Commissioner for Health Lagos State, Prof. Akin Abayomi
Lagos State Government says it has set up a COVID-19 outpatient facility to monitor progress of discharged patients for six to twelve months.
Prof. Akin Abayomi, state Commissioner for Health, disclosed this on Thursday while briefing the media on COVID-19 update.
Abayomi said that the facility would manage post COVID-19 syndrome that was beginning to reflect in the reinfection of some discharged patients.
“We are beginning to discover from around the world that there is something called post COVID-19 syndrome”.
“Post COVID-19 syndrome, is not well-defined. It is characterised by long term lethargy, weakness or what we have recognised as relapses”.
“You would have cleared the virus, but few weeks later, you start secreting the virus, although not in large quantity but low quantity because the immune system is still trying to eradicate the virus from your system”.
“In the process of doing that, people complain of headache, weakness, fatigue and other problems,” he said.
Abayomi said that through the outpatient facility, patients would be monitored physically and also through the Eko Telemed, to ensure that patients were not experiencing the features of the post COVID-19 syndrome after their discharge from isolation centres or home based care.
On the numbers of COVID-19 tests performed by the seven private medical laboratories, Abayomi said that the labs had performed 912 tests in their first week of activation.
According to him, the tests increased to 1,538 tests in the second week of activation of the laboratories, saying the numbers would rise in coming weeks.
Speaking on the financial cost of managing a COVID-19 patient in an isolation centre, Abayomi noted that the costs differ depending on whether it was a mild, moderate, high care or intensive care patient.
“To treat mild to moderate case patients in our isolation centre is somewhere in the region of N100, 000 per day”.
“That gives you an idea of the amount of money the government is spending on COVID-19 isolation facilities and COVID-19 care”.
“If you require high care or intensive care, that amount can go up to anything from N500,000 to even a million naira per day, depending on the complications of the case”.
“Do you need ventilation, dialysis, intravenous antibiotics; every case is different, so it is difficult to calculate exactly how much a patient in high care or intensive care would cost.
“We are working on the rate and we would make it available when it’s ready,” he said.
Besides, Abayomi said that about 2,036 COVID-19 cases were confirmed in Lagos within the past two weeks.
He, however, added that the patients had not been picked up from the communities to the Isolation centres for various reasons which includes patient’s preference for home treatment and wrong information by some patients.
“In the next couple of days, we will formally activate the home based care programme for asymptomatic COVID-19 cases.
“We will manage the asymptomatic cases through the EkoTeleMed,” he said.
On the state’s COVID-19 epidemiology, Abayomi said that there were 13,543 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Lagos, 2,075 of the cases had been discharged from isolation centres, while 192 deaths was recorded.
Abayomi however noted that Rapid Diagnostic Test Kits have very high risks of giving positive or negative results. As a result RDT kits is illegal in Lagos.(NAN)
