Scientist learns more about Nigeria virus variant

Nigerian scientists have spent the holiday season in laboratories doing genetic sequencing to learn more about the country's COVID-19 variant, as cases increase in the country. Virologist Sunday Omilabu says the information he gathers about the variant will help battle the spread of the disease in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country with 196 million people. Nigeria has confirmed 86,576 COVID-19 cases, including 1,278 deaths, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The variants discovered in the UK and South Africa, they are distantly different from the variants discovered in Nigeria”, said Omilabu, who said it is not unusual for viruses to mutate and cause variants.

Nigeria is seeing more infections of COVID-19 but it is not yet certain if that is from the variant, said Omilambu, the Director of the Center for Human and Zoonotic Virology at the Lagos University College of Medicine and Teaching Hospital. “What we could say clinically is that we have more people coming down with severe signs and symptoms", he said, describing how one person can spread the disease to four or five family members, which is a higher rate of transmission than had been recorded earlier.

“That shows us that something is happening. There’s a surge so we are recording that but we are yet to sequence any of those isolates”, to determine if the increased transmissions are caused by the variant, said Omilabu.

As lab work is being done to learn more about the variant, Nigerians should remain vigilant to avoid spreading the virus, he said. “People still go and party. They still go to the club and without putting on face masks”, he said. “We talk of social distancing, people are not respecting that", he added. With COVID-19 variants emerging in Nigeria and South Africa, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Africa needs to do more genetic sequencing, such as what Omilabu is doing.

The new variants have emerged as COVID-19 infections are on the rise in the 47 African countries, nearly reaching the peak the continent saw in July, the WHO said. In the past 28 days, 10 countries - Algeria, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda have reported the highest number of new cases, accounting for 90% of all the infections in Africa, the WHO said. 

(Image Credits: AP)