Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) has emphasised the crucial importance of testing. Speed is of the essence, and three things are crucial: tracking down cases with symptoms; identifying their household cluster and tracing people they’ve contacted; and quarantining them until they are no longer infectious. Testing is the basis of public health detective work to shut down an epidemic. “You can’t fight a virus if you don’t know where it is,” said the WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, recently. “Find, isolate, test and treat every case, to break the chains of transmission. Every case we find and treat limits the expansion of the disease.”

Physical distancing is another strategy, but it’s less effective than testing. In the early stages of an epidemic, when clusters are few and far between, one needs a huge population distancing effort to stop their spread. At that point, most people won’t grasp the scale of the threat and will resist restrictive orders. So testing, contact tracing and quarantining people with symptoms is crucial.

The NCDC Director-General Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu had initially blamed the lack of health infrastructure across the country as a major problem hampering the organisation ability to carry out mass testing, but recently shifted the blame on shortage of testing kits globally. At the early stage of the outbreak the NCDC made public that it was tracing thousands of persons suspected to have made contact with diagnosed Covid 19 patients which at the time numbered a few dozens. As of 30 April 2020 total test carried out are just 12828 compared to Ghana, South Africa and Egypt with 106,090, 197,127 and 90,000 respectively.

Top Ten Countries With Least Covid 19 Tests

Total Total Total Tests/
Cases Deaths Tests 1m pop

1. Yemen 6 2 120 4
2. Burundi 11 1 284 24
3. Senegal 882 9 466 28
4. Malawi 36 3 744 39
5. MZ 76 0 1896 61
6. Nigeria 1728 51 12828 62
7. Haiti 76 7 776 68
8. PN Guinea 8 0 604 68
9. Sao Tome 14 0 19 87
10. Mali 482 25 2172 107

And i'm supposed to be surprised? Lol.....

Not surprised at all

... even in Olympic medal table