By Joy Odor
The Minister of Health, Dr. Osagie Emmanuel Ehanire has Informed Nigerians that COVID-19 is not gone in the country but only slow down.
Dr. Ehanire disclosed this during the by-weekly Ministrial Press Briefing on Covid-19 response update in Abuja on Tuesday.
He enjoined Nigerians to refrain from non essential crowding and continue to apply non pharmaceutical measures, like wearing face masks, washing hands, sanitising and being careful in all times.
“We now know that the massive huge city of Shangai in China is on the lock down because of an explosion again of COVID-19 in that city. Before that it was in Europe, in UK and Germany.
“So, the reemergence of COVID-19 from country to country surprise us” the minister added.
The Minister maintained that the Federal Government priority is to improve the health indexes of the country, noting that they Ministry cannot achieved it without the cooperation of the public and the media, who are the interface between the government and the public.
He called for the Multi-National and Multi-Sectoral approach to propelled the Nigeria towards attaining the universal health coverage.
Dr Ehanire affirmed that it is the ministry’s commitment to reposition and restructure the health Sector with lessons leant in other countries according to global best practices.
He was of the opinion that one factor that would support policy goal realization is accelareting the lmplementation of fetility control interventions, adding that among them are receiving family planning and child birth spacing to scale up meaningful control of the population growth rate and support Nigeria economic growth rate.
The Health Minister informed that Federal Government target is to have more consumption of contraceptive prevalence rate of of 27% by year 2030 and sustainably increased it to 65% by year 2050.
He called for more support with the National Population Commission (NPC) and other stakeholders for the ministry to achieve it.
“Federal government is following up on the plan to revamp the local vaccine manufacturing capacity. “Nigeria recently completed training on COVID-19 vaccine production technology by WHO in South Africa and work is currently going on at the BioVaccine company.
“We are looking at working with two platforms, because of our population. We have to have these preparations made by identifying the vaccine production capacity that we can use to start off other production platform to be able to produce multiple types of vaccines.
“There are many disease patterns in our country which we need to be able to take care of such as TB, malaria and other endemic diseases and these should have vaccines. So the research components have to be included.”
“The country is working in collaboration with some research organisations outside the country for not only producing COVID-19 vaccine, but learning the capacity to produce any other type of vaccines that can be used to deal with some indigenous and tropical neglected diseases” he stressed.
He disclosed that the total number of Covid-19 samples tested is five million, thirty six thousand eight hundred and thirteen (5,036, 813), confirmed case are two hundred and fifty five thousand, six hundred and seventy (255,670), Active cases are two thousand, six hundred and fifty seven (2,657), discharges till date are two hundred and forty nine thousand, eight hundred and seventy four (249,874), deaths till date are three thousand, one hundred and forty three (3,143) which brings the fatality case to 1.2%.
While a Director from the Primary Health Care Agency, Dr Nneka Onwu noted that currently, the total number of doese of Covid-19 vaccine in the country are 74 million.
