Coronavirus: FCTA inaugurates emergency response committee

Coronavirus

The Federal Capital Territory (FCTA), on Sunday in Abuja has inaugurated Emergency Epidemic Response Committee as part of measures toward effective management of Coronavirus in the territory.

The committee is comprising of representatives from the FCT Health Secretariat, National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Federal Ministry of Health, World Health Organisation (WHO), Tertiary and Private Hospitals, amongst others.

Addressing newsmen during the inauguration, Acting Secretary, FCT Health Secretariat, Dr Mohammed Kawu said that the Committee has an Incident Manager, Lawal Ademola and was subdivided into eight functional units.

These, he said are coordination, logistics and infection prevention and control.

Others are epidemiology, surveillance and point of entry laboratory, risk Communication and social mobilization, case management and health and safety (welfare).

Kawu said that the primary responsibility of the team was to confront the disease in all ramifications and curtail its spread in the nation’s capital.

“Although FCTA has been up and doing to ensure that everything is done to contain the disease but with the confirmation of cases in the FCT, emergency management and treatment is opened and FCT is inaugurating this team”, he stated.

On her part, Dr Josephine Okechukwu, Director, FCT Public Health Department said, for now, there are four confirmed cases of the coronavirus and three are responding to treatment and are stable while 39 cases are only suspected.

Okechukwu who said she personally interacted with the patients noted that one of them was not yet stabilized.

According to her, the patient had a serious health issue before travelling abroad to seek medical attention and contracted the coronavirus.

Okechukwu stressed that FCTA was well prepared to contain the pandemic, adding that isolation centre was for confirmed cases, while quarantine was for suspected cases.

She warned Primary and Secondary Healthcare centres against the management of coronavirus patients, saying “PHCs are not allowed to manage patients with the virus.”

“I want to assure FCT residents and Nigerians generally, there is no cause for panic. We all know that COVID-19 is just a respiratory tract infection, so it’s not something that is a death sentence.

“So let us support people especially family members who have COVID-19, we should not stigmatise them.

“In FCT, as at now, we had 39 suspected cases, who have been screened for COVID-19, out of which, only four tested positive for the disease in the FCT.

“Three of them are very stable, but one is not too stable when I discussed with them this morning at the Gwagwalada Teaching Hospital” the Public Health Director added.

Malam Abubakar Sani, Senior Special Assistant on Media and Strategic Communications to the FCT Minister
said the administration was satisfied with the level of compliance by religious leaders and worshipers to maintain a maximum of 50 persons in a congregation at a time.

“I want to say that from what we observed today, the report we got from the field, the FCT Administration is satisfied with the level of compliance by most of the Churches today.

“Some of the churches that did not have the time to really sensitise their members we noticed large gathering”, noted