Coronavirus: Sanwo-Olu declares self as incident commander as Lagos sets up Command

Speaking at a stakeholders meeting held at the State House, Ikeja, the Governor noted that the effort is in collaboration with the Ministry of Health, to contain the outbreak of the disease.

The Governor disclosed he would be the incident commander of the centre while the Commissioner for Health, Prof Akin Abayomi would serve as the Deputy Commander.

While dispelling rumour on the availability of cases of the virus already infiltrated in the State, Sanwo-Olu said the State government is prepared to forestall its outbreak.

According to him, “What we have now is to heightened state concern in case of any emergency. We are putting in place incident Command system, I will take charge as incident commander.

“It has reached a level i have to be in charge personally while the commissioner will be my deputy with immediate effect. We will work with other stakeholders where there will be high level monitoring,”

He further advised residents to embark on self quarantined, saying “we will expect people to be self quarantined. We are going to be doing supervised quarantine.”

Sanwo-Olu added with the command centre, there will be hotline Nos available to the public and medical presonnel are on ground to follow up on daily basis if there appears suspected cases.

On his part, the Commissioner noted that there is no cause for worry as there is no suspected case of the virus in Lagos, Nigeria and Africa.

He noted that the Ministry is ramping up human capacity at the airport to scrutinize those coming in from the East.

According to him, “the Chinese government announced early in December 2019 of a flu like virus which is from corona and SARS virus transmissible from person to person. 17,000 persons have been affected so far.

“In Lagos, through the state ministry of health, the state is working to prevent the outbreak of the disease.

He noted that Lagos is ramping up field tents in the mainland hospital in case of any eventuality. Deployed health officials to the ports and Murtala Muhammed International Airport to monitor state of travellers, especially those from the East.

Chinese Consul General in Lagos, Chu Moaning, also at the event, commended efforts of the state government to fight the disease.

 He said that the Chinese government has mobilized efforts to support Wuhan. Built three new hospitals to take care of the affected persons within 10 days.