No new death as Nigeria records 96 infections Wednesday

Nigeria recorded no death from COVID-19 on Wednesday, the sixth day in the past nine days that nobody died from the disease.

Also, in continuation of a steady run of low infection figures, the country recorded 96 new cases on Wednesday, one of the lowest daily figures this year.

The new figure which is significantly lower than the 214 recorded a day earlier raised the total number of infections in the West African nation to 162,178.

This is according to an update published by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) Wednesday night.

In the past week, daily infections have fallen below 300; it averaged over 1,000 between December and early February. Deaths have also declined and with no new deaths on Wednesday, the fatalities in the country remain 2, 031 in total, according to the NCDC.

The data also suggest that Africa’s most populous nation may have gone past the worst phase of the virus, although experts warn it might be too early to celebrate.

Specifics

The 96 new cases were reported from 15 states – Lagos (28), Yobe (20), Akwa Ibom (10), Cross River (9), Kaduna (6), Kano (5), Edo (4), Oyo (3), Plateau (3), Jigawa (2), Osun (2), Borno (1), Nasarawa (1), Rivers (1), and Sokoto (1).

Lagos had the highest figure with 28 new cases on Wednesday, followed by Yobe and Akwa Ibom with 20 and 10 new cases respectively.

Since the pandemic broke out in Nigeria in February last year, the country has carried out over 1.7 million tests.

More than two-thirds of the over 161,000 people infected by COVID-19 in Nigeria have recovered after treatment.

According to the NCDC, a total of 148,726 people have recovered after treatment.

Meanwhile, over 11,000 infections are still active in the country.

Vaccination

Authorities have announced that over 200,000 Nigerians have received jabs from the nearly 4 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine that were shipped to the country earlier this month by the Vaccines Global Access facility – COVAX.

Nigeria is also expecting 41 million doses through the African Union.

The west African nation aims to vaccinate 109 million people against the COVID-19 virus over a period of two years.

Only eligible population from 18 years and above will be vaccinated.

To achieve this, authorities said the vaccine roll-out will be in four phases, starting with health workers, frontline workers, COVID-19 rapid response team, laboratory network, police officers, petrol station workers and strategic leaders.

Despite the controversy trailing the Oxford vaccine globally, especially in Europe where there have been very few cases of blood clot among those vaccinated, officials said Nigeria has not recorded any serious adverse reaction following the administration of the vaccines.