The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has warned that COVID-19 infection may rise as the holiday season approaches.
The projected rise in cases of the virus will emanate from the increase in travel over the holiday season.
This was disclosed by the Director-General, NCDC, Dr. Ifedayo Adetifa in an exclusive interview with PUNCH.
He said, “We are prepared to see that there may be a bump in cases just because of the increase in travel and the number of people returning. What we may not expect to see is an increasing number of people who are sick.”
He, however allays fears saying that since a fraction of the country’s population has been vaccinated there is likely to be some degrees of immunity.
“The population has quite a bit of immunity due to vaccination, previous COVID-19 infection, or repeated COVID-19 infection. So. COVID-19 is not new. The Omicron is not new like it was in November (2021).
“If you look at our numbers, we haven’t lost people for a while. Even if every single death is a great disaster for people’s families or friends, it’s not anything like the Delta variant when we had a big problem,” he added.
Speaking further, he said the Omicron variant was the dominant strain in the country.
He said, “Omicron took over as the dominant variant in November and December last year, and it has refused to go anywhere. Other minor variants have emerged, but Omicron remains the most dominant.”
The latest data from the NCDC showed that there were 266,283 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 3,155 deaths, while the number of discharged cases stood at 259,640 as of November 18.
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