Governor Babajide Sanwo-olu of Lagos State has blamed spread of COVID-19 in Nigeria to the late closures of Airports, land and sea borders as well as the refusal of returnees into the country to self isolate.
Sanwo-olu revealed his thoughts during an interview on CNN where he reiterated that although Lagos was already prepared to contain the virus, it had to wait for the Federal Government to shut land, sea and air borders.
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While Nigeria recorded its index case of COVID-19 in February 27, the Federal Government waited for one month before shutting the borders on March 29. By this time, Nigeria already had 111 confirmed COVID-19 cases with one death.
Speaking about how prepared Lagos was to handle the pandemic, Sanwo-olu said;
“Given the population that we have, we are a bit ahead in terms of preparation, as a state, but we are sub-national. We couldn’t give directives as to when Nigeria should close the airport, seaport, or in-land border.
“We don’t have control over that. We were just wrapping up our own facilities and the training officials, and that was why we were able to track the index case over two months now.
“In the country, 33 or 34 states have had one case or the other. For us, it is a double X thing. The population is huge, so we will be a fool of ourselves to just think that it is going to be a spike and we will be out of it. Because we did not close all of the importations early and people were not also doing full isolation when they came, it was really difficult for us to do contact tracing before it got to the community – which is where we are now.”
He took the opportunity to reveal that more cases may be unveiled in the state because of increased testing with about 7,000 samples collected recently.
“We are pretty much getting to the peak season. We will soon see a large number because testing is now wrapped up. It is a public health issue and we needed to take our protocols from NCDC and other international organisations.
“Testing kits were rationalised and we could not do more than we were given. Even the accreditation requires processes. We have learnt it now and we are applying it.” he concluded.
Nigerian currently has 1728 confirmed COVID-19 cases with 307 recoveries and 51 deaths.