The federal government has taken further measures to scale up the country’s state of alertness to counter the threat posed by the outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19).
A source at the inter-ministerial meeting held Monday night in Abuja said that the Chief Medical Directors (CMD) of Federal Teaching Hospitals in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Enugu, and Kano have been asked to be on alert and for them to prepare their intensive care unit facilities in the event of an escalation of COVID-19.
The source said the meeting, which was meant to review the operations of the various agencies involved in checking the spread of COVID-19 in the country, also deliberated on what needed to be done now that the virus has entered the country.
“We did a postmortem on preparations we made to check the importation of COVID-19 and now that it has come to the country, what strategies we are going to adopt to contain it,” he said.
On why the CMDs of teaching hospitals were summoned, he said: “They were called so that they can be on standby in case facilities at our isolation centres are over-stretched and more persons needed to be taken care of.”
THISDAY gathered that the Minister of Health, Dr. Osagie Ehanire, would be presenting an update on actions being taken to keep the country safe from any looming epidemic as a result of the outbreak COVID-19.
It was learnt that the minister may be seeking for further approvals to spend more money to facilitate intervention activities by agencies of the ministry.
Source: THISDAY
