March 18, 2020//-Nigeria’s health ministry on Wednesday confirmed five new cases of coronavirus in the country.
The new cases bring the total number of confirmed cases in Nigeria to eight.
Four of the new index cases, Nigeria’s health minister Osagie Ehanire said, are Nigerians that includes one a 6-week old baby and a “foreign national who came in through the land border — the first case of infection via land border in Nigeria.”
Ehanire said Nigeria is focused on contact tracing to curb the spread of the virus because the country is only in the importation stage of COVID19 and not the Community Transmission Stage.
Nigeria confirmed its first case of coronavirus on Thursday, February 28, 2020, in an Italian who returned from Milan to Lagos State.
A second case was confirmed on Wednesday, March 9 2020.
Nigeria’s health minister Osagie Ehanire at a press conference in Benin City, Edo State, said that the patient was a man who had contact with the Italian citizen.
Both cases were confirmed in the Virology Laboratory at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, which is part of the Laboratory Network at the Nigeria Center for Disease Control.
The third case which was confirmed Tuesday, March 17, 2020, is a Nigerian, who returned from the United Kingdom on Friday, February 13 2020, Lagos State health ministry said.
“She is clinically stable and is being treated at the Infectious Disease Hospital Lagos,” Ehanire Nigeria’s health minister said.
