SDG Should Handle Nigeria’s Post-COVID Recovery Plans – Damilola Olawuyi

The Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Academic, Research, Innovation, and Strategic Partnerships (ARISP) of Afe Babalola University, Ado Ekiti, Professor Damilola Olawuyi has urged the government to fully embed the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into COVID-19 economic recovery plans.

Professor Damilola Olawuyi revealed this during an online workshop organized by the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (NIALS), in partnership with the International Law Association, ILA.

According to him, SDGs offer vital tools for nations to battle all invisible enemies like COVID-19 and are built on the idea of turning disasters and challenges to opportunities.

He added that without an SDG approach to recovery, effectively detecting, measuring, and reporting on the impacts of the pandemic, containing the pandemic would be very tough.

Her words, “To ensure that economic recovery efforts leave no one behind, there is an urgent need to make the SDGs the basis and foundation of all post-COVID recovery plans, including economic planning, research, education, and rulemaking in Nigeria. Without an SDG approach to recovery, effectively detecting, measuring, and reporting on the impacts of the pandemic, as well as progress made in addressing them, will be extremely difficult.”

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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.