With the increase in coronavirus cases in Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari has mandated the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control to conduct 4,000 tests per day.
The decision was taken at the 11th joint national briefing of the Presidential Taskforce Force on COVID-19.
NCDC Director-General, Chikwe Ihekweazu, making the announcement, said that Buhari had mandated the NCDC to increase testing in Lagos to 2,000; FCT, 1,000 and the rest of Nigeria, 1,000 per day.
He said:
“We now have the capacity to test 1,500 people per day across the network. This capacity is not being fully utilized at the moment.
The challenge right now is not the laboratory testing capacity, it is how active our public workforce is in identifying samples, collecting and sending them for testing.
“We have sufficient capacity to test 1,500 right now and we’re not close to exhausting that capacity every day. But from today, we’ve to push even harder.
Our target following Mr. President’s speech is to get 2,000 samples per day in Lagos, 1,000 in Abuja and 1,000 for the rest of the country.
“…The challenge is no longer with the labs, the challenge is in collecting samples from those identified as suspect cases.”