The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), has said the country currently carries out between 3,000 and 6,000 COVID-19 tests daily.
It said although the testing infrastructure available can conveniently carry out 15,000 daily COVID-19 tests, the country is yet to fully utilise this capacity, as only 40 percent of it is being deployed.
The Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, made this known in Abuja, during a television interview.
He said: “We have a national capacity to test somewhere close to 15,000 tests per day. We’re however doing between 3,000 and 5,000 and maybe 6,000 at most. So, that is what we are doing and we are testing about 40 percent of what we have the capacity to test for.
“This is not just about the laboratories. This is really about the sample collection; encouraging people not to be fatigued, not to worry – to have confidence in the system, and to come up when they are sick, and to provide samples to be tested.
“Second challenge is the logistics to get those tests collected into the lab. We have been working over the last week with States to improve the efficiency of this.
“How we have gotten to 64 laboratories is that we have gone across the country and wherever we see some minimum capacity, we have worked with them to quickly upgrade what they have in order to get them to the level of testing – whether it’s in a university, in a state hospital, in a federal teaching hospital.”
