Coronavirus Is Still Killing People – Prof. Akin Abayomi

The Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Prof. Akin Abayomi has come out to say that the state has lost 14 health workers to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

He recently revealed this via a statement, and Nigerians have been reacting.

According to him, the state government will not rest on its oars in the battle against COVID-19, and there are strategies already implemented to prevent a third wave of the disease in the state.

He added that 12 doctors and two nurses lost their lives in the battle against the pandemic, and people are still dying from the virus.

His words, “During the battle against COVID-19; the wave one and the wave two; we lost some our colleagues, we lost 14 health professionals; 12 doctors and two nurses. So, just to remember that there are still people dying around the world from COVID-19.”

“We want to say that we appreciate all the work that has been done by the frontline workers and sacrifices that have been made; during COVID-19 some doctors and nurses and professionals never saw their family for four weeks; they were constantly on call working night and day trying to save lives.”

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.