By Valentine Amanze
Following what he described as,
The Vice Presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Mr. Peter Obi, has called on the Federal Government and Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) to speed up the Coronavirus testing process in Nigeria.
He said that the present process was very slow, stressing that it would not enable many people be tested and on time.
Obi, who spoke on Channels TV on Wednesday, April 15, 2020, commended the NCDC and other relevant health agencies for ‘the good work they were doing’, while urging them to add more speed to their testing process to get more people tested.
Calling on the Federal Government to establish testing centres in every state of the country, Obi said, “It would speed things up by easing off the burden on the few testing centres we have in the country.
“South Africa has tested over 80,000 people out of which 2000 were discovered to be infected with the virus, a 2.5% of those tested. Ghana has carried out about 38,000 COVID-19 tests, and about 566 tested positive for Coronavirus, about 1.5% of the people tested. In Nigeria, we have tested over 6,000 people with over 300 positive cases, showing that over five percent of the people tested are positive. So we need to do more speedy and aggressive testing to help us effectively curb the spread of the virus”, Obi explained.
Obi also said that the Federal Government could make the fight against the pandemic easier for state governments by helping them establish testing and isolation centres.
“The Federal Government gave Lagos State and Abuja N10 billion and N5 billion, respectively, they could have as well given each state N2 billion each to help them set up testing and isolation centres easily”, he said. Obi said, “We can only get the true picture of the number of people infected with the virus if we do more aggressive testing by getting more people tested.”