It is not often that one agrees with a governor whose sometimes brash and abrasive style makes nonsense of the Not too young to run law.
But then just like the old admonition which enjoins one not to judge a book by the cover, I found myself really chewing upon last week’s encounter between the team of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and the Kogi State governor, Yahaya Adoza Bello.
That encounter, the climax in the battle of wits between the state government and NCDC on the Covid-19 pandemic, finally ended on Thursday with the governor telling the visiting NCDC team to either accept to go on a 14-day isolation or leave the state immediately.
Unfortunately, while Nigerians may have focused on the comical dimensions which eventuated in the dramatic return of the team to their Abuja base – all of which would prove to be mere shadows in the face of the gross mismanagement of the infodemic and the ensuing psychological terrorism that has inescapably become its correlate, most Nigerians, it would appear, have succumbed to the one-size-fits-all approach being adopted by NCDC.
For while it is not necessarily the fault of the PTF that the country now literally sleeps, dreams, wakes, eats and farts on Covid-19, it certainly speaks to the gross miscommunication of the crisis that the country’s thoughts and imagination if not the entire machinery of governance have since succumbed fatally to the infodemic.
Here, if we may borrow from the justice system where an accused is deemed innocent at least until the law says so; under Covid-19 no one qualifies for the benefit of the doubt; all it takes to be dubbed a suspect Covid-19 case is to show symptoms of the mildest of flu for anarchy to be let loose on the household who must now herd the victim to the quarantine!
Now, pregnant women can’t be attended to without due certification of their coronavirus-free status just as those of us – the over 50s – with so-called pre-existing conditions have long been passed off as high-priority suspects.
Last week, my young cousin, a senior doctor told me of a case of a pregnant woman in Lokoja forced to cough out an extra N120,000 – all because the team of doctors who needed to perform a gynae procedure on her insisted on personal protective equipment for each member of the team – thanks to the Covid-19 hype.
Now, you can’t conceive of a routine follow-up with your doctor without suffering suspicious glances and certainly not without the trauma of morbid imaginations all because a tiny virus has intruded upon our lives.
Now, you venture to go the infirmary at your peril.
Which reminds me of the controversy that surrounded Oyo State’s first recorded COVID-19 victim – the case of the Kano-based Assistant Comptroller at Customs.
Like most Nigerians, I actually swallowed the official line regarding his death: how the patient hid his travel history; hid his testing by the NCDC and subsequently flouted isolation instructions etc. etc.
In all of the accounts, not only was the poor chap deemed guilty as charged; for travelling to Ibadan where his family live – and inevitably made contacts with a whole range of family members including the doctors and nurses who attended to him, he was passed off as selfish and inconsiderate – at least, so goes several of the accounts that reported his demise.
Little did I know that the subject in question was an old school junior who I knew very well. As I will later find out, the truth was actually in between. Yes, he was unwell – diabetic and hypertensive – both of which he had managed to a reasonable degree.
But then, he died before the result of the Covid-19 test ever came out – and so could not have knowingly spread the virus! More than that, he actually reported to the NCDC at the onset of the familiar symptoms. And the latter took his samples for tests subsequent to which he was required to self-isolate.
Imagine a sick man living hundreds of kilometres away from his family being required to wait for 14 days before any definitive treatment could commence! Rather than await an uncertain fate in his bedroom, he did what a desperate man would do in the circumstance: head for Ibadan to see the doctors all of whom already the details of his medical conditions on their fingertips.
In fact, he was said to have told the doctors that he’d already had his samples taken by the NCDC and so awaiting the result which although positive only came out after his passing!
Today, I have read of dozen-plus cases where people with severe symptoms have had to make frantic calls to NCDC to no avail; meanwhile, they have neither the option of private testing facilities nor the choice of private treatment since Covid-19 management is deemed a no-go area.
I am also familiar with cases in which doctors actually requested that their patients stay away until the current tide blows over.
In other words, to hope and pray that the worst does not happen while the wave lasts! In our efforts to keep Nigerians free of the coronavirus, are we not unwittingly telling those with medical conditions to, at least for now, put up with their afflictions even when this can come at the pain of an avoidable death?
For patients with moderate to severe medical cases, it is an unenviable situation to be in. As it is, we may never know how many Nigerians have succumbed to avoidable deaths – particularly those unrelated to the corona virus – on account of the prevalent moods both in our public hospitals and at the level of the government.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I do of course differ with the Kogi governor on his broad characterisation of the pandemic as something of a hoax; or his more ridiculously laughable reference to a so-called app which, he claims his administration developed to ensure that citizens of the state could determine their virus-status at the touch of a button.
If such claims seem a necessary offering in a world needlessly starved of mirth, certainly his opposition to a lockdown of the state based on mere conjectures and at a time the nation’s testing capacity remains at best wobbly cannot be said to be without some merit.
Even at that, we are here talking of a disease whose case fatality rate (ratio between confirmed deaths and confirmed cases) as at May 10 stands at 3.08 per cent as against UK’s 14.67 percent and United States’ 6.02 percent.
And this is a country where malaria, the more visible enemy is known to afflict a record 100 million annually of which over 300,000 fatalities are recorded annually.
By the way, who am I to judge when the governor maintains that Lassa fever whose case fatality rate of 44.4 per cent and which has claimed four deaths out of the nine cases reported in the state since January is by far more troubling than Covid-19 and which he insists is yet to show up on the state’s epidemiological radar?
The Presidential Task Force (PTF) on Coronavirus Disease says “Kogi is at the risk of COVID-19 because it is a melting point for inter-state travellers and it shares borders with 12 states (about one-third of the states in the federation) which had recorded infections”.
Moreover, that “Kogi has only conducted two tests despite the increasing rate of community spread”. Governor Yahaya Bello on his part says the problem is with the “merchants now marketing COVID-19 as if that is our priority”. Between the duo the nation is torn on who to believe.
As sure as daylight, the truth like the pregnancy, cannot be hid for long.
Credits: Sanya Oni | Nation
