We Have Capacity To Test 3000 COVID-19 Suspects Daily – NCDC

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has said it now has the capacity to test 3000 suspected patients daily for Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the country.

Director General of NCDC, Chikwe Ihekweazu, who disclosed this during Wednesday’s Presidential Task Force Briefing on COVID-19, said, this was possible because it had increased the number of testing laboratories in the countries to 12.

Before now, the centre had testing capacity for only 1500 per day.

Ihekweazu said “We now have the capacity of testing 3000 per day, that capacity is not being fully utilised that’s why I focus on Lagos & the FCT with the efforts they’re making to get more people tested.

“The bottleneck right now is not the testing, it’s the collecting of the samples and getting them to the lab.

“By the end of today, we will be publishing a diagnostic strategy, so that everybody will be aware of where we are, where we are going, short term and long term. That is, how we are going to introduce the TB facilities (GeneXpert Machines), HIV testing, and how we are going to end up with one lab per state.”