The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) reported 542 new infections of COVID-19 Monday.
In a Twitter update via its verified handle, the government agency said there are now 152,616 confirmed cases of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus in Nigeria.
It said a total of 129,300 people have so far been discharged from hospital, while the number of deaths so far is 1,862.
As of Monday, more than 111.5 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported worldwide, with 62.9 million of those listed as recovered or resolved on a tracking site maintained by Johns Hopkins University. The global death toll stood at more than 2.4 million.
Meanwhile, a new COVID-19 variant has been detected in Nigeria and 15 other countries, the NCDC has said.
According to a Daily Trust report, the centre’s Director-General Chikwe Ihekweazu announced the finding at Monday’s joint briefing of the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19.
The new strain, B.1.2.5 which is different from the highly infectious B.1.1.7, has not been described as a variant of concern yet, he said.
He said that researchers and scientists were still working hard to understand if this variant had any effect on the virus transmissibility, immunity, as well as diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics.
Nigeria has now confirmed 54 cases of the B.1.1.7 COVID-19 variant in the country.
The B.1.1.7 COVID-19 variant was first detected in the UK and has spread to over 80 countries in the world.
Iheakwazu said the cases were found between November 2020 and February 2021.
That is even as the United States surpassed 500,000 on Monday, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University.
The US has by far the highest COVID death toll of any country in the world, with 20% of the nearly 2.5 million global deaths from coronavirus.
The 500,000 Americans who have died from coronavirus exceeds the death toll from World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined.