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COVID-19: With 1,286 Cases in 7 days, Lagos Running Out of Bed Spaces

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4 years ago

June 6, 2020

The Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Professor Akin Abayomi, has raised the alarm that the state would soon run out of bed spaces at its isolation centres if it keeps recording high number of COVID-19 cases.

The Lagos health commissioner, who spoke at a press briefing yesterday, said the state confirmed a total of 1,165 new cases between May 30 and June 4. With the 121 new cases recorded yesterday, the tally for Lagos in the last seven days is now 1,286 On the same day, 328 new cases of Coronavirus were recorded nationwide, taking the tally to 11,844, with 3,696 discharged and 333 deaths.

Professor Abayomi stated that tests revealed more cases than Lagos State could handle and that they had consequently resolved to treat COVID-19 patients without symptoms at home.

Lagos, which is the epicentre of the disease in Nigeria, now has a total of 5,663 cases.

Abayomi attributed the recent spike in the number of positive COVID-19 cases to increased testing capacity.

He said: “Between May 30 when the state recorded its highest daily toll with 378 new COVID-19 cases and June 4, Lagos has confirmed a total of 1,165 new cases.

“We’ve been testing more. We’ve been escalating our capacity to test for COVID-19 and what we’ve found is that the more we test, the more we find, which is a reflection of the fact that COVID-19 is spreading within the community and we’re finding more cases than we can manage.

“If we carry on with the rate of positive testing that we are obtaining, we’re going to run out of isolation beds in our established isolation facilities.

“Therefore, we are projecting. If we keep getting 150,200 positives everyday, in another two or three weeks, even though we’re opening new isolation centres all the time, in time, we’re going to run out of beds.

“And this has happened all over the world; it’s not just in Lagos or Nigeria. Every other country has reached the same tipping point where you now have to transit from managing patients in an isolation centre to managing patients who are not that unwell at home, and reserving the isolation centres for people who are feeling unwell and need to be monitored more closely by medical personnel.”

He added that the state was currently developing strategies for managing asymptomatic patients at home to address the projected rise in number of cases.