The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has on Thursday said it had succeeded in tracing 3,550 people who came in contact with patients infected with COVID-19 in the country.

The Director General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, disclosed this at a press conference organised in Abuja by the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19. He said that the 3,550 people traced were being monitored for symptoms of Coronavirus.

The NCDC assured Nigerians that the Federal Government was fighting the virus to ensure its containment.

Recall that Ihekweazu had at a press conference on Tuesday said, government was searching for 5,000 people who came in contact with COVID-19 positive patients, “We have traced and monitoring 71 per cent of all of them. By the end of today, that figure will increase. This is what this period of two weeks is for. Lagos has been transformational in the last few days. The teams have been able to move incredibly across the state to monitor all these contacts.”

He added that there was an urgent need to get the remaining people to prevent community transmission of the virus. He however expressed challenges in tracing the contacts as many of the contacts came from abroad and gave wrong phone numbers and addresses on the flights they boarded.

“The early cases had large number of contacts. Many of them were on planes and we have to basically contact everyone. But everyone we identify now has a maximum of 30 or 40 contacts,” he said.

On the kits donated to the country by a Chinese billionaire, he said every state government was asked to come to Abuja to collect its share of the kits.
He also said there was no preferential treatment for anyone in all the coronavirus isolation centres across the country.

“There is no preferential care at treatment centres. Everybody is getting the same level of care in Abuja and Lagos and health care workers are really working hard to make sure everybody is supported through the period of care,” he said.

Similarly, the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed said that the information circulating on social media that the materials donated to the country by the Chinese billionaire, Ma were infected with Coronavirus was not true.