Fear Grips Osun State Residents, As Cote d’Ivoire Returnees May Have Triggered COVID-19 Community Spreading

Posted on April 2, 2020

This may not be the best time for the people of Osun State as the cases of novel Coronavirus pandemic may be on the increase in the state any moment from now.

On Wednesday, the state recorded an overwhelming cases of people tested positive for COVID-19 with the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control announced that Osun has recorded 14 cases so far.

What could have brought the increase in a single day? This was one of the several questions the residents in the state were asking until late Wednesday evening their fear was confimed through the news that some of the returnees from Cote’d’Ivoire who are undergoing quarantine in Ejigbo, about 127 of them, were said to have allegedly escaped. The returnees were not only from Osun States, some were from Delta, Edo, Benue and Anambra states.

Though there has been no official confirmation of this from the Government of Osun State, P.M. EXPRESS’ findings between Wednesday night and Thursday morning can confirmed that the situation is not a tea party as residents of the state and more importantly people in Ejigbo are living in fear of what the multiplier effect of the action of the runaway returnees will be.

It was reported that the returnees arrived Osun State on Friday enroute Ogun State and they were to be isolated for 14 days. The state’s commissioner for Health, Dr Rafiu Isamotu said that the tests were done in batches, and out of the first 23 samples ran, three came out positive. In the second batch, he said 47 were tested and nine of them came out positive.

Isamotu said the samples of the remaining 56 had been taken to testing centre and that the results were being expected.

P.M. EXPRESS, however, gathered that the news of the results of those who tested positive among the samples taking for examination filtered into the quarantine camp in Ejigbo. This caused panicking, which led to people forcing themselves to escape from the camp. The stampede overwhelmed the security agents on ground.

News filtered in Wednesday night that ‘a whole deployment of soldier and police were there…but as they surged to the gate they could not restrain or shoot them.

“Only God knows how many people might have contacted this virus through community spreading with the unfortunate action of these returnees who I think they supposed to have stayed in Abidjan rather than coming to Nigeria,” said Dosumu Ajani who spoke to P.M. EXPRESS early on Thursday in Ejigbo.

“We are now living in fear because we don’t know who might have contacted any of these people. It is so unfortunate that the help the state government was trying to do for these people now turned to disaster on our hands,” he said

To another resident in Osogbo, the state capital, “I think these returnees are on the loose and COVID-19 is already with us.”

The state governor, Gboyega Oyetola had since 1 April, 2020 ordered a total lockdown to curb the spread of COVID-19 and observes are of the opinion that with the returnees on the loose, some of whom have tested positive, Osun state’s case may even surpass the record of cases in Lagos and Abuja in the next few days.

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