Africa’s largest economy and most populous country, Nigeria has confirmed that an Italian citizen tested positive to the Novel Coronavirus.
According to the Lagos state government, the country’s most populous city with over 20 million people where the patient landed, “The case is an Italian citizen who works in Nigeria and returned from Milan, Italy to Lagos, Nigeria on the 25th of February 2020.
The state’s ministry of health said that “He was confirmed by the Virology Laboratory of the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, part of the Laboratory Network of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control. The patient is clinically stable, with no serious symptoms, and is being managed at the Infectious Disease Hospital in Yaba, Lagos
There are indications that Lagos state and by extension, Nigeria has what it takes to stop a major outbreak of the virus. It would be recalled that in 2014 when Nigeria confirmed that a Liberian citizen entered the country with the Ebola virus, a more dangerous virus, the country was able to tackle a major outbreak and was declared Ebola-free in less than a month despite continued outbreak of the Ebola virus across West Africa more than a year after.
The virus which has killed more than 2,000 people worldwide has also invested more than 80,000 people worldwide with most of them from China, the country where the outbreak started.
Egypt and Algeria are other African countries that have recorded cases of the deadly virus. There are fears that the continued spread of the virus could lead to a pandemic that could hamper global economic growth for the rest of the year.
