The Federal Government has explained why it could not lockdown some local government areas with high cases of COVID-19 in Lagos and Bayelsa.
The government said locking down these LGAs would be likened to locking down the whole states.
National Coordinator of the Task Force on COVID-19, Dr. Aliyu Sani gave the explanations during the briefing of the PTF on Monday.
Speaking on why the government has not introduced lockdown in the eleven LGAs, Sani said: “The main reason why we have not locked down the eleven local governments is because of the technical side of things.
As I said earlier, Lagos had seven local governments. If you lockdown seven local governments in Lagos that are high burden you might as well lockdown the whole state.
“State like Bayelsa for instance, the local government affected is right in the middle of the state and all the roads lead through it so if you lockdown that local government you might as well lockdown the whole state.
“So there were technical reasons why we couldn’t do the lockdown but provided we do all the other interventions and put in place all the other restrictions that we have the impact should really be very similar with that of a lockdown.”
He said the task force will be meeting with governors and commissioners of health of nine new local government areas with high Covid-19 cases.
He said the PTF added the nine new local government to the already existing eleven after carrying out a risk assessment analysis in the areas.
According to the task force, 20 LGAs account for 50 per cent of Covid -19 cases in the country.
As of the time of this report, Nigeria has recorded 46, 577 Covid -19 cases with 945 deaths.
He said: “We have just reviewed our data for the high burden local government areas and we have expanded the number of local governments now to 20.
“We have added an additional nine and this has brought about an additional four states into the fold.
“We are doing a lot of work with the first eleven local governments and we will be meeting with state governors and the commissioners of health for the new local governments – the additional nine that we have now included.”
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