Dr Solomon Chollom, a Jos based Virologist, said Nigeria needed to increase the testing ratio of its population to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus in the country.
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Chollom disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria( NAN) on Wednesday in Abuja.
He explained that the improvement in the testing would bring the country at per with other African countries with lesser population.
NAN reports that as at July 21, Nigeria was reported to have tested 212,207 people out of a population of about two million, while Kenya and Rwanda with a population of 47.56 million and 10.51 million have tested 243, 887 and 210,236 people respectively.
South Africa is leading the line in COVID-19 testing in the African continent having tested 2.47 million out of a population 58.77 million.
The virologist said that Nigeria had only tested an average of one person in every one thousand.
This, he noted was about the highest margin in the continent when compared to South Africa’s ratio of having tested one person per 24 people.
Ghana had tested one out of every 80 people and Rwanda had one out of every 50 people tested.
Chollom stated that Ghana and other countries deployed the use of pooled samples technique to ramp up their testing.
He, however, said that Nigeria grew from having just four COVID-19 testing laboratories to over 50 it was currently using.
The expert said that to close the gap and truly ramp up testing for COVID-19 in the country, more had to be done in establishing a robust case definition.
He advised that Nigeria should equal bring in the new additions of loss of taste, loss of smell, nausea, runny nose and diarrhoea as recently released by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) into its testing.
“This will mean more yield from surveillance activities and contact tracing thus putting the over 50 testing labs in maximum use as against the current speculation on the below-per-performance of the labs in terms of number of tests ran per day.
“Another approach is to increase the number of testing personnel. Nothing stops the government from deploying all the medical laboratory scientists in the country for this emergency exercise.
“If the position of the young medical laboratory scientists is true that they have over 30,000 members who have capacity to run this testing, then we should give it a look.
“Above all, our effort to ramp up testing must not compromise standards of quality, safety of work place and safety of testing personnel,” he explained.