Nigeria’s COVID-19 testing capacity reaches 50,000

The Director-General of the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Chikwe Ihekweazu has said that the country now has capacity for about 50,000 COVID-19 tests.

Ihekweazu disclosed this during the daily briefing of the Presidential Task Force (PTF) in Abuja on Monday.

He said, “On the Roche equipment, what we have at the moment in the country as we speak, is a capacity to test about 50,000.

“This is with the conventional RT-PCR and the new Roche equipment that we have launched today (yesterday). So, with every new laboratory that we have, we just set up a laboratory in Sokoto, it means we have to provide them with the logistics and everything they need to collect samples and we are looking to do this in 36 plus one states.

“The good thing about the new Roche equipment we are starting to work with today is that it eliminates the need for certain things like the extraction kits. So, we can actually do a lot more work in a short time.

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“If we had all the samples in the laboratories, if all the collections happen from the states, we can do up to 900 or a thousand tests in a day. Really, there is a lot of capacity to test now, the challenge is to bring in the samples quickly and get the equipment working.”

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