WHO: Nigeria top risk for coronavirus

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday listed Nigeria and 12 other African countries as top risk for the spread of the killer coronavirus.

The rest are Algeria, Angola, Ivory Coast, DR Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.

But the organization said it was scaling up novel coronavirus preparedness efforts in the continent and supporting countries to implement recommendations outlined by the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee.

The committee met in Geneva, Switzerland on Thursday.

The WHO said it predicated its fear on the direct links or a high volume of travel to China from the named countries.

It said: “Active screening at airports has been established in a majority of these countries and while they will be WHO first areas of focus, the organization will support all countries in the region in their preparation efforts.”

It added: “To ensure rapid detection of the novel coronavirus, it is important to have laboratories which can test samples and WHO is supporting countries to improve their testing capacity.

“Since this is a new virus, there are currently only two referral laboratories in the African region which have the reagents needed to conduct such tests. However, reagent kits are being shipped to more than 20 other countries in the region, so diagnostic capacity is expected to increase over the coming days.”

It said that the WHO Director-General, declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) on the advice of the Emergency Committee.

The Emergency Committee recommended that all countries should be prepared for containment, including active surveillance, early detection, isolation and case management, contact tracing and prevention of onward spread of novel coronavirus or 2019-nCoV infection, and to share full data with WHO.