As part of measures towards effective management of coronavirus, the Federal Capital Territory (FCTA) has inaugurated Emergency Epidemic Response Committee, comprising of members from FCT health secretariat, tertiary and private hospitals, National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Federal Ministry of Health, and World Health Organization (WHO).
The Acting Secretary Fedral Capital Territory (FCT) Health Secretariat, Mohammed Kawu while inaugurating the committee Sunday, in Abuja explained that the committee has an incident manager, Lawal Ademola which is subdivided into eight functional units, such as: coordination, logistics and infection prevention and control.
Others are epidemiology, surveillance and point of entry laboratory, risk Communication and social mobilization, case management and health and safety (welfare).
The Acting Secretary who also said that the primary responsibility of the team is to confront the disease in all quarters and curtail its spread in the nation’s capital, said: “Although FCTA has been up and doing ensuring that everything is done to contain the disease but with the confirmation of cases in the FCT, emergency management and treatment is opened and FCT is inaugrating this team”,
Speaking earlier, Director of FCT Public Health Department Dr. Josephine Okechukwu, disclosed that for now there are four confirmed cases of the covid -19 also known as coronavirus as she indicated that three are responding to treatment and are stable, even as she noted that there are 39 suspected cases.
Okechukwu who however, said she personally interacted with the patients noted that one of them is not yet stabilised, revealing that the said patient had a serious health issue before traveling abroad to seek medical attention and contracted the coronavirus.
She further assured that FCTA is well prepared to contain the pandemic, she explained that while isolation is for confirmed cases, quarantine is for suspected cases.
She also warned that primary and secondary healthcare centres are not allowed to manage covid 19.
According to her “I want to assure FCT residents and Nigerians generally, there is no cause for panic. We all know that COVID-19 is just a respiratory tract infection, so it’s not something that is a death sentence. So let’s support people especially family members who have COVID-19, we shouldn’t stigmatise them.
“In FCT, as at now, we had 39 suspected cases, who have been screened for COVID-19, out of which, only four tested positive for the disease in the FCT.
Three of them are very stable, but one is not too stable when I discussed with them this morning at the Gwagwalada Teaching Hospital” she added.
On his part, Senior Special Assistant to FCT Minister on Media and Strategic Communications, Abubakakar Sani who spoke on the earlier warning of the FCTA to religious leaders and worshipers to maintain a maximum of 50 persons in a congregation at a time, said the Administration is satisfied with the level of compliance.
He said: “I want to say that from what we observed today, the report we got from the field, the FCT Administration is satisfied with the level of compliance by most of the Churches today. Some of the churches that did not have the time to really sensitize their members we noticed large gathering”.