By Cletus Ukpong, Premium Times
Cross River State on Sunday recorded 20 cases of COVID-19 infection, the highest so far in the State.
Prior to this, the State has remained at the bottom of the table since the outbreak of the Coronavirus in Nigeria.
The total number of confirmed cases in the State is now 189 as of January 24, according to data from the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, NCDC.
The Commissioner for Health in Cross River State, Betta Edu, said the recent high cases in the State was because of corps members who came in for their National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) program.
“We had people who came in from the NYSC, about 13 of them were positive cases. So, these are people who moved into our State from other States.
“The other ones are people who are residents in the State,” Edu told Premium Times, Monday.
“However, it clearly shows that the second wave of the COVID-19 is here on us, so people need to improve on their level of adherence to all the COVID-19 protocols.
“It is also a call for the Federal Government to see that they can immediately come in and help Cross River State fix their lab so that we can do community sampling and testing and really have a true picture of what might be going on in communities, as we already do know that community spread is taking place,” she added.
Cross River, before now, had two laboratories for COVID-19 testing – Lawrence Henshaw Memorial Reference Lab and another one at the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital (UCTH).