The Rivers State Government says it has been at the forefront of the Covid-19 mitigation in the country.
The State Chief Executive, Chief Nyesom Wike stated this during a courtesy visit by Course Participants of Armed Forces Command and Staff College, Jaji at the Government House in Port Harcourt, on Monday.
Represented by his Deputy, Dr. Ipalibo Harry Banigo, the governor said the Covid-19 team, under his watch swung into action at the beginning of the year when the news of the terrible Coronavirus broke out, his team ensured that all non-pharmaceutical measures were put in place, stressing that the use of hand sanitizers, social distancing, wearing of face masks as well as massive public enlightenment campaigns were carried out across the 23 local government areas of the state.
According to him, “when the need to shut down the borders and lock down became necessary, all the borders were shut down as part of deliberate efforts at ensuring a bio security of the health of our people, to make sure they were safe, secure and remain healthy.
“You know we have to be alive before we can talk about doing anything else, life is most important, this was done to safeguard the lives of those doing business here in the state”, the governor stressed.
Wike said, “we have tried to up our testing capacity in Rivers State, with the emergency operations centre which is done in collaboration with donor agencies, corporate agencies and so on, so you find out that we have increased our testing capacity across the state, as at now we have done well over 55,000 tests.
“We are pressing to do more, people have been afraid they feel they will be discriminated if they are tested but we are trying to get information out, that people should know their status, they should know if they are positive, we have enough holding centres where they can stay, and if there are those who can stay at home and be quarantined, they can be properly advised by our various health authorities”, the governor remarked.
Wike said “we have been reducing our case positivity rate. Coming from the bottom, we are about 6.3% that is the case positivity rate, it was quite high you know, there was a time when it was 14 to 15 % in the country, it has been reducing and we have cut down as low as 6.3 % and we are still going down”, he further stressed.
The State Chief Executive, who thanked members of the team for choosing Rivers State for their study tour, expressed the hope that at the end of the tour they would have remarkable recommendations that would be implementable.
In his remarks the Team Leader, Armed Forces Command and Staff College, Jaji Brig. Gen. Victor Ebhaleme, said the objective of the college was to develop the professional knowledge and understanding of selected officers, in order to prepare them for Command and Staff responsibilities, noting that the college do not train only Nigerian military officers but also offers training to allied officers from sister African countries.
He said as part of the curriculum of the Senior Course, the students are made to study the African Environment which begins with the Nigerian Study Tour, which is an annual event to selected states in the country.
The theme for this year’s course is “Pandemic and National Security: Covid-19 in Perspective”.