Breaking: COVID-19: Nigeria to suspend international passports of those flouting protocol

Nigeria’s Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 says it’ll this weekend publish a list of 100 Nigerian Passport Numbers that will be suspended for a minimum of 6 months for flouting obligation to test within 7 days of arrival in Nigeria from overseas travel.

According to Mr Tolu Ogunlesi, Thursday, the Social Media aide to President Muhammadu Buhari, “PTF says the 100 affected persons (this is only Phase 1, more coming) have been contacted and have confirmed that they failed to do the post-arrival test”.

He wrote on twitter, “Only passport numbers will be published, PTF says, not names. Nigerian Passports will be suspended for 6 months (minimum).”

PTF says Nigeria not banning flights from UK and SA, at least for now. Instead there will now be very stringent monitoring of inbound direct flights from the two countries.

“Any Nigerian who fails to do Day-7 test will have passport suspended, foreigners will have visas revoked” – he added in his tweets.

PTF says penalties will also apply to persons caught presenting fake negative PCR Tests for travel. Apparently it’s a thing – Nigerians cooking up fake negative results and uploading them to the Travel Portal and/or presenting them to airlines.

Nigeria is currently experiencing its worst stretch to date of COVID-19 with the recent surge in new infections.

The total infections in the country has increased to over 80, 000.

On Wednesday, 1,133 new COVID-19 cases were found in Nigeria, the second-highest daily tally ever.

This is coming 48 hours after Nigeria’s daily coronavirus infections fell for two consecutive days after over two weeks of high numbers across the country.

Health experts are raising serious concerns over the recent resurgence in infections which they believe could be more dangerous if citizens keep violating safety protocols.

Last week alone, 5,176 infections were reported – the highest weekly figure so far.

With the 1,133 new cases, Nigeria’s total coronavirus cases rose sharply to 80,922.

This is according to an update Wednesday night by the Nigeria Centre For Disease Control (NCDC).