COVID-19: Nigeria’s new daily cases remain low

After reporting its lowest COVID-19 daily infection figure in seven months on Saturday, Nigeria recorded another relatively low number on Sunday with 269 new cases.

This is according to an update by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Sunday night.

In the update, however, Lagos, the epicentre of the disease in Nigeria, which on Saturday recorded almost a third of the day’s total, had no infection.

It is not immediately clear if this because no case was found in the commercial city on Sunday or that Lagos officials did not turn in infection figures.

Such incidents have happened at least four times since the beginning of this year with the NCDC saying Lagos State health authorities did not report their infection figures.

With no new cases reported from Lagos, Enugu had the highest daily figure with 78 new infections on Sunday.

Nigeria suffered its worst phase of the COVID-19 outbreak between December and January as daily infections averaged over 1,000.

Recently, however, infection figures have been relatively low with daily cases hovering between 200 and 700 in the past two weeks except for the 709 infections recorded Thursday and the 195 recorded Saturday.

With the latest figure, the total infection in the country is now 158,506.

Nigeria also recorded five deaths from COVID-19 on Sunday.

While daily infections have reduced, the fatality toll in the country has been relatively been high. Sunday’s death tally raised the fatality toll in the past five days to 62 in total.

With the latest figure, the total fatality toll in the country is now 1,969, according to the NCDC.

Health experts believe the official data under-reports both infections and deaths because of the country’s limited testing capacity.

The 269 new cases were reported from 19 states: Enugu (78), Bauchi (37), Rivers (22), Imo (18), Ogun (16), FCT (15), Akwa Ibom (13), Kaduna (13), Kebbi (11), Kwara (9), Edo(7), Ekiti (6), Borno (5), Yobe(5), Kano (4) Nasarawa (3), Osun (3), Anambra (2) and Plateau (2).

Nigeria has conducted 1,544,008 tests so far, less than one per cent of the 200 million inhabitants of Africa’s most populous nation.

More than two-thirds of the over 158,000 people infected by COVID-19 in Nigeria have recovered after treatment.

According to NCDC data published Saturday night, a total of 137,875 have recovered after treatment.

Meanwhile, over 18,000 infections are still active in the country.

It could be recalled that Nigeria suffered its worst phase of the COVID-19 outbreak between December and January as daily infections averaged over 1,000.