Akin Abayomi, Lagos commissioner for health, says the state will run out of bed spaces at isolation centres if it keeps recording high number of COVID-19 cases.
He made this known at a press briefing in Ikeja on Friday. Lagos, which is the epicentre of the disease in Nigeria, has a total of 5,542 cases.
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.
Abayomi attributed the recent spike in the number of positive COVID-19 cases to increased testing capacity.
“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 eventually when we project,” he said.
“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 transition 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 is currently developing strategies for managing asymptomatic patients at home to address the projected rise in number of cases.
Nigeria currently has a total of 11,516 confirmed cases.
