The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has confirmed and reported 187 new cases of the coronavirus on Tuesday, 29th September, 2020.
The total confirmed cases in the country now stands at 58,647
with 49,937 been discharged, and 1,111 lives have been claimed.
NCDC’s latest figures reported, the new infections were recorded in FCT and other 12 state of the federation which include; Lagos – 74, Plateau – 25, Rivers – 25, Gombe – 19, Osun – 10, Kaduna – 5, Borno – 3, Ogun – 2, Katsina – 2, Nasarawa – 1, Bayelsa – 1, and Edo – 1, and FCT – 19
However, there was no record of death within the past 24 hours as the figure of those whose lives the virus claimed, still remains 1,111.
Osagie Ehanire, Minister of Health raised his concern as he called for more surveillance over the spike in the number of new cases in Nigeria. He made the announcement on Tuesday, during a briefing by the Presidential Task Force of COVID-19 in Abuja.
In his statement, he said, ‘As business and schools begin to open and as travels begin to pick up, we fear that we may have a surge in the number of cases unless we scale up surveillance and review our response plan to integrate new ways to deal with the disease.
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‘In line with this, the Nigeria Institute of Medical Research has developed a molecular test for COVID-19 that can give results in less than 40 minutes. It is the SARS-COV-2 Isothermal Molecular Assay (SIMA) which can be performed by low skilled personnel with minimum training.
‘This test which is ten times cheaper than the PCR, can be deployed for point of care detection and surveillance.
‘The technique which was developed by Dr. Chika Onwuamah will be deployed for use as soon as it is validated by the relevant agencies of the Ministry for specificity and Sensitivity.’