A total of 9,029 persons of interest have been traced by the Federal Government, as it intensifies contact tracing across the country.

Although the government said testing of suspected COVID-19 carriers is no longer a challenge, it described collection of samples was the headache.

The government also plan daily tests from 1,500 to 4,000. Drive-in test clinics are to be set up in Lagos.

Minister of Health Dr. Osagie Ehanire and Director-General of Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, made this known during the briefing of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 on Tuesday in Abuja.

Ehanire said 99 per cent of those traced have exceeded their 14-day observation period, which has significantly helped the entire strategy to curb the spread of the pandemic virus in the country.

He said: “We have made significant progress in contact tracing and have to date, followed up 9,029 persons of interest, 99 per cent of whom have exceeded their 14-day observation period.

“The NCDC is doing a good job of supporting response activities in the states with new outbreaks, with Rapid Response Teams, and working with the Department of Hospital Services to oversee the establishment of more isolation and treatment centres in line with national guidelines and global best practices.”

“The Federal Ministry of Health and its agencies are developing the new National Action Plan as a strategy to respond to the imminent phase of COVID-19 community transmission,” he said.

Dr. Ihekweazu said the centre’s challenge was no longer testing but samples collection.

He said the centre now has 12 molecular diagnostic laboratories across the country, but that samples collection and other response activities were the major challenges to overcome.

Ihekweazu explained that the agency plans to increase the number of samples collected daily to 4,000. It is 1,500 at present.

Lagos alone will have 2,000 suspects tested daily; Abuja, 1,000 and the rest of the states, 1,000″, he explained, adding: “Never in the history of our nation has its entire future depended on actions of its public health workforce.

”The challenge right now is not the laboratory testing capacity, but how active our public health workforce is in collecting samples, identifying suspect cases, and sending them into the labs for testing.

”Our target is to get to 2,000 samples a day in Lagos, 1,000 in Abuja and 1,000 for the rest of the country.

”In under four months, we have now activated a total of 12 laboratories across the country, to bring testing closer to the people and to make sure that we have at least one in every geopolitical zone, and we keep pushing until we get one in every state.

”We have achieved this largely by leveraging existing molecular laboratory capacity within our network and within some centres across the country. “We now have a capacity to test 1,500 people per day across the network. We are not close to exhausting this capacity every day.

”Our challenge now is how to make the entire response more efficient. It is a process engineering challenge of how to make the entire food chain work.

“Right now the limiting factor is not the laboratories, the limiting factor is getting the right samples into the laboratories and that is our collective responsibility in the next two weeks.

“We are establishing clinics in Lagos where people can actually drive-through and have their swabs collected through a special arrangement.”

The minister added that the government was also ”gathering more epidemiological information on coronavirus , such as understanding sources of new cases and planning new lines of action.”