The pneumonia-like disease caused by coronavirus has dealt a heavy blow on all the sectors of Nigeria’s economy, including the day-to-day lives of individuals’ resident in the heterogeneous country.
It has been a little over a year since Nigeria recorded its index case of the novel coronavirus on 27 February 2020, in Lagos. Months have gone by, yet the country grapples to contain the pneumonia-like virus which emanated from a local market in Wuhan, China, spreading across 200 countries of the world and killing over 2,048 people in Nigeria, according to the Nigeria Center for Disease Control, the country’s infectious disease agency. As of 29 March 2021, the centre has recorded at least 162,593 tested cases, which represents more than 0.0769 percent of the country’s population of over 200 million.
Interestingly, about two-third of the 162,593 people infected with COVID-19 have recovered after treatment, indicating some level of success recorded by the country’s frontline health workers. The health war is fierce and unlike other countries of the world, Africa’s giant, Nigeria, is threatened by a rather inefficient and insufficient testing capacity.
It took a period of nine months for Nigeria’s supposed antigen-based rapid diagnostic test for COVID-19 to hit a milestone of 120,000 on 24 January 2021 from the 1,000 cases reached on 25 April 2020.
Unfortunately, since the country declared a second wave of the pandemic in December 2020 following an increase in infections, Nigeria has averaged over 1,000 confirmed cases daily, hence, typifying how fast the virus spreads on an hourly basis.