Barely seven days after Nigeria’s coronavirus infection tally surpassed 120,000, another 10,000 has been added to the toll indicating how swift the virus has been spreading across the country.
As of Saturday night, the number of people infected with COVID-19 stood at 130,557 after 1,883 new cases – one of the highest daily figures the country has witnessed – were reported in 23 states across the nation on Saturday.
This was announced by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) on its microsite Saturday night.
The grim milestone was reached as Nigerian authorities continue to shuffle plans to land the coronavirus vaccine.
Since early December, there has been an upscale in reported cases and deaths from COVID-19 as the country experiences the second wave of the pandemic.
The spike in daily infections seems to be concentrated more in Lagos, Abuja, Plateau and Kano states although other regions are also witnessing increases in daily figures
In Saturday’s tally, Lagos, Nigeria’s COVID-19 epicentre, led with 1,040 new cases, more than half of the daily tally. Abuja, the second most impacted city followed with 296 new infections.
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Deaths
As a result of the spike in fatalities, there has been more deaths.
COVID-19, the potentially dangerous pneumonia-like disease caused by the coronavirus and said to have emanated from a local Chinese market to spread to over 200 countries across the globe, has also claimed more than 1, 500 lives in Nigeria.
Only one person died from the disease on Saturday but in the previous day, 27 people died – the country’s highest daily fatality toll.
According to NCDC data, the COVID-19 death toll in Nigeria stood at 1,578 in total as of the time of this report.
Last week, Nigeria reported 82 deaths, which represents a 14 per cent increase from the previous week’s record.
In the past four weeks, there have been over 230 fatalities.
Health authorities attributed the rising death toll to late referral of COVID-19 patients to treatment centres.
So far, Nigeria has conducted over 1.2 million COVID-19 tests.
Despite the continuous increase in the number of coronavirus cases in Nigeria, a survey has found that nearly a fifth of Nigerians still do not believe the disease is real.
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The study by the research firm, SBM Intel, in all 36 states and the FCT, found that only 68.8 per cent of Nigerians believe that the virus is real.
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