So, I must encourage everyone, we are out in the 20 Local Government Areas.
” We are testing each ward each day for the next 14 days so that we can avoid community spread because once we have community spread, we will have a challenge on our hands.
“However, we should expect that we are going to keep on having a ramping up of numbers.
“As we announced, we started testing the population base since yesterday. When we do more tests, we are likely to have more results that are positive and the state is prepared.
” As we all know, we have four isolation centres, this being the fourth one. Ikenne has the highest capacity which is 128 beds, OOUTH has 25 beds and Iberekodo has 72 beds.
“So we are ready to scale up. We have also identified sites where we can scale up into if we come to a situation of exhausting our capacity of 300,” Coker said.
The Director-General of NCDC, Dr Chikwe Ihekwazu, commended the state government for its level of preparedness in responding to the pandemic.
“We are really impressed with the momentum here and obviously this facility is one of them and we have been to several others and we are impressed by the progress made so far,” he said.