TheCable

Chikwe Ihekweazu, director-general of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), says the agency is now following up on 70% of persons believed to have had contacts with COVID-19 patients. 

President Muhammadu Buhari had on Sunday ordered a two-week lockdown of the federal capital territory (FCT), Lagos and Ogun states to allow for contact tracing and stop the spread of the virus.

At a press briefing on Wednesday, Ihekweazu said the purpose of the lockdown is being achieved as their teams are now daily finding contacts and also using technology. 

“For all our surveillance and contact tracing, we are using a digital platform called Surmas and to collect information on all the cases, all the contacts  either then displaced on the dashboards at the federal level, at the state level,” he said.  

“With those dashboards, we understand the progress of case finding. Everyday, that dashboard informs us on where the contacts are, which contacts are linked to what case. 

“It is with this information that we send down teams every morning to do the detailed investigation required. As at this morning, we are following up on 70% of the over 5, 000 contacts that we have identified. Everyday, we are pushing that number higher and that is one of the key purposes of the lockdown in Lagos, Abuja and Ogun. It is to enable the teams to find these contacts and make sure that those that are sick are found and brought into care, and those that are well are followed for 14 days. 

“So, this is the primary strategy at the moment. We couldn’t do any of these without the technology to support the work we are doing. In addition to the dashboard, everybody has a hand held device that they use once they go to the individual’s home. Immediately that information is put into the hand held, it appears on the dashboard, and we know whether that person has been seen on that day or not. We monitor that in real time in our emergency operation centre.”

The DG said a lot of effort has been made to make www.covid19.ncdc.gov.ng as user friendly as possible. 

He said there were some problems about a week ago and this was because of the traffic to the site, but working with some partners, they have now enhanced the accessibility and user friendliness both for the computer version and the phone version. 

“In all that site you find all the information you need and cases reported in real time,” he said.

“We have a geographical information system displaying the trajectory of cases as we announce them. We try and update this frequently but if you see any error, let us know, There is a team working specifically on this.”