…Yet to discharge any patient

By Bashir Bello

 Coordinator, Kano State Task Force Committee on Covid-19, Dr Tijjani Hussaini has on Wednesday said two health workers have tested positive to covid-19 in the state.

Dr Hussaini said the two health workers were among the 73 positive cases it has so far recorded in the state.

He disclosed this while addressing newsmen during the maiden briefing of the committee in the state.

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According to him, “over these 13 days since we recorded the first index case, we are able to have 320 suspected cases out of which 73 are laboratory confirmed.

“Similarly, two of these 73 confirmed cases are health workers. Since the beginning of this outbreak, we were able to monitor 53 cases of passengers of interest (those people who came from high-risk areas outside of Nigeria and states faced with high challenges of covid-19).

“We have also admitted 63 out of the 73 cases and by the end of today (Wednesday) the remaining will be evacuated to the isolation centres.

“One of the hallmarks of this response is contact tracing. At the moment, we have listed over 300 contacts person and we are following up on 259 of these contacts. These contacts, we follow them either through phone or visit them physically to their houses to ensure that we have not left any stone unturned.

“We also set up rapid response teams that will go and do an investigation, take samples and ensure that these samples are delivered in our laboratories. We are in the process of increasing the number of a rapid response team from 30 to 40.

“As we have learnt, while we have momentary setback last week because our co-chair was diagnosed with covid-19, but the state government quickly put up another structure to ensure that the coordination mechanism does not break down. We have reconstituted and we are much stronger now. So kano people should be confident that this outbreak would be brought under control as soon as possible.

“Let me also say here that our testing centres do not run out of commodities,” Dr Tijjani said.

Recall that the state as at on Tuesday night had 73 confirmed cases, one death but yet to discharged any patient.

Vanguard