The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) on Friday announced two additional COVID-19 related deaths, bringing total fatalities to 2,141.
According to the health agency, 558 new COVID-19 infections were recorded as of Thursday night in 15 states and Abuja, Nigeria’s capital.
Lagos State led the daily infection chart with 376, followed by Oyo, 33; Akwa Ibom, 26; the FCT, 22; Imo, 15; while Bayelsa and Ekiti reported 13 new cases each.
Twelve new infections were recorded in Kano while Ogun recorded 11, Plateau, 11; Delta, 9; Jigawa, 6; Rivers, 4; Zamfar, 4; Edo, 2; and Ebonyi, 1.
”Today’s report includes zero cases from Kaduna, Nasarawa, Ondo, and Osun,” the agency said in an update on Nigeria’s COVID-19 situation report. ”The NCDC regrettably recorded two COVID-19-related deaths on Thursday keeping the death toll at 2, 141.”
The agency said that 44 people had recovered and were discharged from various isolation centres in the country on Thursday.
It added that to date, 164,930 recoveries have been recorded nationwide in 36 states and the FCT.
The NCDC said that a multi-sectoral national emergency operations centre, activated at Level II, continues to coordinate the national response activities.
Meanwhile, NCDC reported that Nigeria has so far recorded 10 new cases of the Delta COVID-19 variant.
The Director-General of NCDC, Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, disclosed this at the ministerial briefing on COVID-19 in Abuja, on July 27.
The variant has so far been detected in over 90 countries.
Ihekweazu, who was represented by Elsie Ilori, Director of Disease Surveillance Department, while giving an update on Nigeria’s COVID-19 situation, said: “With sequencing efforts, we have detected 10 cases which are confirmed to be the Delta variant. We are working hard to ensure genomic surveillance of travellers’ samples and to scale up our genomic sequencing capacity.”
Minister of Health, Dr Osagie Ehanire, said steps had been taken to scale-up and enhance local oxygen capacity even before oxygen consumption increased.
He also said Nigeria had invested directly and strategically to ensure oxygen availability to avert the unforeseen incidence of oxygen insufficiency for COVID-19 patients in the country.
On COVID-19 vaccines, the minister said that Nigeria was expecting over 29 million of the Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
He said that the vaccine was purchased by the Government of Nigeria through the African Union’s African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team (AVATT) facility and over four million of the Moderna.
He also said that Nigeria is expecting almost 700 thousand of the AstraZeneca vaccine, through the COVAX facility from bilateral donations from the governments of the U.S. and the UK as well as Pfizer and Sinopharm from both bilateral agreements and through the COVAX facility.
