Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Professor Akin Abayomi, says 438 active cases of COVID-19 in Lagos communities were yet to turn up for treatment in the state’s COVID-19 care centres.
Abayomi made the disclosure through his Twitter account, @ProfAkinAbayomi, on Tuesday while giving the state’s COVID-19 update for September12.
He said 48 new COVID-19 infections were confirmed out of a total of 915 COVID-19 tests conducted in the state on the reported day.
According to him, the new cases bring the total number of confirmed COVID-19 infections in Lagos to 18,531 adding that the total number of COVID-19 tests conducted in the state since inception of the pandemic now stands at 92,206.
Abayomi said: “2,407 of the confirmed cases have since been discharged from #COVID19 Care Centres following full recovery.
“Also, 15,422 of the confirmed cases monitored in communities by #COVID19 Lagos Response Team have either fully recovered or positively responding to treatments, the commissioner said.
He said 59 of the cases were currently under isolation in public and private care centres.
Also, data by the World Health Organisation (WHO), Africa Region, shows that there are 1,338,996 confirmed COVID-19 cases on the continent, with over one million recoveries and 32,354 deaths.
Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic had stalled 20 years of progress in fighting poverty and disease, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said on Tuesday.
A report by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, published on Tuesday, shows that, by every indicator, the world has regressed in attempts to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to end poverty and reduce inequality.
According to the foundation’s annual “Goalkeepers” report, extreme poverty has increased by 7 per cent due to the outbreak.
“Vaccine coverage, a proxy measure for how health systems are functioning, has plummeted to levels last seen in the 1990s, setting the world back about 25 years in 25 weeks”.
The data also show that the economic fallout from the pandemic is reinforcing inequalities, with women, racial and ethnic minority communities and people living in extreme poverty hit particularly hard.
In the report, which Bill and Melinda Gates have co-authored every year since 2017, they call for global collaboration on the development of diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments.
Also on swift manufacturing of tests and doses and the equitable delivery of those tools based on need rather than the ability to pay.
“This is a shared global crisis that demands a shared global response”.
