By ABUJAH RACHEAL

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has announced 357 new cases of the dreaded Coronavirus with Rivers leading the pack.

Data from the public health agency showed that the South-South state recorded 170 new infections on Tuesday, placing it ahead of 11 other states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

The 357 cases showed a decrease from the 584 recorded on Monday, but raised the cumulative cases to 183,441.

The NCDC said that Ondo reported 38 cases while Gombe, Ogun, Ekiti, the FCT and Anambra had 34, 20, 20, 18 and 16 respectively.

Others included Oyo, 13 cases, Kwara, 10, while Imo, Bayelsa and Edo registered six cases each.

It said that the additional infections did not include data from Lagos State.

The health agency said that Nigeria had now successfully treated 167,459 COVID-19 cases following the discharge of 149 additional patients on Tuesday.

The health agency noted that six more persons had died from the disease, raising the country’s total fatality to 2,229.

It added that about 2,648,684 samples had been tested for COVID-19 in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with an estimated 200 million people.

The agency added that the number of known active cases stood at 13,756, an increase from 13,554 reported on Monday.

The NCDC said that a multi-sectoral national emergency operations centre activated at Level 2 had continued to coordinate the national response activities.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the NCDC did not indicate the percentage of variants of concern among the active cases across the country.

Nigeria had, on Aug. 2, reported that 32 Delta variant cases of COVID-19 were detected in five states – Lagos, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Oyo and the FCT – with 19 of them in Akwa Ibom.

The agency said it was scaling up its sequencing capacity to have a better understanding of the burden of variants of concern in the country. (NAN)

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