Following what he described as the slow pace of the COVID-19 testing process, vice presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Mr. Peter Obi, has called on the Federal Government and Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) to speed up Coronavirus testing process in Nigeria.
By scaling up, he said a greater percentage of the population would be tested within a short while the government would easily ascertain the true number of people infected with the virus and thus take a better and more practicable approach to combating the pandemic.
Obi, who spoke on a live television, acknowledged the NCDC and other relevant health agencies for ‘the good work they were doing’, while urging them to add more speed to their testing process so as to get more people tested.
He challenged the Federal Government to establish testing centres in every state.
“It would speed things up by easing off the burden on the few testing centres we have in the country. South Africa has tested over 80,000 people out of which 2,000 were discovered to be infected with the virus, a 2.5 per cent of those tested. Ghana has carried out about 38,000 tests, and about 566 tested positive; about 1.5 per cent of the people tested. In Nigeria, we have tested over 6,000 people with over 300 positive cases, showing that over 5 per cent of the people tested are positive. So we need to do more speedy and aggressive testing to help us effectively curb the spread of the virus”, Obi explained.
Obi also said the Federal Government could make the fight against the pandemic easier for state governments by helping them establish testing and isolation centres.