The Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Chikwe Ihekweazu has come out to say that Nigeria’s leaders might be forced to lock everything down again to curb the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

Speaking today during the daily briefing of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 on Monday, Chikwe revealed that the current reports of cases are not very pleasing.

According to him, Nigerians should be wise about going about their daily lives despite the easing of the lockdown because it is far from safe out there.

He added that a steady rise in the number of cases can still be controlled, but an explosion of the number of cases will do nobody any good.

His words, “We knew today would be a problem because for the first time people were let out of their homes.

“But now that we’re out, the challenge for us as a society is how do we now organise ourselves to mitigate these risks, and limit transmission from each other.

“Yes, we might have a few extra infections today and tomorrow, but what we don’t want is an explosion of new infections.

“If we do have that explosion, there will be almost no choice left for the leadership of the country than to ask all of us to go back into our homes.”

“Altogether, we can learn to live with it for the next few weeks and months until we’re able to come out of the period.”

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Coronaviruses are a group of related viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds. In humans, coronaviruses cause respiratory tract infections that can be mild, such as some cases of the common cold (among other possible causes, predominantly rhinoviruses), and others that can be lethal, such as SARS, MERS, and COVID-19. Symptoms in other species vary: in chickens, they cause an upper respiratory tract disease, while in cows and pigs they cause diarrhea. There are yet to be vaccines or antiviral drugs to prevent or treat human coronavirus infections.

Coronaviruses constitute the subfamily Orthocoronavirinae, in the family Coronaviridae, order Nidovirales, and realm Riboviria. They are enveloped viruses with a positive-sense single-stranded RNA genome and a nucleocapsid of helical symmetry. The genome size of coronaviruses ranges from approximately 27 to 34 kilobases, the largest among known RNA viruses. The name coronavirus is derived from the Latin corona, meaning “crown” or “halo”, which refers to the characteristic appearance reminiscent of a crown or a solar corona around the virions (virus particles) when viewed under two-dimensional transmission electron microscopy, due to the surface covering in club-shaped protein spikes.

Human coronaviruses were first discovered in the late 1960s. The earliest ones discovered were an infectious bronchitis virus in chickens and two in human patients with the common cold (later named human coronavirus 229E and human coronavirus OC43). Other members of this family have since been identified, including SARS-CoV in 2003, HCoV NL63 in 2004, HKU1 in 2005, MERS-CoV in 2012, and SARS-CoV-2 (formerly known as 2019-nCoV) in 2019. Most of these have involved serious respiratory tract infections.