The governor of Lagos State, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, on Monday, has announced that the State Government will begin the vaccination of her residents against the dreaded COVID-19 pandemic and the third wave.

The State Government had distributed AstraZeneca vaccines in the first phase of vaccination to the residents.

Briefing State House Correspondents at Lagos House, Alausa, Ikeja, on the situation report on the COVID-19 management in the State, Sanwo-Olu, expressed his resolve to fight the pandemic.

He said: “It is costly and requires hard work and commitment from a wide range of stakeholders and partners, sacrificing their time and energy and resources on multiple fronts to slow down the virus, and eventually to tame it.

As a government, we have taken substantial steps to arrest this third wave in its tracks, most notable of them is the increased monitoring and enforcement embarked upon by members of the incident command structure.

“As of August 21, Lagos had recorded 70,563 confirmed cases of COVID-19. Of this number, 60,716 have recovered in-community, and 4,387 are currently being managed actively in-community. About 5,551 patients have been admitted into our various COVID-19 care centres, with 506 registered fatalities, 135 of which happened in this current third wave.

“Lagos State received its allocation of 299,992 doses of the Moderna vaccine on August 18 for the second phase of the national vaccination campaign, which will begin this Wednesday, August 25.

We have developed an elaborate plan to administer the vaccines in 150 centres. The increase in the number of centres is to prevent the gathering of large crowds and ensure the campaign does not itself become a super-spreader event. We will ensure the administration is based solely on appointments which should be done through nphcda.vaccination.gov.ng.

Our ultimate goal is to vaccinate 60 per cent of our residents in good time.”

Speaking further, the governor said: “To help us better manage the pandemic, we have invested in strengthening the capacity of the Lagos State Biobank to sequence positive cases. Sequencing allows us to identify the predominant strains of the COVID-19 virus in our environment and provides us with information on how to better respond to the pandemic.

“We are also looking to increase our oxygen production to 1,000 cylinders per day since it is a vital requirement for the management of the most severe cases. We have seen a gradual increase in the uptake of oxygen from 75 cylinders per day at the beginning of this third wave, to over 400 cylinders per day currently.

With our modelling suggesting that we may be required even more oxygen supply over the next few weeks, we are exploring several ways of increasing our oxygen capacity, including partnering with the private sector. At the moment we have two functioning oxygen plants, at the IDH in Yaba, and in Gbagada, and are looking forward to shortly taking delivery of two additional oxygen plants being built in Lagos State by the Federal Government. Our target is an oxygen supply capacity of 1,000 cylinders per day.

“I appeal for your cooperation. The threat of the Coronavirus is not theoretical, it is very real. We have been on the journey now for about 18 months, and we are all witnesses to the immense disruptions we have seen on every front, not to talk of the many lives that have been lost.

We are all united in our desire to put this virus and the pandemic behind us as quickly as we can, but this will not happen if we continue to disregard health protocols. We also cannot afford to allow a sense of fatigue to set in. The consequences of this will be enormous.