The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control has on Tuesday announced that three additional cases of the COVID-19 Omicron variant have been recorded, making the total discovered cases of the new variant in Nigeria six.
The Director-General, NCDC, Dr Ifedayo Adetifa made this known in a statement during a press briefing, saying the additional cases were detected in passengers linked to South Africa in November.
"The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control has confirmed three more cases of COVID-19 with the B.1.1.529 SARS-CoV-2 lineage, i.e., the Omicron variant, in Nigeria," the DG said.
“In addition to the three cases announced earlier on 1st December 2021, this brings the total number of confirmed cases of the Omicron variant detected in Nigeria to six. All the Omicron cases so far were detected in persons with recent travel history to South Africa in November.
He further explained that “The NCDC through the National Reference Laboratory continues to coordinate genomic surveillance activities across the country to sequence all positive COVID-19 samples from international travellers arriving in Nigeria. This includes sequencing of positive samples from international travellers from October 2021 to date.
“The Delta variant remains the dominant variant and so far, we have not seen the replacement of this variant by the new Omicron variant as observed elsewhere.”
