Late Closure of Airport, Land Border Responsible for COVID-19 Spread – Sanwo-Olu

Femi Ashekun/

Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, has blamed the spread of COVID-19 on the delay in shutting the country’s borders, seaport, and airports, including the failure of returnees to self-isolate.

The governor disclosed this during an Instalive interview with CNN yesterday.

He said Lagos State was prepared to curb the spread of COVID-19 but had no authority to shut airport, seaport and land borders and needed to wait for the federal government to take the decision.

Sanwo-Olu said, “Given the population that we have, we are a bit ahead in terms of preparation, as a state, but we are sub-national. We couldn’t give directives as to when Nigeria should close the airport, seaport, or in-land border.

“We don’t have control over that. We were just wrapping up our own facilities and the training officials, and that was why we were able to track the index case over two months now.

“In the country, 33 or 34 states have had one case or the other. For us, it is a double X thing. The population is huge, so we will be a fool of ourselves to just think that it is going to be a spike and we will be out of it. Because we did not close all of the importations early and people were not also doing full isolation when they came, it was really difficult for us to do contact tracing before it got to the community – which is where we are now.”

The governor also said that Lagos may be recording large number of COVID-19 cases “soon”, as the state had ramped up its testing capacity

He said, “We are pretty much getting to the peak season. We will soon see a large number because testing is now ramped up. It is a public health issue and we needed to take our protocols from NCDC and other international organisations.

“Testing kits were rationalised and we could not do more than we were given. Even the accreditation requires processes. We have learnt it now and we are applying it.”

Despite the fact that the country recorded its first COVID-19 death on February 27, President Muhammadu Buhari did not order the shutting of the country’s airports, seaports, and land borders until March 29, after comfirmed number of COVID-19 cases had reached 111.

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