Health workers in Nigeria are unhappy about the Federal Government’s refusal to impose travel restrictions on inbound passengers from China, following the resurgence of COVID-19.
The medical bodies have maintained that Nigeria does not have adequate human resources to handle another pandemic, due to the massive emigration of health workers to other countries.
There has been a recent resurgence of COVID-19 in China following the relaxation of the country’s zero-COVID policy, as well as significantly increased COVID-19 cases, admissions, and deaths in the United Kingdom and the United States over the past weeks partly due to the usual winter aggravations of respiratory illnesses.
The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC) has maintained that country-targeted travel restrictions including requests for PCR-negative tests from incoming travelers had little or no effect on preventing global and national circulation of Omicron since the emergence of this variant and its relatives with their shorter incubation period.
However, the President of the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD), Emeka Orji, has urged the federal government to make plans to protect Nigerians from a resurgence of COVID-19.
Orji warned, “We need to act now because we don’t even have enough doctors to handle the current challenges we have in the health sector.
“If we now have a major pandemic, it will only worsen the situation because what we have at hand now, we don’t even have enough medical personnel to take care of them and that is why you have an increase in waiting time in the hospital and rescheduling of surgeries.”