Governor Babajide Sanwo-olu of Lagos has said patients who lie about their travel history to doctors will be prosecuted and jailed if found guilty by the courts.
He disclosed this during a press briefing at the State House Marina on Monday.
He said “These patients do not only endanger their lives but the lives of our front line medical personnel, we already have some names and they will be prosecuted duly”.
“We would therefore like to appeal to our health workers to raise alarm as soon as they notice anything of sort,” he stated.
The governor also said the state government is considering making wearing facemasks compulsory from next week.
“Lagos is now seeing a slow spread of community transmission of COVID19 and as such we are considering mandatory use of face masks in our plan to contain #COVID19.”
Mr Sanwo-Olu attributed the increased number of new cases of coronavirus to increased testing across the local govt areas. .
“The rise in new cases is as a success of our house-to-house contact tracing and ramping up of tests across 20 LGAs.” He said.
On facemasks availability, he said local production of masks in the state has commenced: “We have commissioned local production of face masks certified by our healthcare professionals for our residents. Let us not give into panic buying and opportunistic price gouging which will deny our frontline healthcare workers of masks and other PPEs required to fight #COVID19.”
Meanwhile healthworkers have complained that the easily become exposed and infected to COVID-19 because patients deliberately hide that travel history.
Nigeria has so far recorded 21 deaths from coronavirus among which are 4 doctors, 1 nurse and 1 physiotherapist.
