NCDC, Bello differ on COVID-19 in Kogi State

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, NCDC, Director General, Chikwe Ihekweazu said, Kogi State has recorded two index case.

The NCDC Director-General was reacting swiftly to governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi who maintained that the State was COVID-19 free while dismissing the Wednesday May 27 claims by the Centre.

The NCDC relied on the symptomatic results obtained on Wednesday night before it announced that the coronavirus has now debuts in Kogi.

However, Kogi State Commissioner for Health, Saka Haruna-Audu, in a statement on Friday morning, dismissed the results, saying the state has conducted hundreds of tests for COVID19 and all have returned negative.

The Commissioner maintained that the State would be unbowed to pressures from any quarters.

According to him, Kogi would not accept any result of COVID-19 not conducted by it.

”We have also continued to insist that Kogi state will not be a party to any fictitious COVID19 claims which is wht we do not recognize any COVID19 test conducted by Kogite outside the boundaries of the state except initiated by us” his statement said

Dr. Haruna insisted that the two persons the NCDC claimed had the viral disease are not citizens of State.

However at the daily press briefing of the Presidential Taskforce on COVID19 in Abuja earlier today, the NCDC boss dismissed the claims made by the Kogi state government. He said there is no confusion about the cases because the reference address given by the patients is Kogi state

”There is actually no dilemma in the two cases. They followed absolutely normal practice. The patient that was referred from the Federal Medical Center to the National Hospital. This is a normal referral pathway when you have a case. They physicians in the National Hospital suspected COVID19 from the clinical symptoms of the patient, asked for a test, it came out positive. The individual lives in Kogi state.

Your public health response is based on where you live because that is where your contacts are so this is not controversial in anyway. Standard practice was followed. Once the results came out, the state epidiemiologist was informed that he has to do contact tracing around this patient. It is the state’s responsibility to do that contact tracing. So we hope they do it” he said