COVID-19: ‘We Don’t Want Explosion of New Infection’ – Ihekwazu

With the way residents of Lagos, Ogun and FCT poured out on Monday when the lockdown was lifted, the Director-General of the Nigerian Center for Disease Control, Chikwe Ihekweazu has warned people on the disregard of safety guidelines.

He stated this after witnessing the surge with which people besieged the banks, markets and motor parks with little care to COVID-19.

While speaking at the daily briefing of the Presidential taskforce on COVID-19 in Abuja on Monday said that the government might be forced to issue a lockdown as it cannot afford an explosion of COVID-19 cases.

He said, “It is not the guidelines per se, it is the thinking behind it. How do we want to manage the risk of explosion and transmission? Today, we might forgive the little bit because it is the first day.

We will have an infection because of what happened today, no doubt about that. But how can we learn from the mistakes of today into tomorrow, next tomorrow so by Friday hopefully, we have normalised some of these things?Yes, we knew today would be a problem because, for the first time, people were let out of their homes but now they are out and we have seen the sunlight again, the challenge for us as a society is how do we now organise ourselves to mitigate these risks and limit transmission?

We might have a few extra infections today and tomorrow but what we don’t want is an explosion of new infections.

If we do have that infection, there will be almost no choice left for the leadership of the country than to ask all of us to go back into our homes.

So, for the benefit of coming out to reopen parts of the economy, there is a price to pay which is to reorganise ourselves to do this safely.”