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Juliana Taiwo-Obalonye, Abuja
The Director-General Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Chikwe Ihekweazu, has given reason why he raised the alarm on Saturday that the country was running low on extraction kits.
Ihekweazu, at the daily briefing of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 in Abuja, said the centre was having challenges bringing the items to the country, adding that the alarmed he raised paid off as Nigerians rose to the occasion and filled in the gap.
He said: “On my tweet on Saturday, one thing I want colleagues to understand is that I asked for something called an extraction kit; they are not the same thing as the test kit. We have a supply chain of all commodities but there are some slight challenges with things coming into the country now.
“These are things that we have ordered and they are in the process of coming in but we suddenly ran out on them. So rather than shut down the network of 15 labs in the country, I put out that tweet.
“While we got a lot of criticisms which I expected, something beautiful happened – people came back and solved that problem. Some people brought in the extraction kits, some offered to give it to us for free because they had it in their warehouses.
“There are only four states that have not recorded a case in Nigeria – Cross River, Kogi, Nasarawa, and Yobe states. We are looking at the number of samples collected from those states; we are not satisfied with the number of samples collected, so we need to test more.
“But to test more we need to collect more and that collection part is the responsibility of states and their public health teams.
“We want to really encourage every state in Nigeria; you can’t hide this, eventually it will emerge. It is better we understand what is happening early than leave it till we start hearing stories of deaths.”
The DG NCDC also revealed that the country now has the capacity to test 50,000 samples of the coronavirus (COVID-19) with the launch of the ROCHE machine.
According to him, “what we have in the country at the moment is a capacity to test about 50,000. This is with the conventional RT-PCR and the new ROCHE equipment that we have launched today.
“The challenge now is all the other things that have to happen – the swabs to collect samples, the virus transport media, the people, etc., and we are coordinating all of this. For every new lab we set up, it means we have to provide the lab with the logistics and everything it needs to collect samples, and we are looking to do these in 36 plus one states.
“Our focus this week is to rapidly scale testing across the country and I’m happy to announce that today we are activating the high throughput ROCHE machine in the NCDC reference lab that will enable us an extra capacity of about 1,000 samples a day if we can get the samples in.
“The ROCHE machine eliminates the need for an extraction kit, so we can actually do a lot more work and do it quickly. So if all the collections happen from the States, we can do up to 900 to 1,000 samples in a day. So really, there is a lot of capacity to test now. The challenge is to bring in the samples quickly and get the equipment working. Partners like the UN family, the US government and other partners have helped to get this working.”
He further added: “This weekend, we approved the inclusion of a firm called 54gene to start testing in the private sector in Lagos and Ogun states, and we are currently in discussions with them to move part of their operations to Kano State.
“We have two private labs now – the DNA lab in Kaduna and the 54gene working in Lagos, Ogun, and by next week in Kano. We hope that with this, we will continue growing the network of our private labs in the country.
