Coronavirus: Buhari orders conduct of 4,000 Covid-19 tests daily
- President Muhammadu Buhari has ordered that the number of coronavirus test conducted should be increased
- The president mandated the NCDC to increase testing in Lagos to 2,000; FCT, 1,000 and the rest of Nigeria to 1,000 per day
- Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, NCDC director-general, made the disclosure during the presidential task force meeting on Covid-19
Amid intensified efforts on the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, President Muhammadu Buhari has ordered that 4,000 Covid-19 tests should be conducted daily.
Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, director-general of Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), made this known during the presidential task force meeting on Covid-19 on Wednesday, April 15.
Ihekweazu said the president mandated the NCDC to increase testing in Lagos to 2,000; FCT, 1,000 and the rest of Nigeria to 1,000 per day.
"We now have the capacity to test 1,500 people per day across the network. This capacity is not being fully utilized at the moment.
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"The challenge right now is not the laboratory testing capacity, it is how active our public workforce is in identifying samples, collecting and sending them for testing.
“We have sufficient capacity to test 1,500 right now and we’re not close to exhausting that capacity every day. But from today, we’ve to push even harder.
"Our target following President’s speech is to get 2,000 samples per day in Lagos, 1,000 in Abuja and 1,000 for the rest of the country," Ihekweazu said.
Nigeria currently has 373 cases of Covid-19 as the NCDC announced 30 more cases on Tuesday night, April 14 - the highest daily increase in the country.
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Earlier, Legit.ng reported that Ihekweazu said wide-range testing and effective tracking of the Covid-19 cases by the health personnel are some of the major banes impending the fight against coronavirus.
Speaking during the daily conference on the presidential task force on Covid-19 on Tuesday, April 14, the NCDC chief director said the federal government has successfully solved the problem of laboratory testing capacity.
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