Coronavirus Can Make Nigerians Think Outside The Box – Ogbonnaya Onu

The Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu has come out to say that the Ministry is doing everything possible to develop home-grown solutions to cure coronavirus patients in Nigeria.

Ogbonnaya Onu revealed this today when he received the Report of The Ministerial Committee on The Repositioning and Strengthening of The Ministry to Effectively Carry Out Its Statutory Charged Responsibilities to the Federal Government, in his office in Abuja.

According to him, one important lesson to draw from the pandemic is that it has made the people of Nigeria think outside the box and utilize home-grown Science, Technology, and Innovation to solve our own problems.

He added that Nigerians must start developing self-confidence to become self-reliant in all aspects of life.

His words, “Nigerians must begin to develop self-confidence in themselves and appreciate technological innovations produced by Nigerians. Realize that taking Nigeria to where it should be is our responsibility.

“To move from recession to recovery, the nation must be attached to science and technology.”

“For us to provide jobs for unemployed, there is need for us to provide the enabling environment. The Ministry will work hard and will not rest until we develop a home-grown solution for COVID-19. This virus is a wakeup call for us to wake up from our slumber to find solution to our problems.”

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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.