The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has registered 11 coronavirus-related deaths in the last 24 hours, adding to a recent surge in infections, driven by the spread of the Delta variant in the country.
The NCDC, which made this known via its verified website on Tuesday, added that the country also reported additional 444 infections as at August 2, 2021.
The new infections indicated an increase from the 407 cases announced a day earlier.
The country’s case had been rising over the past few weeks, since the discovery of the Delta strain of the disease, raising fears of renewed pressure on the health system.
The agency noted that the 11 new deaths recorded on Monday brought the total number of fatalities in the country to 2,160, including deaths in Lagos State reported on July, 31 2021.
The public health agency also said that the new figures for confirmed cases had also raised the total number of confirmed infections in the country to 174,759 as at August 2, 2021.
Apart from Lagos State with 275, the highest daily figure of infections, Rivers ranked second with 63 cases, followed by Akwa Ibom with 62 reported cases, Gombe had 22, while Ogun and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) registered eight and four cases respectively.
Edo recorded three and Imo had two infections, while Kano, Nasarawa, Sokoto, Jigawa and Ebonyi registered one each, respectively.
The NCDC added that six states – Ekiti, Oyo, Osun, Ondo, Kaduna and Bauchi – reported no cases.
It said that 32 people had recovered and were discharged from various isolation centres in the country on Monday, adding that total recoveries recorded nationwide stood at 165,037 as the multi-sectoral national emergency operations centre (EOC), activated at Level 2, continued to coordinate national response activities.
The health agency said that the country’s active cases were over 7, 000, having tested more than 2.5 million samples for the virus, out of the country’s roughly 200 million population.
Meanwhile, the agency has put the country’s COVID-19 average test positivity rate at six per cent, saying that the increase in cases across states demonstrated that its surveillance system was working.
“We’ve built up our genomic sequencing capacity to detect emerging variants,” the NCDC added.
Also, NCDC has confirmed that 32 Delta variant cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) have been reported in five states across the country.
The Director-General of the NCDC, Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, who gave the confirmation at the resumed briefing of the Presidential Steering Committee, on Monday, in Abuja, cited Akwa Ibom State as having nine of the cases.
The NCDC boss listed Lagos, Rivers and Oyo states as well as the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), as the other places where at least one case of the Delta variant of COVID-19 had been confirmed in the country.
Ihekweazu stated that the agency had scaled up its sequencing capacity to have a better understanding of the burden of the variants of concern in the country.
He noted that the country had capacity for sequencing the variants, noting that Lagos state alone had three laboratories with capacity to do that, alongside the ACEGID lab in Ede and the National Reference Lab at the NCDC.
“We will continue to scale the weekly number of samples sequenced as part of our surveillance”, Ikekweazu said, while stressing that the risk of virus mutation was higher when there was a high transmission of the virus.
“While sequencing is important for us to understand the situation, handwashing, physical distancing and the proper use of face masks are very important to prevent the spread of the virus,” he further said.
He stressed that Nigerians must continue to adhere to all preventive guidelines to stay protected from getting infected with the COVID-19 virus, while herd immunity can only be achieved when over 50 per cent of the population was vaccinated.
