COVID-19: Patients in Lagos only have mild to moderate symptoms, none requires ventilator –Commissioner

The Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Akin Abayomi, Tuesday said that all the coronavirus patients in Lagos were experiencing mild to moderate symptoms of Covid-19.

He said that none of the patients had need of ventilator at the moment.

The commissioner, who spoke during a press briefing at the state secretariat on Tuesday, also said that Lagos State had excess testing capacity for coronavirus infection and was not under pressure in terms of testing.

“We still have an excess testing capacity, we have three reference laboratories in Lagos, each of those facilities is testing up to 50 per day, so we have about 150 tests per day. We are increasing that capacity by the day, hopefully, we will be able to get to 200 and so on,” he said.

Abayomi, commenting on Jack Ma’s donation, said the equipment would be shared to each state by the Federal Government, according to the needs of the states.

He said, “Lagos State has capacity at the moment and not under any stress in terms of access to PPE or testing capacities.”

Nigeria has 135 cases of coronavirus as of Tuesday. Of that number Lagos has 81 confirmed cases.

Commenting on that, the commissioner said that eight of the 81 cases had recovered and no death.

He added that 66 cases resulted as transmission within Lagos while 15 cases came off a vessel that was manoeuvring the coasts of Lagos doing oil and gas work.

On the conditions of the patients he said, “Most of the patients are experiencing a mild to moderate degree of the illness, no patient requires ventilation at the moment.

“I will estimate that about 33 of the 66 are mild, about 33 are showing moderate diseases characterised by severe fever, some coughing, and general body pain.”

On concerns on whether the number of testing facilities and health practitioners is commensurate with the population in the state, Abayomi explained that the strategies beingemployed by the state remained effective to combat the virus. He equally said there was no shortage of health workers at the moment.

“Lagos has 27 general hospitals and almost 300 health practitioners and a teaching hospital. We are not struggling at the moment, we have health professionals and volunteers. About 50 to 60 professionals are being trained daily, including health practitioners who have gone into voluntary retirement and are coming back.

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“The strategies we are deploying in Lagos is effective, we are only seeing between six and ten positive cases in a day, that is a very slow rate of increase compared to what we see in Europe and other countries where the increase is by hundreds and thousands,” he said.

The commissioner assured that the state was keeping ahead of the outbreak and that even if there is a surge of the virus, it would not be as much as the cases in Europe and the rest of the world.

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