By ABUJAH RACHEAL

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has recorded 643 new cases of coronavirus COVID-19, bringing the total number of infected people in the country to 140,391.

The NCDC disclosed this on its official Twitter handle on Monday.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the country continues to report a trend of steadily declining active cases, for the second day after the active cases dropped below 1,000 mark for the third time since January.

The first lowest daily count was on Jan. 2, 2021 when 576 people were confirmed positive with the virus and the second lowest this year was Feb. 7 when NCDC registered 506 infections.

According to it, the country has so far tested 1,398,630 people since the first confirmed case of COVID-19 was recorded on Feb. 27, 2020 in the country.

The public health agency also announced additional six COVID-19 related deaths on Monday along with the 643 new infections which occurred in 18 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

The NCDC stated that Oyo, Lagos and Rivers recorded the highest number of COVID-19 infections on Monday, with 88, 86 and 55 cases respectively.

In the states, Edo recorded 54; Akwa Ibom (53); Adamawa (52); Plateau (45); Kaduna (41); Kwara (27); Benue (20) and Kano (19).

Delta had 18 new infections, Nasarawa (16); Niger (15); Bayelsa (11); Borno (five); Bauchi (two) and Sokoto (two). The FCT had 34 new infections.

The NCDC pointed out that 1,110 people were discharged from isolation centres across the country after testing negative to the virus.

“Our discharges today include 744 community recoveries in Lagos State, 100 in Rivers, 78 in Plateau, 72 in Kaduna State and two in Benue, all managed in line with guidelines,” it added.

The NCDC said that a multi-sectoral national Emergency Operations Centre (EOC), activated at Level 3, is coordinating response activities nationwide.

NAN recalls that the country last week logged 8,000 COVID-19 cases from 96,220 tests, bringing the total to 139,242 out of 1,398,630 samples, to date.

The country has also sadly lost 1, 647 people while 112,557 people have been successfully treated and discharged.

Nigeria, in its response strategy, still focuses on four pillars which include infection mitigation with stricter implementation of public health measures, upgrading and refining therapeutics, vaccines, which have become a central global topic, and maintenance of routine and essential health and hospital services such as antenatal care.

Improvement in therapeutic strategy may seem to be yielding result with case fatality rate now at 1.2 per cent but the sheer number of cases makes any improvement in case fatality rate inappreciable. (NAN)

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