The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has disclosed it will completely decentralise testing for coronavirus (COVID-19), thereby improving turnaround time by fifty percent in all states.
It said with the addition of two private testing laboratories in Kano, Lagos and new testing modalities using HIV, Tuberculosis modular laboratories, it will rapidly scale up testing capacities across the country.
The Director-General of the NCDC, Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, made this known on Friday in Abuja during the briefing of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19.
According to him: “I know that it might appear that we have been slow to get testing scaled up, but anyone that has followed discussions around this disease around the world will know that we are not the only country that has struggled with initiating mass testing in their settings.
“We have quietly put our heads down, worked with our partners, developed our strategies, made our plans, and now we are ready to scale up testing in Nigeria. We aim to increase access to testing, as new testing modalities become available.
“The success of this strategy is dependent on our ability to leverage existing infrastructures not only for testing but also to rapidly include testing modes that were available through other disease programs.
“There are basically five aspects to it, first, is to expand our existing laboratory network. Second, is to use labs that were previously used for HIV testing. Yesterday we got our first consignment of reagents for those tests, for the HIV molecular testing labs. We will be trying it out at the National Reference Lab and then scale up very rapidly.
“The third strategy is to use the point of care tuberculosis testing, generally called GeneXpert. There are 400 of them across the country but not all of them are ready. We have 41 that are now ready to be used for COVID-19 testing.
“It is not that the equipment is bad, it is just that they require a certain level of bio-safety. There has to be a functional bio-safety cabinet. We will start with the 41 and scale from there. We expect the reagents for the GeneXpert machines to come in by next week, and that will enable us again to scale testing.
“Our plan is to decentralise testing completely and improve the turnaround time at state levels by 50 percent. Our final strategy is to engage the private sector.”