The Minister of Health, Dr. Osagie Enahire, said Thursday that at least 113 health workers in the country had been infected by COVID-19.
He also advised Nigerians to remain where they are at present and refrain from travelling to their states or villages, saying the measure was necessary to halt the transmission of the disease.
Ehanire said the federal government had sent a team of medical experts to Kano in the wake of reported mass deaths in the state.
The minister said: “It is very important for healthcare workers to understand that nobody is conscripted, everybody is a volunteer. Those who cannot handle it generally have the option of requesting to be excused and someone else would come in.
“As for the doctors, it is fable to say over 300 of them have been infected. That is not true. There are not so many people in the health sector who are infected. The latest figure we have is that they are about 113 actually and these are not all public health workers.
A good number of them are from private hospitals and if you hear us speaking here frequently against trying to treat coronavirus in private clinics, we are actually referring to people who do so without having necessary precautions or training because they risk infecting themselves and they go home and give this infection to their family and that is not the right thing.
“So, the healthcare workers who have no training, have no business actually handling coronavirus. As for those who do not have equipment, we have said that we provided equipment and PPE for all those who are out there. There are one or two places where we have heard that there is tightness with supply and we are trying to send them over.”