We Are Testing 150 Persons Per Day -Lagos Commissioner For Health

The Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Akin Abayomi has said the state currently has capacity to run Coronavirus tests for only 150 persons daily.

Abayomi said this while giving updates on the effort of the state government to combat the virus on Tuesday.

According to him the state had would continue to expand it’s capacity to do more, adding that soon it would get to about 200 tests per day and more.

“We still have an excess testing capacity, we have three reference laboratories in Lagos, each of those facilities is testing up to 50 per day, so we have about 150 tests per day. We are increasing that capacity by the day, hopefully, we will be able to get to 200 and so on.”

Abayomi however claimed that Lagos state was far ahead the outbreak of the virus as the molecular test laboratories were more effective with a 100 % result accuracy.

“Lagos State has capacity at the moment and not under any stress in terms of access to PPE or testing capacities,” he said.

“Most of the patients are experiencing a mild to moderate degree of the illness, no patient requires ventilation at the moment.

“I will estimate that about 33 of the 66 are mild, about 33 are showing moderate diseases characterised by severe fever, some coughing, and general body pain,” he said.

The commissioner further said the state had deployed effective strategies to combat the virus adding that presently it had no shortage of health workers.

“Lagos has 27 general hospitals and almost 300 health practitioners and a teaching hospital. We are not struggling at the moment, we have health professionals and volunteers.”

He said about 50 to 60 professionals were being trained daily, including health practitioners who had gone into voluntary retirement and are coming back.