Coronavirus: Again, Nigeria is caught off-guard By Jerry Uwah

Coronavirus( COVID-19), the deadly ailment with a beautiful name is in Nigeria at last. I do not know who gave such a beautiful name to one of man’s greatest enemies. I adore Toyota Corona, one of the rugged sedans built in the 1970s by the world’s leading automaker, Toyota.

Now the name has been derisively attached to a deadly ailment. The virus entered Nigeria the way Ebola did.

Like Ebola, it was a foreigner who brought corona to Nigeria because our borders are more porous than the gates of a Pentecostal church on a typical Shiloh celebration period. Patrick Sawyer, a Liberian diplomat brought Ebola to Nigeria on July 20, 2014. A critically ill Sawyer sauntered through the gateway of the Murtala Mohammed International Airport (MMIA) into the sympathetic reception of a veteran consultant, Dr. Ameyo Adadevoh in a leading private hospital in Obalende, Lagos. No one at MMIA could notice that the Liberian diplomat was an agent of death.  There were no scanners after several weeks of warnings that the virus was plaguing Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia.

It was Dr. Adadevoh that discerned Sawyer’s strange ailment and quarantined him despite pressures from the government of Liberia.

But before then, the damage had been done. The doctor was infected. She and some of her nurses paid the supreme price.

Today we are facing a similar threat with coronavirus. Like the case with Ebola, a foreigner is the index case. This time it is an Italian. If Nigeria was prepared for COVID-19, the Italian would have been stopped at the gates of MMIA.

We had enough warnings but those in position of authority ignored them and rather traded insults with those who warned that we were not prepared for the impending disaster. A senator arrived from South Africa last week and warned that with what he saw in South Africa, Nigeria was not prepared to halt the entry of the virus. The presidency responded to the timely warning by tongue-lashing the senator.

The day after the tongue-lashing by the presidency, it became clear that the federal government had done practically nothing to stop the spread of the virus to Nigeria.

The minister of health shamelessly announced that the virus had sneaked into Nigeria.  The index case could not be spotted at the entry point in MMIA because there probably were no scanners.  Scanners were eventually rushed in after the virus had entered. We ended up closing the door after the thief had entered.

The Italian engineer, a consultant with Lafarge, beat the gatekeepers at MMIA and boarded a taxi to Ewekoro.

Like in the case of Ebola, it was the health centre of Lafarge in Ewekoro that raised the alarm that the consultant had the deadly virus. Before then the damage had been done.  The taxi driver who ferried the Italian engineer to Ewekoro in Ogun state was infected.  He probably has infected his family members who in turn would spread the virus. Passengers of the Turkish Airline flight that brought the Italian engineer are ignorantly spreading the virus. Even if they are eventually tracked and quarantined, it would be rather belated.

The rulers of Nigeria have been very sloppy in handling the outbreak of the virus since it was announced in January that the Chinese city of Wuhan was the epicenter. While the Chinese quarantined anyone from Wuhan, Nigeria ignored that warning example by the index country of the virus and opened its gateways to everyone.

Nigeria probably has the highest number of Chinese in Africa because of the magnitude of the projects handled by Chinese firms. Sometime in January, the Chinese in Nigeria flocked to their country to celebrate their own new year.

Most of them returned when news of the outbreak of the virus hit the airwaves. None of the returning Chinese was quarantined.

Instead, Lagos state commissioner for health took passivity to the superlative degree by warning all air passengers from China to quarantine themselves. No one obeyed him. There are fears that the virus has been in the country for weeks now but was mitigated by the hostile temperature which hovers around 34 degrees Celsius in Lagos.

It is perhaps in the quarantine centre that the world would notice Nigeria’s deplorable level of preparedness for the disaster.

The Italian engineer was quarantined in the Infectious Disease Hospital in Yaba. That hospital had suffered decades of neglect because no rich man goes there. It is home to the poor and wretched whose low immunity has given way to tuberculosis. The Italian engineer is very angry with Nigeria. It took his forced admission there for the world to know how primitive Nigeria’s health facilities are.

The centre is one of the worse kept health facilities in the country. Mosquitoes have a field day because of the filthy surroundings.

Traders are the major beneficiaries of the outbreak of coronavirus in Nigeria. The price of preventive items has surged by 1,000 per cent. A pack of face mask that use to sell for N400 has gone up to N7, 500.

One small bottle of hand sanitizer sells for N3, 500 from a maximum of N350 before the outbreak. Government responded to the surging prices by warning retailers that they would be sanctioned for profiteering.

The warning is an empty threat. Government has no answer to the scarcity because it has no strategic reserve of the items that could be released into the market to force down prices.

If Nigeria was a developed country, the minister of health would have resigned after he announced the arrival of the virus in Nigeria. Unfortunately poor performance is rewarded with more responsibilities here.

The only solace this time is that the casualty rate of the virus is pretty low. Less than three per cent of those infected have actually died. The high temperature in Nigeria would mitigate the spread of the virus as it hardly survives temperatures higher than 26 degrees Celsius. That probably is the only hope of defenseless Nigerians.

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