NCDC officials breaks WHO protocol, refuses to take Covid-19 test in Kogi »

Kogi State Governor Yahaya Bello has directed officials of the National Center for Disease Control, NCDC, to isolate in the state quarantine center for fourteen days.

The governor issued the order Thursday night when he received officials of NCDC and Federal Ministry of Health in the state.

The governor said the step was to ensure that the established procedure to control the scourge by the NCDC was strictly followed.

The National Center for Disease Control, NCDC, has sent a delegation of rapid response team to determine Kogi’s true status as a covid-19 free state.

The team led by Dr. Noah Andrew, who had arrived at the government house to present a letter tittled “Deploying the Rapid Response Squadron to Assist in the Fight Against Covid-19,” said its mission was to provide logistics for all the states of the Federation from which Kogi cannot be left out.

He said two team members would stay behind to help the state and support its efforts from the state government already in place: “We are here to support the state in sending swabs and samples and verifying the state’s readiness in the fight. ” COVID-19 “.

He urged the government and people to observe social distancing and to wear the face mask at all times as part of the measures to combat the scourge.

Responding, Governor Bello described the steps taken so far by the state to combat the covid-19 pandemic, noting that the state has a lot of experience in fighting infectious diseases like Lassa fever, malaria and the experience has been put into practice. in the fight against Covid-19.

“Then you will notice that, unlike practiced in most places, we established a Lassa Fever and Covid-19 Squadron Committee to coordinate our response to the Covid-19 pandemic while making sure to keep track of existing epidemics such as Lassa Fever which has already killed more people this year in Nigeria than the coronavirus.

“We were the first state to officially launch a web application that the general public can implement to self-assess the risk of CoviD-19. This application has proven to be popular and effective in fighting fear among the population against an unknown fatal disease.

“We have had over 200,000 engagements with that app, over 14,000 completed self-assessments that revealed dozens of cases that required further investigation before CoviD-19 could be ruled out. This is great since we all know how fear and misinformation They are often overlooked but are very dangerous for travelers with outbreaks of disease and other phenomena that disrupt the social order.

“To improve our degree of certainty in ruling out cases, our health commissioner, state epidemiologist, and other senior medical personnel have had to personally track as many feedback cases as possible, both in urban and remote locations. They have been able to professionally determine based on the NCDC and WHO criteria that none of the suspected cases qualified as a CoviD-19 case.

“Also, it has been over 3, 4, even 5 weeks in some cases since some of these cases were investigated and resolved and we have not even had a Covid-19 case.” This shows that our processes are complete enough. This is how the foundations were laid for our CoviD-19 zero state and how it remains to this day.

“Our people are adequately sensitized in all languages and locations across the state to CoviD-19. To the extent possible, Kogites now observes social distancing, hand washing, and other protocols for infection prevention.

“The Kogi State Ministry of Health has deployed health personnel in the 239 neighborhoods of the state, 2 focal persons per neighborhood, who constantly sensitize people about the dangers of the virus, report news or even rumors of suspicious cases to the committee of incidents. or research task force and also helps in tracing contacts.

“We have established 3 modern isolation / containment centers in the state that have a combined capacity of 130 bed spaces. These facilities are currently unused. It is our prayer and our determination that these isolation centers will remain vacant until the pandemic ends.

“We have provided toll-free emergency numbers for the general public to call and report suspected Covid-19 cases at no cost. We have also sent many of those calls. All were found to be false alarms during the investigation and did not meet the NCDC criteria for cases that should be sampled for testing.

“In these circumstances, we cannot fabricate cases to be counted among the states that have registered it. As Governor, I heard there are “benefits” to having CoviD-19 cases in your state, well, I’m not interested. ”

However, Insidestoryng.com can confirm that the officials unceremoniously fled the state, allegedly to avoid being quarantined.