₦airaland Forum

Very impressive.

I do not think we should wait until the last minute when korokorovirus hit before we get a place like this for very sick patients.

From projection and learning from other so called Developed countries, all equipment can not be concentrated in a few locations.

Equipment can still be spread from level one to three. Level three reserved for most serious cases. Level one for less so.

Each would still be better than open space and floors we now see in Italy and Spain. Luckily, we have great brains in each of our states that can prioritize PPE, Personal Protective Equipment for Health Workers first. If we do not save them, they cannot save us.

Good job Akwa Ibom.

Pray that you will not need them all. Others from neighboring states can come over?

Nah qwesion o!

Reminds me of how USA was offering cash and visa during the War with Iraq. Some Nigerians and others joined and lost their lives, got maimed but some came out alive.

Fast forward, a new President comes, denied them citizenship and kicked them out of Army. A new dept of Naturalization Review has been established by US Immigration to fish out those who "lied" in their past applications.

KlynSoul:
Going to USA now to practice medicine is suicide mission.

If Nigerians can risk precious lives and talents to cross sea and desert, what can't we do?

This is indoctrination or mental slavery because we believe we are not good enough to save ourselves.

Babapyro:
Anybody that wants to leave his country in a period like this to go and expose himself to a life and death situation over there in the name of visa is an unfortunate human being and such person has no iota of dignity, I was in a page where Americans were discussing Nigerians desperation to enter their country some few weeks back With many tagging the behavior embarrassing for a human being, y'all want to continue to disgrace all of us.

https://www.aila.org/advo-media/issues/all/featured-issue-denaturalization-efforts-by-uscis

nikdam:
Senegal test kit gives result in an hour if I am not wrong. Other countries developed theirs too.

My daughter got tested in Germany by her "kinder arzt' on Tuesday and we got the result in about 10minutes

With all respect, this is why I posted a source that is in the USA Washington Post. BBC, Al Jeezeral, CNN and others including BET carried it and gave credit to Senegal scientists. Check this out yourself.

I am not knocking other countries, but we cannot stay idle and watch others take our credit in Africa.

But you can trust a black man, if the choice is between test or treatment between Africa and Europe or America, you can guess which.

Why? We always lie to ourselves.

I cannot believe this.

This is a test Developed by scientists in Senegal for Mass production with the help of Mologic.

Now Mologic has been given the credit as usual with every Discovery in Africa.

Sioo!

Nigerian politicians cannot make money out of one dollar test kit nah

10-minute coronavirus test for $1? Researchers in Senegal say it’s coming.
A university security officer wears a face mask at the entrance of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal,

It is cheaper and more respectable to look for local solutions to world problems than World solutions to African problems.

I salute Senegal and Ede Center for Excellence scientists.

Senegal partners with UK lab to develop a hand-held coronavirus test kit.

A 10-minute coronavirus test for $1? Researchers in Senegal say it’s coming.
A university security officer wears a face mask at the entrance of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, on Monday.
A university security officer wears a face mask at the entrance of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, on Monday.
(Zohra Bensemra/Reuters)
By Danielle Paquette and Borso Tall
March 17, 2020 at 3:30 PM EDT
DAKAR, Senegal — In the race to invent a faster coronavirus test, the West African laboratory that made one of the world’s first yellow fever vaccines has teamed up with the British creator of pee-on-a-stick pregnancy technology.

Researchers at the Pasteur Institute in coastal Senegal — a World Health Organization partner that has battled viral outbreaks for more than a century — say they’re as little as three months away from releasing $1 diagnostic kits that can detect the respiratory contagion in 10 minutes.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/a-10-minute-coronavirus-test-for-1-researchers-in-senegal-say-its-coming/2020/03/17/43f82cb6-67ab-11ea-b199-3a9799c54512_story.html%3foutputType=amp

See how ready-made mentally dey kill us,

We already have a local one at Center For Excellence at Ede.

It took Germans a few weeks to develop. We have young men and women in labs all over the Country that are way smarter.

Donate money for local initiatives, do not order readymades.

Please
.

All healthcare jobs from the doctors to tbe community health workers and cleaners are not jobs for weaklings.

Please donate PPE.

Yeepaa!

sam4noow:
If truly you did created one at least you be busy right now rather than coming here and be giving us FABU

FABU is suicide in my line of work. You cannot recover once you lost your reputation.

You do not even know if coming here to share whatever you think, is part of my work. I do not get paid each time.

BTW, you must remember I am sure that I am a road cleaner.

sam4noow:
You can lead by example by creating one for yourself

How do you know I didn't.

In fairness to you though, some businesses are "weather" proof.

Sowing Mistress can supply Masks, gowns, beddings and protective gears

Big Trucks, Vans apart from containers as in Italy can be converted to mobile hospitals.

Most doctors and nurses that are rich work two three jobs worldwide.

Onikan Stadium is being converted to temporary hospital. Do not stop there.

Hotel business has been slowed by Coronavirus. Lease them as hospitals.

Add yours

Chei, I just silenced this thread?

STOP DONATING MONEY, it is meaningless.

BUILD YOUR HOSPITALS OR RECOVERY CENTERS.

Employ doctors full time or part-time with other community health workers and provide them with personal protective equipment first.

Thanks to GT Bank, Access Bank, Dangote and others doing the right thing.

Valfrankie:
I wonder what SE governors are waiting for? Is it until the region is infected before they act? Ugwuanyi, Umahi, Uzodinma and Igbazu had better borrow a leaf from Obiano. This is not the time for Extreme servitude.
PROTECT THE SOUTH EAST!!!

My brother, I completely agree with you.

China had to close down Wuhan to arrest COVID-19. So can we in Nigeria.

Come to think of it, I cannot think of a better way to achieve BIAFRA. God is so good. All the time!

Lagos is next after Oyo and any state can follow the lead of Oyo. May God bless their Governor.

Lagos must stop all traffic by road, water and air into the State.

Thank you Oyo Governor, Lagos is overburdened with thousands still trooping in. We can reassess the situation after everyone finds his level.

I cannot believe religion still has this much grip on people. Pay for the survival or luxurious lifestyle of others at the expense of yours.

Why a Tiny Colorado County Can Offer COVID-19 Tests to Every Resident

There are advantages to having biotech executives as neighbors.

SARAH ZHANG
MARCH 23, 2020

San Miguel County in Colorado has, in ordinary times, fewer than three full-time employees in its public-health department. It has no hospital. Its total population is only 8,000. And yet last week, the county became the first in the United States to announce that it would be offering all its residents a new kind of test for COVID-19.

The tests are being donated by United Biomedical, a multinational biotech company whose executives, a married couple, happen to live part of the year in Telluride, the resort town that is also San Miguel’s county seat.

“It’s a small community,” Mei Mei Hu of United Biomedical told me on the phone from Colorado this weekend. “Very small,” her husband, Lou Reese, added. “Whether it’s just getting a donut or walking by on the street or on the ski hill with the ski patrol,” he said, “we know and have met or interacted with almost every member of the medical or emergency community here throughout the course of our lives.”

Hu and Reese—along with Hu’s mother, Chang Yi Wang, who is United Biomedical’s chairwoman—are the founders of the company’s new COVID-19–focused subsidiary, c19. United Biomedical has facilities in New York, China, and Taiwan, and it develops animal vaccines as well as diagnostic kits for human diseases. So when the novel coronavirus first appeared in China, the company started working on testing, and when cases started showing up closer to home, Hu and Reese thought of their community in Telluride. They floated the idea of testing the county to an old family friend, who also happens to be the area’s chief paramedic. Like they said, it’s a small community.

At that point, San Miguel County was, like everywhere else in the United States, having trouble getting tests for every patient who needed one. This particularly worried Sharon Grundy, the county medical officer, because Telluride had so many visitors coming and going. “We’re a high-risk area because we are a resort community,” she told me. (A group of skiers visiting another Colorado resort town, Vail, ended up seeding a coronavirus outbreak in Mexico.) The county was able to test some people through the state health department and a commercial lab, and got its first positive result on Friday. But when I spoke with Grundy on Friday, she also said the whole county had only two swabs left. “It’s not just us,” she hastened to add. “It’s the whole country.”

Without testing, San Miguel County’s health workers would be unable to track the virus’s spread. They would be, to use the words of the World Health Organization’s director-general, fighting “a fire blindfolded.” So United Biomedical’s offer to donate the kits came as a relief. “This gave us some hope,” Grundy said.

United Biomedical’s COVID-19 test is different from those typically being run on nasal swabs collected around the country. Those tests use a technique called RT-PCR to look for the virus’s genetic material in a patient’s nose and throat, but United Biomedical’s test requires a blood draw. It uses a different technique, called ELISA, to look for antibodies, the proteins the immune system makes to neutralize the virus. Antibody tests, also known as serological tests, don’t always pick up early viral infections, but they can tell if someone has ever had a particular virus—maybe even if they were asymptomatic.

For this reason, scientists all over the world have been pushing antibody tests as a way to study the true scope of the coronavirus pandemic. If serological testing can find asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19, it can also clarify the disease’s transmission and fatality rate. Testing a whole population—say, a whole county—would give epidemiologists a snapshot of everything going on in one place. “Any sort of population-based study is really interesting,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. And while it’s unclear how long immunity to COVID-19 lasts, she says, it could allow people who are immune to go back to their normal lives.

Hu said that United Biomedical started working on an antibody test back in January, as the outbreak got serious in China. The company had developed a very similar test for SARS in 2004. Its scientists could apply that expertise to COVID-19, but they needed blood samples from COVID-19 patients to confirm that the test indeed detects antibodies against the virus causing the disease. The company’s existing connections to China and Taiwan helped it get patient samples quickly. “We were actually able to ship tests to ground zero in Hubei, Shanghai, Beijing, and Taiwan,” Hu said.

According to data that Hu said the company has filed with the FDA, its serological test was validated using 47 samples from coronavirus patients and began to detect antibodies 10 days after infection. The company also ran the test against hundreds of COVID-19–free samples from blood banks to confirm that it does not mistakenly pick up antibodies for related viruses that cause the common cold. Catherine Blish, an immunologist at Stanford University, told me that other scientists have developed a COVID-19 antibody test that picks up infection earlier, but there is often a trade-off between how specific a test is and how early it can detect an infection. “They managed to get very fabulous specificity,” she said. United Biomedical is now waiting for emergency-use authorization from the FDA, but certified labs can offer testing in the meantime because of the public-health emergency.

Researchers in China, Singapore, Europe, and the U.S. have made their own versions of COVID-19 antibody tests, and several companies are now offering theirs. Florian Krammer, a biologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, says his lab started working on one in January, the very day that a Chinese group first shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus. Krammer and his colleagues used that genetic sequence to synthesize S, the protein that makes up the virus’s outer spikes. Any antibody that binds the synthesized S protein is likely the result of a past or ongoing COVID-19 infection. United Biomedical’s test also uses S, as well as parts of two other viral proteins.

Krammer’s group posted a preprint paper describing its test on Wednesday. The holdup, he told me, was getting blood samples from coronavirus-positive patients to validate the test. Otherwise, creating these tests is fairly routine for labs like his. “Serological testing is not rocket science,” he said. The clinical lab at Mount Sinai can already run this antibody test for COVID-19, but he said it will be limited to special cases, such as looking for patients with COVID-19 immunity, whose blood could be turned into a therapy.

The challenge with these tests is scaling up. United Biomedical’s COVID-19 test kits are being manufactured at its facility in New York and shipped to Colorado. In theory, running each test in a lab takes only a few hours. But the samples have to be shipped to another lab for testing, and lab capacity is limited.

San Miguel County is still figuring out exactly how to get the tests to 8,000 people across 1,300 square miles. Ideally, residents would get voluntarily tested twice, two weeks apart, which doubles the logistical challenge. The county simply does not have the manpower to go door to door, so Grundy said it’s planning to set up two testing stations, in Telluride and Norwood, to reach as many people as it can. The county is relying on volunteers, hopefully, to help staff the stations as well.

It’s too early to say how this public-private partnership in San Miguel will work out, but the program is getting started in earnest this week. Reese said several other states and counties are now interested in the antibody test as well. “I would love to see [an antibody] test deployed widely everywhere,” Blish said.

A tiny county with one confirmed coronavirus case may not be the most obvious place to start widespread serological testing, but that’s exactly what is happening in the U.S. The testing debacle has left much of the country desperately short on capacity. Many people with coronavirus symptoms are unable to get tested, although being rich or famous or an NBA player seems to help. The story in San Miguel is that of a small community’s residents looking out for one other in a time of crisis. But it is also a story of how wealth and power—and proximity to them—continue to determine access to health care.

SARAH ZHANG is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Please donate materials and salaries to new Convalence Centers, not to Government for stealing.

Let us hope it does not get to a stage where Covid-19 turns Ice Skating ring in Spain into Morgues or patients lying on the floor in Europe and Asia.

We do not have governments in Nigeria. Every organization not even big as GT Bank must be encouraged to open a Convalence Center or Recovery Rooms for their employees, members, congregation and students with at least beds, fans, windows or places open enough to exchange free flow of air.

The government must give other places material incentive (not money), food supply and more importantly under the supervision of doctors, senior medical students, nurses community health officers and community health workers.

Their salaries must come out of Emergency Fund to avoid day light robbery, managed by each unit that cannot fund these services.

If Covid-19 can reduce European and Asian countries into open unequipped primary clinics and ice skating morgues, imagine what will happen to us unprepared.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.the-sun.com/news/576976/spanish-coronavirus-patients-lying-on-the-floor-in-packed-hospitals-as-countrys-death-toll-hits-2000/amp/

She was remarkably strong willed, Dr Durkin says.

"Even though she left West Africa when she was a toddler, she appears throughout her life to have worn her hair in a traditional Yoruba style, a style presumably taught to her by her mother," says Dr Durkin, whose research is published in the journal, Slavery and Abolition.

She also carried the facial markings from a traditional rite in Africa.

In her 70s, Matilda set out on another journey, travelling for 15 miles on dirt roads to a county courthouse to make a claim for compensation for her enslavement.

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-52010859

A Taya wait O.

Oga, when and where we go demonstrate in support of the president wey call Nigeria shithole in appreciation nah?

Na for Easter Sunday

MP,

If you give that much to Omo Ibini what and how will you interpret

AROMIRE

which was interpreted as Admiral.

Omo Ibini Arokun Yo!

The son of Bini who dominated the Sea!

This is common Oriki for all the Akarigbere White Cap Chiefs.

MetaPhysical,

Always dazzle me with history, even before Nairaland. I have to come back and read this over again.

Thanks.

It is often referred to as the commercial capital. Just missed a word.

As much as I share your frustration, I commend this gesture. It is not what "Anyone" can do.

Remember, this type of effort is needed to free up hospital space for curable diseases in Hospitals.

Coronavirus flu and Ebola need more medical management than all those medical equipment in a standard hospital.

Those hospitals built in stadiums, open parks and temporary areas for quarantine do not have most of what you listed.

Again, I fully understand your point, we could do better. Sometimes in an emergency, we are forced to take half bread. Thanks

ejihand:
Anyone could rent a building and provide (camp) beds. The question is
1. Is this place equipped with ventilators, PEP, etc
2. What about medical personnels?
3. Availability of testing kits nko?


If these basic things are not in place, kindly shut down the damn building. Let everyone sit his/her ass down at home.

Big corporations like this, are the conduit pipes corrupt politicians used to siphon millions of dollars to foreign nation to acquire choiced properties.

Critical health infrastructure have been neglected over the years. They are looking for avenues to safe their face now. Let them continue to open new branches in every nook and cranny of the city without investing in critical medical equipment and supplies. We are in this together.

Uncle Coro doesn't differentiate between the rich and poor, leaders and followers, etc. Everyone is equal in the eyes Corona virus.

IlovePMB:
Nigerians don't hate Buhari. Nigerians want the man to simply resign and hand over to a more capable hand. Must he remain president even when his incompetence and weakness is glaring. He is weak and old and should go and rest. Must we all die with him.

We did not die with Yaradua nah

I hope people know that right here in your backyard at a small town called Ede, there is a small Redeem University where Professor Christian Happi that built a local diagnosis machine for Ebola; he is also sequencing RNA test for covid-19.

So far all cases refered to his Center For Excellence are negative. Stay tuned.

Lassa fever can be prevented, this covid-19 is insidious. It creeps up on you even from people without symptoms in clean environment.

While it is true that we have many infectious diseases like Lassa fever in poverty stricken areas, pulmonary diseases, diabetes and blood pressure killing more people in Africa that we must worry about. This Coronavirus is mythical because we do not know as much about it but more importantly, it infects those very health workers more as Ebola, and spreads so rapidly that coping with it requires draconian measures as in China

Take politics aside, many of us have at least one Buhari in the family as father or grandfather.

Moreover, Buhari is still recovering from a very devastating sickness. This is not about Prayers.

Keep Buhari Away from Aso Rock and contact from even his children unless they are well sanitized.

I wish him the same as any member of my family at that age. Thank God we are not in Italy.

9jatriot:
Around 3 million naira equivalent. Hmmm

This is a good example of why we must be careful of what Nigerians tell us about US.

In the Norh Eastern part of US, you may get away without paying right then and there. This was how visiting grandmothers get free health care with fake name and address. The children would drop her and disappear until she is discharged.

In other parts of US, you will die first. Nigerians have forgotten the Africans that were not attended to during Ebola until it was too late, for lack of insurance. Well, that is what happens to poor white and black in the South.

Obama gave them free money to extend Medicaid and Medicare, they refused to take it. In the states that took Obamacare, many of them went for medical care first time in many years.

This guy beat the system and he sincerely believe all Americans can.

Now, they keep your records to take it out of your tax return money, use it to deny you legal resident or citizenship, put a lien on your house or salary or declare you a public charge to be thrown out.

With that bill for one day without medications, you can imagine why the poor avoid not only hospitals but college.

Even the medication you get depends on your insurance. Imagine if this guy needed a strong effective medication.