I didn’t regret raising alarm on no extraction kits – NCDC DG

The Director-General Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Chikwe Ihekweazu, has given reason why he raised the alarm on Saturday that the country was running low on extraction kits.

Ihekweazu, at the daily briefing of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 in Abuja, said the centre was having challenges bringing the items to the country, adding that the alarmed he raised paid off as Nigerians rose to the occasion and filled in the gap.

He said: “On my tweet on Saturday, one thing I want colleagues to understand is that I asked for something called an extraction kit; they are not the same thing as the test kit. We have a supply chain of all commodities but there are some slight challenges with things coming into the country now.

“These are things that we have ordered and they are in the process of coming in but we suddenly ran out on them. So rather than shut down the network of 15 labs in the country, I put out that tweet.

“While we got a lot of criticisms which I expected, something beautiful happened – people came back and solved that problem. Some people brought in the extraction kits, some offered to give it to us for free because they had it in their warehouses.