Pascal Oparada
Nigeria’s former vice president, Atiku Abubakar has raised the alarm over a new strain of coronavirus that has surfaced in the United Kingdom.
According to the former presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party(PDP) in the 2019 presidential election, Nigeria needs to act fast to avoid being caught unaware, as the first wave.
“The reason Nigeria took a harder than necessary hit during the first wave of the #COVID19 virus is that the Federal Government failed to heed the warnings of well-meaning Nigerians, like myself and others, to shut down our borders once the virus became a pandemic.
“The new strain of COVID19 that has erupted in the United Kingdom, and specifically, London, can add to Nigeria’s health emergency if we do not act with an abundance of caution and temporarily halt all flights to and from the UK until this new strain is brought under control,” Atiku said.
Atiku said other nations are already taking precautions to avoid a repeat of the last infections.
The United Kingdom announced a surprise lockdown on Saturday in London and parts of the country amid a surge in the cases of the coronavirus disease after the discovery of a new strain of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, Hindustan Times reports.
According to experts, the new strain is 70% more infectious than other strains of the virus. It is believed that most of the new cases in the country are driven by this variant, with up to 60% of the cases in London being caused by it.
As per Hindustan Times, the variant is not new. It was first detected in September. In November, around a quarter of cases in London were from the new variant.
This reached nearly two-thirds of cases in mid-December, according to a report in the BBC.
Jonathan Ball, a virologist at the University of Nottingham, said: “The amount of evidence in the public domain is woefully inadequate to draw strong or firm opinions on whether the virus has truly increased transmission.”
