COVID-19: Nigeria announces 13 deaths, 371 new infections

By ABUJAH RACHEAL

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has announced 371 new cases of the Coronavirus (COVID-19), bringing the total number of infections in the country to 158,906.

The NCDC disclosed this on its official Twitter handle late Monday.

The agency also registered 13 additional COVID-19-related deaths, raising the total fatality in the country to 1,982.

The institute said the new infections were registered across 16 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) in the past 24 hours.

It added that Lagos topped the list with 102 infections, followed by Enugu with 65,  then Edo with 56, and FCT with 23 of the new cases.

Other states with new COVID-19 infections were Ogun-20, Osun 18, Bayelsa 18, Rivers 15, Kaduna 14, Plateau 10, Oyo eight, Bauchi 7 Kano 5 Delta 4, Nasarawa 3, Niger 2, and Ekiti 1.

The agency said 461 people had been successfully treated and discharged from different isolation centres across the country within the past 24 hours.

“Our discharges today include 104 community recoveries in Lagos State managed in line with guidelines,” it said.

According to NCDC, the total number of recoveries in the country stands at 138,502 while the number of active cases in the past 24 hours stood at 18,588.

Meanwhile, a multi-sectoral national emergency operations centre (EOC), activated at Level 3, continues to coordinate the national response activities in the country.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the country has conducted more than 1.6 million COVID-19 tests as of March 8.

As the number of people infected with the virus keeps growing in countries across the West African sub-region, the Nigeria government is leaving no stone unturned in efforts to curtail further spread of the virus.

Nigerian authorities declared an initial 2-week lockdown on March 30, 2020 in three of 36 states of the federation (Lagos, Ogun, and Abuja), and on April 13, 2020 extended the lockdown by another 2 weeks, thereby  restricting the movement of more than 200 million people. (NAN)