Oyo State records seven new COVID-19 cases

Ignorance, denial can escalate virus, says decontamination, containment chairperson
Oyo State has recorded seven new cases of coronavirus.

The state’s governor, Seyi Makinde, who disclosed this yesterday while giving an update on COVID-19, said that six out the new cases were from the Ibadan company, iSON Xperiences.

He said: “The COVID-19 confirmation tests for seven suspected cases came back positive. Six are from iSON Xperiences and one case is also from Ibadan South-West Local Council. So, the total number of confirmed cases in Oyo State is 240.”

Meanwhile, the Chairperson of Oyo State COVID-19 Decontamination and Containment Project Team, Prof. (Mrs.) Olanike Adeyemo, has said that living ignorantly and in denial of the prevalence of the coronavirus can increase the number of infection cases in the country.

Adeyemo, the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research, Innovation and Strategic Partnerships), University of Ibadan (UI), who spoke with The Guardian in Ibadan yesterday, added that such ignorance and denial could make the coronavirus difficult to contain.

She was speaking against the backdrop of the conspiracy theory of the non-existence of the virus, being circulated among the public.

The theory is believed to be having an impact on the public’s level of compliance with safety protocols put in place to contain the spread of the pandemic.

“It is a bit of ignorance on the part of the people who do not know as much as they should – those that may be uneducated and a bit of denial.

“We can be educated but illiterate at the same time.

“For me, this COVID-19 has shown that it is not going to school that makes you educated.

“This is because the kind of conspiracy theory that is flying around makes it even a bit difficult to separate the educated from the uneducated.

“If you hear what the educated people are saying, it is actually tedious.

“For the uneducated, if you have somebody that is educated around you, you will prefer to look up to them to guide you.

“But most people around now – even the educated ones – are buying into the conspiracy theory.

“They say, ‘Oh! COVID-19 is a scam in Nigeria’, ‘the government is just using it to make money,’” she said.

Adeyemo, who decried a situation where Nigerians make jokes of everything and the negative effect that kind of attitude could have on efforts at containing the spread of the virus, therefore, urged those at the helm of affairs at isolation centres across the states to be circumspect in disseminating some kind of information that could jeopardise the fight against COVID-19.

“We do a lot of things carelessly in Nigeria. Isolation centres should not be places where pictures should be coming out from and people begin to say all sorts of things.

“So, anybody that is not taking care of himself or herself is posing danger to himself/herself and anybody around him/her because we don’t know who is going to have the serious one.

“And even if that is not the case, you have loved ones that may contract the serious strain of the virus and it leads to death,” she further said.

She described the efforts being made to contain the spread of the virus as war-like, adding: “People use the analogy of a war. This is like a war situation where nobody is talking about anything other than survival.”