By ABUJAH RACHEAL

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has registered 11 coronavirus-related deaths in the last 24 hours, adding to a recent surge in infections, driven by the spread of the Delta variant in the country.

The NCDC, which made this known via its verified website on Tuesday, added that the country also reported additional 444 infections as at Aug. 2, 2021.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the new infections indicated an increase from the 407 cases announced a day earlier.

The country’s case had been rising over the past few weeks, since the discovery of the Delta strain of the disease, raising fears of renewed pressure on the health system.

The agency noted that the 11 new deaths recorded on Monday brought the total number of fatalities in the country to 2,160, including deaths in Lagos State reported on July 31, 2021.

The public health agency also said that the new figures for confirmed cases had also raised the total number of confirmed infections in the country to 174,759 as at Aug. 2, 2021.

Apart from Lagos state with 275, the highest daily figure of infections, Rivers ranked second with 63 cases, followed by Akwa Ibom with 62 reported cases, Gombe had 22, while Ogun and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) registered eight and four cases respectively.

Edo recorded three and Imo had two infections, while Kano, Nasarawa, Sokoto, Jigawa and Ebonyi registered one each, respectively.

The NCDC added that six states – Ekiti, Oyo, Osun, Ondo, Kaduna and Bauchi – reported no cases.

It said that 32 people had recovered and were discharged from various isolation centres in the country on Monday, adding that total recoveries recorded nationwide stood at 165,037 as the multi-sectoral national emergency operations centre (EOC), activated at Level 2, continued to coordinate national response activities.

The health agency said that the country’s active cases were over 7,000, having tested more than 2.5 million samples for the virus, out of the country’s roughly 200 million population.

Meanwhile, the agency has put the country’s COVID-19 average test positivity rate at six per cent, saying that the increase in cases across states demonstrated that its surveillance system was working.

“We’ve built up our genomic sequencing capacity to detect emerging variants,” the NCDC added. (NAN)

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