In the early hours of Monday, 24 August 2020, Lagos State Commissioner For Health, Prof. Akin Abayomi announced that he has tested positive to COVID-19.
Gbenga Omotosho, the commissioner for information in the
state, confirmed this development.
Announcing the status on his Twitter handle, Mr Omotosho
wrote that the health commissioner tested positive after coming in close
contact with persons feeling unwell.
Interestingly, Journalists asked him that question a
few weeks back when he was interviewed, whether he was scared of contracting
the virus because of his daily exposure, and he said has made up his mind,
since that’s his job.
One question many people are dying to ask Lagos Health
Commissioner, Prof. Akin Abayomi is what he thinks about each morning when he
wakes up, with the enormity of the challenges before him as Health
Commissioner. That was one of the questions City People Publisher, SEYE KEHINDE
asked him recently, when he met this handsome doctor for an interview. And he
promptly revealed what goes on, in his mind. Below are excerpts.
A few months back, you revealed how Lagos State government
got to know about COVID-19 ahead of time and how this helped you prepare for
it. Tell us a bit more about how you got wind of the virus early this year?
We all heard about COVID-19 since December 2019. We were
watching the outbreak, and we saw it gradually expanding. So, by January, we
had noticed that it had started spreading across South East Asia. And then as
you recall, it started arriving in Europe and the Middle East and so we
activated what we called our Enhanced sense of Importance and we established
what we called the Incidence Command System which makes the Governor the
Incident Commander. We did that early in February and we got our first Index
Case around the 27th of February.
We had already been preparing since the time of Ebola. And
from January till when we got our first Index Case, we ramped up our
preparations, in terms of Training & Infrastructure, in preparation for an
Index case. And of course, it wasn’t surprising when we got our index case
eventually from Europe. We had already put in place significant plans to
address that.
What will you call the achievements you have recorded so
far?
What helped us is that we had prepared. The second thing is
that we were able to contain the initial imported cases. So, we had a series of
imported cases. What that did was to delay the onset of the active community
transmission which gave us time. In circumstances like this, Time is very
valuable.
Because with Time, you can ramp up your Infrastructure and
Training. You can develop your programmes. You can do your public awareness.
So, our early aggressive Contact Tracing and Isolation and ability to develop
the required test that is necessary to confirm COVID-19, made it possible for
us to flatten the curve, very much, right at the beginning. For the first 3
months, we kept the curve very flat.
That allowed us to put resources into important places to
train people, to build isolation centres, and to do a bit of public awareness
and campaign to make sure that people understand what is COVID-19. And to make
people understand it, because COVID-19 behaves differently, in different
environments. Now, we know how it behaves in Lagos. It has helped us define our
policies. So, buying that time, helped us. If we had just had a full-scale
outbreak right from the beginning we would not have been able to put in place
the necessary structures, Training, Manpower and also a better understanding of
how COVID-19 works or affects people in Lagos.
Your job must be very challenging. When you wake up each
morning, what is always on your mind. What do you think of, considering that
you are at the forefront of the battle against COVID-19?
We are making the best of a bad situation. But we are also
grateful that, by the Grace of God for some reasons, we are not seeing the same
disease profile, as we see on Television in the Northern Hemisphere, in Europe
& America.
Had it behaved the same way in Nigeria, as it is behaving in
Europe, & America, it will have been a very sad situation. You can imagine,
even with the strong health systems in Europe & America, they are still
overwhelmed. Our health systems are very weak.
We have poor infrastructure, reduced manpower and equipment.
Generally speaking, our Health Systems are not particularly robust or
resilient. So, under the circumstances in which we find ourselves, we are doing
well. What has happened now is that we recognise that we really need to focus
on health system strengthing.
COVID-19 has opened our eyes to this extreme weakness but I
hope that just because the disease is likely different or with less aggressive
profile in this environment doesn’t detract from the fact that, moving
forward, we need to really focus on some major changes.
So, what I think of every morning is: how do I get up and
use the system that we have to provide the best strategy to essentially save
people’s lives, those that fall into the Moderate to Severe. I worry about them every day. And I am putting things in place to try and rescue as many of those
people as much as possible because those are the ones that become critical and
die. Meanwhile, the Mild to the Moderate will not die, but all we have to do is
to stop them from spreading it too fast.
But my main challenge every morning is: how many severe patients do I have? And
how are we going to save their lives?
How do you cope sir with visiting all the isolation centres
daily? Doesn’t that expose you, as you see those infected with Covid-19? What
goes through your mind as you go round daily?
Well, I am responsible for all the Isolation facilities. I
am responsible for all the welfare of all the patients. So, I have to go round
each day. But I exercise due precaution. I can catch it at the Isolation
Centre. I can catch it in the public. The virus is everywhere, so, you can’t be
too careful. If many of our health personnel don’t catch it at work, they can
catch it at home. Because it's at home that you have relaxed your guard. When
you go home, you relax. But somebody can come into your house with the
virus and you catch it. So, I do my best. If I get it, I get it. If I don’t I
thank God.
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