The “COVID-19: Updates from Singapore” weekly webinar series is a forum for leading clinicians, scientists, public health officials and policy makers to share insights from their fields of study. The 17th webinar session was held on Thursday 30 July at 7pm.
Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, Director General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), was this week’s guest speaker. Dr Ihekweazu brings with him more than 20 years’ of experience serving in senior public health leadership positions in several National Public Health Institutes, such as the South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NCID) and the United Kingdom’s Health Protection Agency. He has also led responses in infectious diseases outbreaks around the world with the World Health Organisation.
Titled COVID-19 in Nigeria, Africa, Dr Ihekweazu spoke about the successes and challenges of managing a pandemic in Nigeria these past 6 months and provided a longer term view of the development of public health expectations and goals in Nigeria moving forward. Dr Ihekweazu introduced Nigeria as a country with 36 states and 200 million inhabitants, and the country with the fifth highest population density on the continent. These factors influenced the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases in the country. Nigeria has seen a spate of infectious diseases outbreaks in recent years, from the 2014 Ebola outbreak to the 2019 Lassa Fever outbreak. Even with Nigeria’s past experiences in combating hosts of infectious diseases, managing the COVID-19 pandemic of this scale proved extremely tough. Initially, testing people for COVID-19 was a challenge because of the difficulty in accessing diagnostics and other medical supplies, which was made more complicated in addition to the disruptions in the global supply chain. Yet, Dr Ihekweazu remains fairly confident about combating this new pandemic because of the marked improvement in Nigeria’s surveillance system and laboratory architecture, which has found diseases that were deemed difficult to detect.
Dr Ihekweazu agreed that communication to the people about exercising personal responsibility to help curb the spread of the pandemic has been difficult. He emphasised that using legal action is the last resort, but timely responses and using communication avenues such as social media and engagement with community leaders to fight unproven rumours and stimulate behavioural change is the way to go. Emphasising that no country can fight a pandemic on its own, Dr Ihekweazu encouraged countries to depend on strong relationships with international organisations while building collaboration and coordination with national and regional public health institutes.
In conclusion, Dr Ihekweazu called for the urgent need to re-inspire the movement for multilateralism in addressing the challenges on health security, and encouraged strong global and regional leadership to counter the increasingly nationalistic approaches that have emerged in recent days.
WATCH: COVID-19 Updates from Singapore: Webinar 17 | Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu
Join us on 6 August 2020 for the next webinar session where guest speaker Dr Voo Teck Chuan, Assistant Professor at the NUS Medicine Centre for Biomedical Ethics (CBmE), will be speaking on “The ethics of immunity passports in COVID-19”. Register now at https://medicine.nus.edu.sg/cet/webinar/.
