Abuja, Nigeria:
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, on Wednesday confirmed its first cases of the new Covid-19 variant, among three passengers arriving from South Africa.
The head of the Nigeria Centers for Disease Control, Ifeddayo Adetifa said: “Genome surveillance has now identified and confirmed the first Nigerian cases of strain B.1.1.529 SARS-CoV-2, currently under investigation. called the Omicron variant”.
Contact tracing and “tracing to ensure isolation … have begun,” Adetifa said.
“Omicron is common globally… So it’s a matter of when, not if, we’ll identify more cases,” he added.
According to official statistics, the coronavirus outbreak has resulted in 2,976 deaths and 214,113 infections in Nigeria, but the actual number is believed to be much higher, partly due to low testing rates.
Home to some 210 million people, the West African country has launched vaccination campaigns and required civil servants to present proof of vaccination or test negative to enter public buildings.
However, vaccination rates remain low, with just over 6.5 million people getting one shot and about 3.5 million getting two shots.
The government says it plans to vaccinate 112 million or 70% of adults by the end of next year.
The emergence of Omicron, first reported to the World Health Organization in South Africa a week ago, has spread rapidly globally with borders closed and dozens of countries imposing restrictive measures. go.
Nigeria has stepped up some travel measures and imposed an additional test on Monday.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)
