Nigeria records one new death, 214 new cases

Exactly one year after Nigeria reported its first COVID-19 fatality, one person died from the disease on Tuesday. Prior to Tuesday, no death was recorded from the virus in two days making Tuesday’s fatality the first in 72 hours.

Also, about 214 people tested positive for COVID-19 in Nigeria on Tuesday.

The total infections in the country is now 162,076 while 2,031 deaths have occurred.

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

In the past one week, there has been a marginal decline in new cases as daily infections have fallen below 300.

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

Specifics

The 214 new cases were reported from 12 states: Adamawa (109), Lagos (33), Bauchi (26), Kaduna (9), Rivers (9), FCT (7), Oyo (7), Gombe (5), Ebonyi (4), Osun (3), Ekiti (1), and Ogun (1).

For the first time this month, Adamawa had the highest figure with 109 new cases on Tuesday; followed by Lagos, the most impacted city in Nigeria, with 33 new cases.

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 NCDC data published Sunday night, a total of 148,530 people have recovered after treatment.

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

Vaccination

Authorities on Tuesday 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.

Faisal Shuaib, the Executive Director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) while speaking at Monday’s briefing of the…