COVID-19: FG Can’t Impose Lockdown on 11 High-Burden LGAs- Aliyu

Presidential Task Force (PTF) on Corona virus (COVID-19) Pandemic has on Monday said it would not impose precision lock-downs on 11 high-burden local government areas of the country.National Coordinator of PTF, Dr Sani Aliyu, gave this explanation at a media briefing by the task force in Abuja.
He said that locking the council areas down would most certainly pull the entire states where such council areas belong into lock-down with them.
Aliyu said that the geographical natures of the council areas made it rather impracticable to do isolated lock down but added that precision lock downs were just one out of many types of interventions that could be used to manage cases in the said council areas. According to him, PTF is already working with the affected council areas through other means of intervention to reduce their high infection load, citing risk communication and community engagement activities as part of the ongoing works.“We have 11 high-burden local government areas we’ve identified, we are doing a lot of works in these local government areas, especially as it relates to risk communication and community engagement activities. We are also trying to improve testing, particularly in Lagos where seven of the 11 local governments are. We are improving case management, discussing with the various states in terms of improving access to care, access to oxygen and so on. Precision lock-downs are only one out of the various options. The main problem we have with lock-downs in these areas is the geographical nature of the local governments”.
Aliyu said if they were to lock-down those local government areas in Lagos, they would have to lock-down the entire state.
He said, a state like Bayelsa, where Yenagoa is the local government with the high-burden, they cannot lock down Yenagoa, where virtually all roads across the state had to go through the local government.
“Technically, it will be very difficult, we know if the interventions that we proposed are being implemented and people are cooperating, you don’t actually need to lock people down at all”.