Adetifa claimed that the increase in travel over the holiday season might result in a rise in cases.

He said, “We are prepared to see that there may be a bump in cases just because of the increase in travel and the number of people returning. What we may not expect to see is an increasing number of people who are sick.”

The NCDC boss said vaccination and previous COVID-19 infections provided some degrees of immunity.

The population has quite a bit of immunity due to vaccination, previous COVID-19 infection, or repeated COVID-19 infection. So. COVID-19 is not new. The Omicron is not new like it was in November (2021).

“If you look at our numbers, we haven’t lost people for a while. Even if every single death is a great disaster for people’s families or friends, it’s not anything like the Delta variant when we had a big problem,” he added.

Speaking further, he said the Omicron variant was the dominant strain in the country.

He said, “Omicron took over as the dominant variant in November and December last year, and it has refused to go anywhere. Other minor variants have emerged, but Omicron remains the most dominant.”

The latest data from the NCDC showed that there were 266,283 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 3,155 deaths, while the number of discharged cases stood at 259,640 as of November 18.

This was as he argued that the decision was to ensure a balance in the mandate to protect the health of Nigerians.

Adetifa made this known in a statement made available to journalists in Abuja.

The statement titled, ‘Update in the use of Nigerian International Travel Portal’, explained that the decision to make repeat tests mandatory in Nigeria was based on the review of COVID-19 test positivity data among returnees to Nigeria during the first and subsequent waves of the pandemic.

He said, “The decision to make repeat tests mandatory in Nigeria was based on the review of COVID-19 test positivity data among returnees to Nigeria during the first and subsequent waves of the pandemic.This was necessary for ensuring a balance between our mandate to protect the health of Nigerians from more infections and supporting the restart of the economy, including international travel.As of January 16, 2022, over 18,000 cases of COVID-19 have been recorded from inbound travellers to Nigeria. Therefore, the associated risk of disease transmission is not trivial.

A statement signed by the Director-General, Dr Ifedayo Adetifa, partly reads, “The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control conducts case and genomic surveillance for inbound international travellers arriving in the country at its National Reference Laboratory, Abuja and a network of other testing laboratories. Sequencing of samples from COVID-19 positive inbound travellers is currently conducted in laboratories with sequencing capacity in the country and all the sequencing data are shared in publicly accessible databases. This genomic surveillance has now identified and confirmed Nigeria’s first cases of the B.1.1.529 SARS-CoV-2 lineage, now known as the Omicron variant. Samples obtained for the stipulated day two test for all travellers to Nigeria were positive for this variant in three persons with a history of travel to South Africa. These cases were recent arrivals in the country in the past week. Follow up to ensure isolation, linkage to clinical care, contact tracing and other relevant response activities have commenced. Arrangements are also being made to notify the country where travel originated according to the provisions of the International Health Regulations. The NCDC assumes Omicron is widespread globally given the increasing number of countries reporting this variant. Therefore, it is a matter of when, not if, we will identify more cases. We continue to expand our sequencing capacity in-country at the NCDC-NRL, through our network of public health laboratories and other partners. Our focus is to complete sequencing of recently accrued samples of SARS-COV-2 positive travelers from all countries, especially those from countries that have reported the Omicron variant.”