The Kano state Coordinator of the COVID-19 Taskforce, Dr Tijjani Hussain on Friday in Kano, said that the state government has embarked on aggressive contact tracing of over 259 out of the listed 300 contact persons in the state.
Dr Hussain made this Known in an update chat with The Nation.
According to him, “One of the hallmarks of this response is contact tracing. At the moment, we have listed over 300 contacts person and we are following up on 259 of these contacts.
“These contacts, we follow them either through phone or visit them physically in their houses to ensure that we have not left any stone unturned.
Dr Hussaini explained that “over these 13 days since we recorded the first index case, we are able to have 320 suspected cases out of which 73 laboratory-confirmed.
“Similarly, two of these 73 confirmed cases are health workers. Since the beginning of this outbreak, we were able to monitor 53 cases of passengers of interest (those people who came from high-risk areas outside of Nigeria and states faced with high challenges of COVID-19).
“We have also admitted 63 out of the 73 cases and the remaining will be evacuated to the isolation centres.
“As we have learnt, while we have momentary setback last week because our co-chair was diagnosed with COVID-19, but the state government quickly put up another structure to ensure that the coordination mechanism does not break down.
“We have reconstituted and we are much stronger now. So kano people should be confident that this outbreak would be brought under control as soon as possible.
“We are also going to rapidly set up rapid response teams that will go and do investigation, take samples and ensure that these samples are delivered in our laboratories.
“We are in the process of increasing the number of rapid response team from 30 to 40.
“Our testing centres do not run out of commodities”.
He called on the people to cooperate with the state government in her efforts to tame the COVID 19 disease.