₦airaland Forum

There is a disconnect between the needs of the NCDC and the gifts being sent to them. We need test kits, RNA extraction kits, PPE for healthcare workers, masks for citizens, reagents for the tests, and the equipment and skilled technicians needed to setup Coronavirus testing labs in every major city so that test samples can be processed without delay.

Instead of these, they are sending us ventilators that we don’t yet need. Why? If your condition has deteriorated to the point where you need a ventilator, it has already gone too far because your prognosis is not good. Not allowing patients to deteriorate to that extent should be our priority right now (though it is nice to have more ventilators)

I think the NCDC is not adequately communicating its most urgent needs to defeat the virus and that is why we are receiving many gifts and promises that are not immediately helpful while our more urgent needs are not being met. Trump should send test kits instead. The US produces a lot of them.

Is the shortage of RNA extraction kits responsible for this drop?

Ricchcream:
Nice suggestion, but who is that someone you have in mind?

For me, the ideal candidate has to have been running an organization with many branches all over the country or even the world. Aliko Dangote, with the assistance of an experienced epidemiologist from the South Korea CDC would probably do a way better job than the current NCDC DG. He grasps the magnitude of the problem which is why CACOVID ordered 400,000 test kits under his leadership. We need someone like that.

Perhaps it is time to hand over the NCDC to someone who can scale the organization to the size required to eradicate a fast-moving virus from a country with 190m residents? We are tired of listening to excuses as we waste away at home. Hand it over to someone who has experience with running a very large organization. I don’t even care if the person is an epidemiologist at this point. Just someone who can grasp the scope of the challenge and is willing and able to obtain and effectively utilize the massive resources needed to tackle it. Enough with the failures and excuses.

mrtegation99:
whats south Korea's method pls?

1) They rely heavily on rapid testing and contact tracing. Unlike many countries, which test only people with symptoms, they test anyone who may have been exposed to the virus. If you are sick, they will test you. If you have been exposed to someone who tested positive, they will test you. If they don’t believe that have been exposed but you still want to get tested, they will collect your money and test you, and use the money to make more test kits, but if you test positive, they will return your money. Those who test positive are taken to hospitals if they are very sick or special dormitories if they are not very sick. Those not showing symptoms are advised to stay at home and they will send food and other essentials to your house and check up on you every day. They will also make you download an app that alerts them if you leave your house.

The logic behind their strategy is that the people spreading the virus are the unconfirmed cases. By testing everybody who may have been exposed to the virus, you can identify almost all the people who are infected and isolate them so they can no longer spread the virus. If you can identify all the people who have the virus and isolate them, it can no longer spread.

2) They recommend the wearing of medical face-masks in public, and most South Koreans use high quality KF94 face-masks that are similar to the N95 face-masks used by doctors treating Coronavirus patients. They don’t believe that quality face-masks should be reserved for healthcare professionals. Every South Korean is allowed and encouraged to use the best medical face-masks that they can afford to protect themselves. They produce enough medical masks to protect everybody.

3) They also do other reasonable things that most countries are doing. They encourage washing of hands, physical distancing, and masks, but there is no lockdown. There is no travel ban, but all travelers must stay isolated at home for 14 days under close supervision. Large gatherings are still banned. Schools were closed but are now being reopened. Sport events will be opened, but without crowds on the stands.

South Korea was one of the first countries to be hit massively by COVID-19. At the peak, they had about 800 confirmed cases every day, but since then it has been dropping consistently, to as low as 8 cases a day. And they did it without destroying their economy. They even conducted elections very recently; it went smoothly, and we are yet to see a spike in new cases.

Is the lack of call center capacity by NCDC the reason why they haven’t been able to stop the spread of the virus?

It seems to me to that a shortage of test kits and suitably equipped laboratories, and a reluctance to test more people for fear of “wasting” money or increasing the number of confirmed cases is why we have failed to test and isolate enough people to stop or dramatically reduce the rate at which the virus is spreading.

The fact that our people are still interacting closely with each other without face-masks at hospitals and pharmacies, markets/shops selling food, filling stations, and ATM machines, which are all absolutely essential and cannot be locked down, isn’t helping. Face-masks slow the spread so that testing can catch up.

We will investigate urgently

This was the most important paragraph for me, where he proffered the solution:

Our model should be learning-by-doing while mainstreaming basic common-sense tips such as: mandatory wearing of masks in public, basic hygiene, disinfection of all open markets every early morning and all places of public gatherings, practical social distancing tips, provision of hand washing facilities in public places, production and use of hand sanitizers, gloves, etc. For example, all public transport vehicles—taxi, buses, trains, airplanes might require disinfection of the vehicle before use, and for all passengers to wear masks and with hand sanitizers. Can you imagine the thousands of jobs to be created in producing face masks, hand sanitizers, gloves, etc for 1.3 billion people? But this cannot happen under a lockdown. New opportunities! Everyone wants to live, and Africans will learn and adapt quickly. Staying at home will become a choice, not a compulsion. The slogan could be: “stay at home if you can, or smartly go to work if you must”. We can only defeat the challenge by confronting it, and not by playing the Ostrich only to still confront it the day after.

We have been saying this for some time and it’s nice that more experts are saying it now. But we also need testing, which we can afford if people are working, making money, and paying their taxes instead of sitting at home and waiting for government provided “palliatives”

Test-kits are very important, so I am very grateful to CACOVID for this. It is unfortunate that the govt was ready to lock us down but wasn't ready to spend enough money to get sufficient test kits for a nation with 190m people, and the private sector had to step in to get them.

However, what they are saying about sharing food and the time the test kits will arrive (2 weeks) suggests that we will be under lockdown for a very long time. Instead of following South Korea's proven method of beating the virus, we're sitting at home and wasting away, unnecessarily.

We certainly want to help people.

2cul2care:
All talk and no action which facemask have I seen the government distributing.

Any tailor can make a face-mask. It's easier than making a shirt or a dress. Once the policy is enforced, there will be face-masks everywhere.

The face-masks used by doctors are more effective than the ones that tailors can make, but any mask is better than no mask if used properly.

Watch this video from the Czech Republic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZtEX2-n2Hc

Yes, please. Dominique was given the task last year.

Victornezzar:
Released Nudes

Campaign got heated that it had to involve the Police

Plenty things ooo .....

what?!?

We need to know how many tests they conducted during the 24 hour period in question. I hope this is not a result of slowing down testing again.

People who lied about their travel history will be apprehended and prosecuted as the government is working on 3-4 names and will be published and made scapegoats.

Why are they still going on and on about travel history? It doesn’t matter anymore. The vast majority of those who had COVID-19 before the travel ban would have recovered by now. Those who have it now must have picked it up locally. All they need to focus on now is testing people with symptoms, their contacts, and the contacts of anybody who tests positive. That is all.

Where a person may have traveled to is irrelevant now. All that matters is whether he/she currently has the virus inside his/her body and is capable of spreading it to other people. Once all such people have been isolated, the virus cannot spread.

I remember predicting that the reign of the Coronavirus would come to an end when people started wearing face masks. It is gradually coming to pass. The reason the entire world is in this mess is that the Asians, who produce most face-masks and other personal protection equipment, blocked their manufacturers from exporting them to the rest of the world because they knew that they would be needed to protect their people.

Instead of the West to respond by mobilizing their manufacturers to produce face-masks massively, so that they would be able to protect their people, they started a deceptive campaign to discourage people from using them. The campaign was so effective that people who wore face-masks were mocked and shamed by those who had been brainwashed. People who had face-masks were pressured into giving them away.

Now they grudgingly accept that face-masks are helpful but instead of producing adequate quantities of the quality face-masks that have been proven to be effective - the kind of masks that most Asians are wearing - they are asking people to use less effective home-made masks.

We will get only a small portion of this donation. Last time we got just 20,000 test kits for a country with 190 million people.

If he didn’t predict the Coronavirus, he is definitely not a prophet.
If he could see the future he would surely have seen the virus that would shut down even the greatest countries in the world.

I can’t even watch the video.

redcliff:
Hello Seun, please can you remove my name and email from this list? Regards.

done

They need to keep on testing aggressively and it will surely peak and start dropping

Our government should have started working on plan to reopen Nigeria before the lockdown, but I am glad that it was mentioned in the president’s latest speech. Hope they can start rolling out the plan before people start dying of hunger and crimes motivated by hunger.

Tominix:
If you live in Ogun state or a family live around abule, Mushin boys are looting shops armed with ammunition and beating traders. . . .
seem like they want to continue what they started yesterday

did you see them?

Agboriotejoye:
Testing with what?
We've been able to ramp up testing through donations from Jack Ma, China and now UN

Could you give us more details about how the tests are conducted and what reagents and machines are needed to conduct them? Thanks.

Agboriotejoye:
Really?
Jack Ma's test kits is 500k? How come our press are not calling out govt on the slow pace of testing? The media have generally painted a picture of ambience concerning this issue. If that information is available and no one is raising hell about it then I guess we're a nation of unserious people.
We're being ruled by incompetence and cool with it

As soon as I read this I went to double-check It seems that I was wrong about the number of test kits Nigeria got. Apologies to everyone:

"Let me announce that we have received donated safety and test kits from the Jack Ma Foundation in China. The supplies are:

– 100,000 Face Masks
– 1,000 Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
– 20,000 test kits"

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/jack-mas-coronavirus-testing-kits-reach-nigeria/articleshow/74829029.cms

I remember seeing the 500,000 figure somewhere. I figured that we got 50% of Jack Ma's 1.1m test kits because of our huge population:

Ma announced a donation of a total of 1.1 million testing kits, six million masks, and 60,000 protective suits and face shields to help the continent in its fight against the new coronavirus last week.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/16/africa/jack-ma-donate-masks-coronavirus-africa/index.html

But they shared the test-kits equally with all 54 countries in Africa (54 * 20000 = 1080000 or ~1.1m test kits), which is unfortunate.

Agboriotejoye:
Testing with what? We've been able to ramp up testing through donations from Jack Ma, China and now UN

Jack Ma's 500,000 20,000 testkits landed in Nigeria on March 24. That's 23 days ago. That's a very long time in the Coronavirus era. [s]These are the same test kits that other African countries like South Africa have used to test many more people and isolate them to slow down the spread of the virus.[/s] It looks as if he gave the same number of test kits to all countries in Africa which is why the smaller countries have been able to test way more people per capita than Nigeria.

With the Coronavirus, trying to economize test kits isn't recommended. If there are 1000 infected people in the country and you have to burn through 100,000 test-kits in order to identify and isolate all of them, you should do it immediately. If you delay because you don't want to "waste" the test kits, there may be 10,000 infected people by then and you will have to test 1 million people in order to isolate and identify all of them.

einsteine:
South Korea has a crazy enemy just across the border that's willing to use bioweapons so they have built a serious capability against epidemics/pandemics.

I know you mean North Korea, but China is a bigger threat because that is where the viruses come from.

We’ve seen this play out all over the world. By not testing enough, people are deceived into thinking the virus is not spreading. Meanwhile, the virus keeps spreading on the down-low. When they finally start testing, there is an explosion of new cases. In some cases the virus' spreading advances to a point where they lose all hope of containing it and only test people with major symptoms who need to be hospitalized.

There is no alternative to testing. Lockdowns and even wearing face-masks will only slow it down. Testing sufficiently can stop the virus. If you can find all the people that are currently infected and isolate them, the disease can no longer spread. It's very simple, but not easy. You have to keep testing as many people as you can and eventually it will get to a point where the new cases will start dropping. It happened in South Korea and Taiwan. The longer you wait, the more massive the testing you have to do to contain the virus. Not containing it is not an option.

The policy of only testing people with travel history was terribly, comically, and obviously unwise. I'm glad that PMB forced the policy to change.

They should have started testing aggressively from the get go.
By not doing that they allowed the disease to continue spreading silently.
Now they will have to test many more cases to contain the virus.