The National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) Monday said it is set to commence daily testing of 200,000 samples across all the laboratories in the country.
This was disclosed by the Director-General if NCDC, Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, at the daily briefing of the Presidential Task Force on Control of COVID-19.
“We now have enough reagents to test close to 200,000 samples, across all the Labs in our network. We now really need to work with the State epidemiologists, to collect the samples,” he said.
He said the centre would now focus on response on the states and the set of professionals (epidemiologist) that work in every state that have had to take on a lot more responsibilities.
He said there are also the incident managers of the emergency operation centres and they are the heart of the collaboration in the states.
“But also there have few opportunities coming their way to support the work that were doing we’re raising looking for resources, wherever possible to make their life easier and one thing that we must get out of this outbreak is really to build a network around them.
“So very often in the past, they have not really been recognized their responsibility, in the work that they’re doing on our behalf.
“But in effect to do that work effectively, they need the resources. So it is really they’re the first people we call when we hear there’s a case of X or Y or there is a cluster of an unknown illness or unknown deaths, our first response is always the call the state epidemiologist.
“But critically, we’ve also been advocating to the state governors. These outbreak has brought their Public Health teams much closer together with the leadership of every state. So now most State Governors now know their state epidemiologist very well.
“And that relationship will grow over the next few years because we will not return to a country with the hell security architecture that we had in the past. We will need to build on what we have learned from this outbreak to design a great architecture for the future.
“And this means that we need to use technology, use our platforms and build a lot more closer relationship across the different tiers of government from the federal at the NCDC level to the state epidemiologist, in the teams and the disease surveillance and notification officers and in every local government area,” he said.
He said the NCDC was working with the World Bank to design some high-impact interventions to build an agile, flexible workforce for health security in Nigeria that would be responsive.
