A Public Health Consultant, Tuyi Mebawondu says Nigeria’s policy cannot be based on luck.
He stated this on the background of the re-emergence of covid-19 in China.
China’s relationship with Nigeria appears to be growing by the day, and there is a lot of interest in the African continent.
According to the Public Health specialist, Nigeria should begin pursuing partnership with China so that its nationals can submit essential papers before entering the country.
He noted that we have to seek help in deepening the genomic surveillance, which would enable us get accurate date of positives and negatives as regards covid-19.
He said it is important that if you’re coming from China. You must have had a negative COVID result, vaccinated at least one, two, three or booster shot so that the transmissibility of the virus will be reduced.
Mr Mebawondu noted that this is a political period where we have to do a lot of campaign, interact with a lot of people and our vaccine coverage is still far less than 20%.
If you’re going to attend political rally, we should be able to encourage people to take vaccines if they are not covering their face because if it spreads where we don’t have vaccines, where we don’t have health system, where there are no humanity services for health then it will be more dangerous.
“We have too many layers of infections, endemic diseases, cholera, lassa, monkey pox and the likes. We cannot put this then put this on malnutrition. 133 million people malnourished in Nigeria, We don’t want to add COVID to the malnutrition”.
Speaking about the health system in Africa, the health practitioner said that given the fact that we have all sorts of chronic illnesses, infections all around in Africa, it becomes important that we don’t add to it.
According to him, he said the the recommendation is that for every single neighborhood, there should be at least a Doctor.
In Nigeria, however, we see approximately 8000 patients to one doctor. Even so, in Africa, we house up to 90% of the world’s chronic diseases while only harboring around 3% of the world’s people resources for health. As a result, it’s a misnomer. But, of course, we did Africa in a positive light.
Mr Mebawondu stated that the government is not doing nearly enough to deploy health services, provide assistance to people, ensure their treatment, and then provide universal access to health. Even when you don’t have time, you are physically inspecting the disposition of your facilities, the distribution of health staff, and access to health.
