Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Prof Akin Abayomi has come out to say that coronavirus cases might reach 120,000 between July and August.

He recently revealed that with the present trend of the case of the pandemic, Lagos might be battling the peak of the outbreak before September.

According to him, residents should just continue to abide by safety measures as the state government gets ready to increase its capacity and strategies to tackle any future reality.

He added that we have obviously not reached the peak of the outbreak in Lagos so everyone should remain careful.

His words, “Just a month ago, on April 7, we saw 10 cases per day. Two weeks later it was 32, then 70 cases. We are now seeing above 100 cases per day. This shows our graph is moving in a gentle incline upwards.

“We definitely have not reached the peak of our outbreak. We suspect that the peak will happen sometime in July or August and so we are preparing for the oncoming; we are increasing our capacity and strategies to deal with this situation.”

What do you think?

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.