We’ve Activated Oxygen Plants At IDH, Yaba – Lagos State

The Lagos State Government has activated an Oxygen Plant within the premises of the Infectious Diseases Hospital, IDH, Yaba.

Commissioner for Health, Prof. Akin Abayomi recently revealed this, and Nigerians have been reacting.

According to him, this plant will help to offer support to COVID-19 patients who require oxygen therapy, and this is very crucial at this time.

He added that the increasing demand for oxygen at the isolation centre which is occasioned by the second wave of COVID19 infection must be catered for by all of us.

“We recognized the importance of generating oxygen because of the large number of patients who are currently on admission in our isolation centres and are largely depending on oxygen. This has resulted in an escalating and alarming demand for oxygen”.

“The oxygen plant facility could not have come at a better time than now when the State is recording an increase in the number of people presenting with difficulty in breathing and requiring urgent oxygen therapy.”

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.