The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) reported 796 new cases of COVID-19 Thursday.
In a Twitter update via its verified handle, the government agency said there are now 72,140 confirmed cases of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus in Nigeria.
A total number of 65,722 people it said, have so far been discharged from hospital, while the number of deaths so far is 1,190.
As of Friday, more than 70 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported worldwide, with more than 45 million of those considered recovered or resolved, according to a tracking tool maintained by Johns Hopkins University. The global death toll stood at more than 1.5 million.
According to a CBC report, in Africa, Nigeria may be on the verge of a second wave of COVID-19 infections, the health minister warned, as another official said the country expects to roll out a vaccine by April next year.
Meanwhile, World Health Organisation Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said nearly a billion doses of vaccines had been secured for the COVAX programme to provide shots for poor- and middle-income countries, with 189 countries participating. But several WHO officials noted that it would still take time to manufacture enough doses of vaccines to meet demand.
AstraZeneca intends to start clinical trials to test a combination of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine with Russia’s Sputnik V shot to see if this can boost the efficacy of the British drugmaker’s vaccine, Russia’s sovereign wealth fund said on Friday. Trials will start by the end of the year and Russia wants to produce the new vaccine jointly if it is proven to be effective, said the RDIF wealth fund, which has funded Sputnik V.
The move is likely to be seen in Moscow as a long-awaited vote of confidence by a Western manufacturer in Sputnik V, which the Russian defence ministry alleged on Friday was the target of a foreign-backed smear campaign. Sputnik’s Russian developers say clinical trials, still under way, have shown it has an efficacy rate of over 90 per cent, higher than that of AstraZeneca’s own vaccine and similar to those of rivals Pfizer and Moderna.