By Asmau Ahmad
Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari said his country’s response and management of the COVID-19 pandemic is globally acclaimed.
In a nationwide broadcast to mark the 2021 democracy day on Saturday, Buhari said in the last one year, Nigeria and the whole world faced COVID-19 for which no one was fully prepared.
He said Nigeria’s response to the pandemic involved making hard choices in balancing livelihoods and public health concerns.
“You are all living witnesses to how successful this has been due to a number of proactive measures put in place. Our response to COVID-19 is globally acclaimed.
“We were able to ensure that the various lockdown measures did not impact too negatively on the ability of ordinary Nigerians to continue sustaining their livelihoods.
“During the pandemic, we disbursed N5,000 to one million Nigerians using a Rapid Response Register and advanced N20,000 to 750,000 beneficiaries of the Conditional Cash Transfer Progamme and provided 1.37 million Nigerians with palliatives from CACOVID,” he said.
President Buhari added that at the same time, the Federal Government released 109,000 metric tonnes of food reserve stocks and 70,000 metric tonnes of grains to the poor and vulnerable in all 36 states of the federation.
Nigeria recorded its first COVID-19 case on February 27, 2020 in the global pandemic outbreak which was first recorded in December 2019 in China.
According to data from the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control on Friday, the country has recorded over 167, 02 COVID-19 cases; 163,413 recoveries and 2,117 deaths recorded
The NCDC noted that the country had so far tested 2,180,444 persons since the first confirmed case relating to the COVID-19 pandemic was announced.
Nigeria on March 2, 2021, received 3.94 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine through the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Assess Facility, COVAX.
COVAX, an initiative co-led by the vaccine alliance, GAVI and the World Health Organisation, aims to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines by dividing about two billion doses across 92 low and middle-income countries.
Nigeria also received 300,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines from telecom giant, Mobile Telecommunication Network (MTN).
The National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) says 1,955,652 eligible persons have been vaccinated so far with the first dose of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in the country.
The NPHCDA also said 58,938 persons vaccinated with the first dose have received their second dose of the vaccine.
