A Nigerian
scientist has spent the holiday season in his laboratory doing genetic
sequencing to learn more about the country's COVID-19 variant, as cases
increase in the country.
Virologist Sunday Omilabu says the information he gathers about the variant will help battle the spread of the disease in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country with 196 million people.
Nigeria has
confirmed 89,163 COVID-19 cases, including 1,302 deaths, according to the
figures Sunday from the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"The
variants discovered in the UK and South Africa, they are distantly different
from the variants discovered in Nigeria,'' said Omilabu, who said it is not
unusual for viruses to mutate and cause variants.
Nigeria is
seeing more infections of COVID-19 but it is not yet certain if that is from
the variant, said Omilambu, the director of the Center for Human and Zoonotic
Virology at the Lagos University College of Medicine and Teaching Hospital.
"What
we could say clinically is that we have more people coming down with severe signs
and symptoms,``" he said, describing how one person can spread the disease
to four or five family members, which is a higher rate of transmission than had
been recorded earlier.
"That
shows us that something is happening. There's a surge so we are recording that
but we are yet to sequence any of those isolates,'' to determine if the
increased transmissions are caused by the variant, said Omilabu.
"I
think we need to calm our mind down, there are going to be more variants to
come,``" he said.
"We
need to be monitoring the virus, we need to sequence. If we sequence then we
would have more information about what is in circulation and then, of course,
we need to continue with surveillance, we need to monitor how active the virus
is in the environment ... so the public health experts, they have work to do
and then government must support all these. "As lab work is being done to
learn more about the variant, Nigerians should remain vigilant to avoid
spreading the virus, he said.
"People
still go and party. They still go to the club and without putting on face
masks,'' he said. "We talk of
social distancing, people are not respecting that. We talk of using face masks.
People are not doing that. You see them in the market places, they are not
doing that. So how do you now control it?''
With
COVID-19 variants emerging in Nigeria and South Africa, the World Health
Organization said Africa needs to do more genetic sequencing, such as what
Omilabu is doing.
"The
emergence of new COVID-19 variants is common. However, those with a higher
speed of transmission or potentially increased pathogenicity are very
concerning. Crucial investigations are underway to comprehensively understand
the behavior of the new mutant virus and steer response accordingly,'' said Dr.
Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa.
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