Health Experts, Others Review ‘2020 Year Of The Pandemic’

Health experts and government officials on Thursday featured as guests on a special end of the year programme on Channels Television.

The programme, entitled 2020 Year Of The Pandemic aims to review the events of the outgoing year, especially as it relates to COVID-19 which disrupted daily lives in many countries of the world.

For many, 2020 has been challenging in more ways and lots of people are still grappling with the existing circumstances.

The first human cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus and subsequently named SARS-COV-2, were first reported by officials in Wuhan City in China in December 2019, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.

While some of the earliest known cases had a link to a wholesale food market in Wuhan, some did not and a majority of the initial patients were either stall owners, market employees, or regular visitors to the market.

 

The United Nations health agency noted that environmental samples taken from the market in December 2019 tested positive for SARS-COV-2, further suggesting that the market in Wuhan city was the source of the outbreak or played a role in the initial amplification of the outbreak.

This led to the closure of the market on January 1, 2020.

Amid the denial of its potential danger, it took Dr Li Wenliang, who later died of the virus to take the lid off the secret as he announced to the world that China was dealing with a dangerous infectious disease – the coronavirus.

Before then, the virus had already begun to cross borders, killing thousands of people in the wake of the spread.

By January, nations began to shut their borders and lock down cities and eventually, entire countries were shut down, as the UN declared the spread of the deadly virus a pandemic and officially named it COVID-19.

On February 27, Nigeria’s progression of COVID-19 cases indicated that two cases were found in Ogun State and almost immediately, cases in Lagos surged to the top of the log.

The Federal Capital Territory was not spared either while states, including Kano which at some point overtook Abuja and then Oyo, Gombe.

As at 6:30pm on Thursday, Nigeria has tested 948,048 samples out of which 86,576 cases have been confirmed, 11,976 are active, 73,322 have been discharged, and 1,278 deaths recorded.

This is according to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC).