Gov El-Rufai Says 4 Persons Contracted #COVID19 From Him

Mallam Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State, on Saturday, said he was the index COVID-19 case who infected four others in the state.

El-Rufai, who was a guest speaker on The Platform, an annual event of the Covenant Christian Centre in Lagos, aired on Channels TV, also noted that the state government took steps to get personal protective equipment for health workers.

According to him, “Each and every case of COVID-19 we’ve had in the state was imported. I was the index case, fortunately, I would say, because it served to scare everyone in the state to come to the reality that COVID-19 is real; it’s not a joke.

“I got it in Abuja and I infected four other people. Happily, all of us are okay now. We are all back to our normal lives. We didn’t want to expose any of our frontline workers to any risk, so we have a lot of PPEs for all our health workers.”

He stated that the state government had provided N5m in life insurance coverage for each health worker who dies of COVID-19 in the line of duty.

El-Rufai said, “We also insured their (health workers) lives to the tune of N5m. Anyone that dies in this process, his family will get N5m and we have an additional disability insurance for those that get sick and cannot walk but are not dead.

“We are also giving a special allowance to all health workers, as well as extraordinary allowances for those on the frontlines. This is the broad strategy that we’ve adopted in Kaduna State and we are implementing it with all energy and focus.”

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), on Saturday evening, reported 220 new COVID-19 infections in the country, bringing the new tally of infected people to 2388.

Lagos, the epicenter of the outbreak in Nigeria, recorded 62 cases on the above day, followed closely by the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), with 52.

A breakdown of the latest update shows that 62 of the new cases were reported in Lagos, 52 in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), 31 in Kaduna, 31 in Sokoto, 10 in Kebbi, 9 in Yobe, 6 in Borno, 5 in Edo and Bauchi, 4 each in Gombe, Enugu, and Oyo, 3 in Zamfara, 2 each in Nasarawa, Osun, Ebonyi, Kwara, Kano, and Plateau.

Confirmed cases of coronavirus in Nigeria have been on the rise since the confirmation of the index case in February.

More cases are expected as the government intensifies contact tracing and testing across the nation.