The Federal Government has vowed to lockdown parts of the country again should there be an explosion of coronavirus cases.
The Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, said although it expected some lapses in compliance to safety precautions, it was worried corporate organisations, especially banks on Monday flouted the NCDC’s guideline for infection prevention and control.
Speaking during the daily briefing of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, the NCDC boss said: “Initial reports are not too pleasing across the country.
“When we say take responsibility this time, yes we are addressing individuals but we really needed to address corporate Nigeria.
“One of the biggest groups that we have allowed to restart business today were banks.
“When you limit the number of branches that open, everybody goes to the one branch that is open; that becomes counter-productive.
“We can produce all the guidelines in the world but if organisations are not going to come up and support the implementation of these measures and help us manage the risks and focus on a risk-based approach, then our efforts might amount to little or nothing.
“Today we might forgive a little bit because it was the first day. However, we will have infections because of what happened today, no doubt about that.
” But what is more important is how we can learn from the mistakes of today into tomorrow and into next tomorrow, so that by Friday, hopefully they will have normalised some of these things.”
He added: “Yes we knew today will be a problem because for the first time people were let out of their homes but the challenge for us as a society is how we now organise ourselves to mitigate this risk to limit transmission from each other, so that, yes we might have a few extra infections today and tomorrow, but what we don’t want is an explosion of new infections.
“If we do have that explosion, there will be almost no choice left for the leadership of the country than to ask all of us to go back into our homes.
“So for the benefits of having a few hours a day of coming out and reopening parts of the economy, there is a price to pay and that price is that we organise ourselves to do this strictly.”
