The Lagos State governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu has come out to say that some private buildings and hotels in the state have been converted into isolation centres to ensure that coronavirus patients are well taken care of.

He revealed this while briefing the press in the state today.

According to him, he has also decided to withhold information on the location of these centres to prevent stigmatization from the general public.

He added that another isolation centre would be open for the health workers very soon to make things easier for the frontliners amid the pandemic.

His words, “There have been several conversations. People wrote that Lagos is out of bed spaces, but the very next day we opened another isolation centre. We are opening another isolation centre for the health workers.

“We have other isolation centres that are not known to the media because they are private properties. They are private hotels. We do not want a situation where post-COVID, it becomes a stigmatised place. People are going there and they are getting well.”

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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.