Health

Private Labs Can Now Test For COVID-19 – NCDC

Published

4 years ago

2020/05/12

The Presidential Task Force (PTF) has revealed plans to integrate private sector laboratories into the lab architecture for Covid-19 testing. This is part of its plan to improve the coronavirus response in Nigeria.

The Director General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), said this, while speaking at the daily Presidential Task Force (PTF) briefing on Monday. Dr Ihekweazu urged private laboratories to go through the guidelines after which they will get the necessary support.

“We have 23 labs across the network that have to be kept going. Any private sector laboratory that wants to join the covid-19 testing can go pick up these guidelines that we are going to publish on the website.

“Look through it, define what they need to know to do to be able to join the network and we will support them through that process.”

The DG noted that one of the changes made to improve the response in the fight against the virus is to connect the whole country.

“We are working to get the whole country connected into one system. So we don’t actually need to send results from one point to another. We put the results into a system, someone logs in the same system in Kebbi and pulls out the result.”

Speaking further on the need to collect more samples, Dr Ihekweazu urged states “not to rest on their oars.”

“We keeping pushing the states that are not yet collecting enough samples to do a bit more.”

According to him, only enough testing would help to ascertain if the disease is circulating in the state.