Chidi Samuel| Nigeria’s coronavirus burden on Thursday climbed to 48, 116 cases as the country recorded 373 new infections.
The countrys fatalities from the highly promiscous virus also rose to 966, four short of the magical 1000 figure, this is even as 34, 309 persons have recovered from the disease.
The Nigeria Centre For Disease Control which made the disclosure via a statement from its verified Twitter handle said, the new in fections were recorded across nineteen states and the FCT.
According to the data, Lagos, the epicentre of the pandemic recorded 69 new cases followed by Osun -41, Kaduna -40, Oyo-40, FCT-35, Plateau-22, Rivers-19, Kano-17, Ondo-17 and Ogun-15.
Other states with new infections include, Abia-14, Gombe-12, Imo-9, Enugu-7, Kwara-6, Delta-5, Niger-2, with Borno, Bauchi, and Nasarawa recording 1 case each.
-WHO, experts say no evidence food transmits COVID-19
Meanwhile, amid a flurry of concern over reports that frozen chicken wings imported to China from Brazil had tested positive for the coronavirus, experts and WHO said on Thursday that the likelihood of catching the virus from food — especially frozen, packaged food — is exceedingly low.
“This means somebody probably handled those chicken wings who might have had the virus,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University. “But it doesn’t mean, ‘Oh my god, nobody buy any chicken wings because they’re contaminated.’”
Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintain that “there is no evidence to suggest that handling food or consuming food is associated with Covid-19.” The main route the virus is known to take from person to person is through spray from sneezing, coughing, speaking or even breathing.
“I make no connection between this and any fear that this is the cause of any long-distance transmission events,” said C. Brandon Ogbunu, a disease ecologist at Yale University. When the virus crosses international boundaries, it’s almost certainly chauffeured by people, rather than the commercial products they ship.
The chicken wings were screened on Wednesday in Shenzhen’s Longgang district, where officials have been testing imports for the presence of coronavirus genetic material, or RNA. Several samples taken from the outer packaging of frozen seafood, some of which had been shipped in from Ecuador, recently tested positive for virus RNA in China’s Anhui, Shaanxi and Shandong provinces as well.
Laboratory procedures that search for RNA also form the basis of most of the coronavirus tests performed in people. But RNA is only a proxy for the presence of the virus, which can leave behind bits of its genetic material even after it has been destroyed, Dr. Ogbunu said. “This is just detecting the signature that the virus has been there at some point,” he said.
The WHO also said there was no need to panic – and there were no examples of the respiratory disease being transmitted through food.
“People are already scared enough and fearful enough in the COVID pandemic,” WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan told a virtual press conference in Geneva.
“People should not fear food or food packaging or the processing or delivery of food.
“There is no evidence that food or the food chain is participating in the transmission of this virus.
“Our food, from a COVID perspective, is safe.”
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, said the United Nations health agency was aware of the reports and understood that China was looking for the virus on food packaging.
“They’ve tested a few hundred thousand samples of looking at packaging and have found very, very few, less than 10 positive in doing that,” she said.
“We know that the virus can remain on surfaces for some time.
“If the virus is actually in food – and we have no examples of where this virus has been transmitted as a food-borne, whereas someone has consumed a food product – the viruses can be killed, like other viruses as well, if the meat is cooked.”
To prove that a dangerous, viable virus persists on food or packaging, researchers would need to isolate the microbe and show in a lab that it can still replicate. These experiments are logistically challenging and require specially trained personnel, and aren’t a part of the typical testing pipeline.
After samples taken from the surface of the meat came up positive, officials performed similar tests on several people whom they suspected had come into contact with the product. They also tested a slew of other packaged goods. All samples analyzed so far have been negative for coronavirus RNA, according to a statement released by the Shenzhen Epidemic Prevention and Control Headquarters Office.
With agency report


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