Treating Coronavirus Patients Privately Is Not Allowed – Osagie Ehanire

Minister of Health, Osagie Ehanire has come out to say that no private hospital has been given approval for coronavirus treatment in Nigeria.

Osagie recently revealed that the private hospitals that have been doing this are yet to meet the criteria to receive approval yet so it is not legal as at now.

According to him, private hospitals that are prepared to remove all present patients they have and focus on coronavirus treatment will be useful to the country at this time since that will prevent all kinds of cross-infection.

He added that treating private patients is not allowed currently since it comes with lots of risk for such easily transmitted disease.

His words, “No accredited private hospital has been given approval in Abuja. Lagos is looking at some accredited hospitals. There’s one large hospital in Lagos that has called me and said they want to become a coronavirus treatment centre.

“The structure of the hospital is that they are ready to remove all present patients they have and do nothing but Coronavirus treatment. That would be good because they don’t stand the chance of cross-infection.

“But, at the moment, there is no hospital that has met the criteria.

“Treating of private patients is not allowed. It is risky. Coronavirus is one of the most easily transmitted diseases you can think of. So, it is not allowed to treat Coronavirus privately.”

What do you think?

Coronaviruses are a group of related viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds. In humans, coronaviruses cause respiratory tract infections that can be mild, such as some cases of the common cold (among other possible causes, predominantly rhinoviruses), and others that can be lethal, such as SARS, MERS, and COVID-19. Symptoms in other species vary: in chickens, they cause an upper respiratory tract disease, while in cows and pigs they cause diarrhea. There are yet to be vaccines or antiviral drugs to prevent or treat human coronavirus infections.

Coronaviruses constitute the subfamily Orthocoronavirinae, in the family Coronaviridae, order Nidovirales, and realm Riboviria. They are enveloped viruses with a positive-sense single-stranded RNA genome and a nucleocapsid of helical symmetry. The genome size of coronaviruses ranges from approximately 27 to 34 kilobases, the largest among known RNA viruses. The name coronavirus is derived from the Latin corona, meaning “crown” or “halo”, which refers to the characteristic appearance reminiscent of a crown or a solar corona around the virions (virus particles) when viewed under two-dimensional transmission electron microscopy, due to the surface covering in club-shaped protein spikes.

Human coronaviruses were first discovered in the late 1960s. The earliest ones discovered were an infectious bronchitis virus in chickens and two in human patients with the common cold (later named human coronavirus 229E and human coronavirus OC43). Other members of this family have since been identified, including SARS-CoV in 2003, HCoV NL63 in 2004, HKU1 in 2005, MERS-CoV in 2012, and SARS-CoV-2 (formerly known as 2019-nCoV) in 2019. Most of these have involved serious respiratory tract infections.