Multiple-award winning investigative journalist, Fisayo Soyombo, has revealed that the first COVID-19 death recorded in Oyo State visited 3 private hospitals and 2 laboratories in the state.
Soyombo also revealed that the man, who is a Kano-based Assistant Comptroller at Customs, lied to health workers at the private hospitals and laboratories he visited about his travel history and also refused to disclose to them that his test sample had already been collected by the NCDC who had ordered him to self-isolate.
Soyombo, a serial winner of the WSCIJ investigative journalism award in a series of tweets via @fisayosoyombo wrote: “Oyo State’s 1st COVID-19 death, a Kano-based Assistant Comptroller at Customs, lied about some basics.”
“He hid his travel history; he hid his testing by the NCDC; he flouted isolation instructions.
“The 50-something-year-old would probably not have travelled from Kano, where he works, to Ibadan, where his family lives.
“But someone in Kano had told him how he travelled from the North-West to the South-West despite the lockdown. Therefore, when he started feeling unwell, he opted to travel to Ibadan.
According to him, “though all these which happened last Friday — April 17, 2020, the man had managed to expose more people to the virus than he would have, had he remained in Kano.
Soyombo added: “While in Ibadan, he visited at least three private hospitals and two labs, plus the UCH where he eventually passed on.
“But he neither told them he’d just returned from Kano nor that his samples had been taken by the NCDC. Two of those three hospitals managed him for typhoid and malaria; UCH managed him for pneumonia.
“It was at the third private hospital that a doctor suggested taking his samples for COVID testing. This was when he admitted, for the first time, that his samples had been taken by the NCDC already but he was only awaiting his result.
“As of that time, he hadn’t even revealed that he had just come into Ibadan from Kano. Another lesson: There’s no point for anyone to hide their COVID-19 status or travel history. NCDC told him to self-isolate but he didn’t.
“In fact, it was after this testing that he went to the third private hospital, that same Monday. And he returned to that private hospital the following day, Tuesday. It was on Tuesday when the suggestion of sample collection was made by a doctor at the private hospital that he opened up about his details; he was therefore referred to the UCH.
“The test result came back positive on Wednesday, but he’d died hours earlier,” but, “Now, this man, has exposed healthcare workers at a minimum of one private hospital as well as patients & staff at the UCH, post-testing, in addition to the people at the two private hospitals he exposed pre-testing. Meanwhile, there are HCWs who attended to him at these hospitals without PPE or face mask.”
The former editor of Sahara Reporters, ICIR and TheCable also revealed that even though “the NCDC standard for private hospital exposure to COVID-19 is for the hospitals to shut down for two weeks for contact tracing, decontamination and quarantining.”He can confirm that at least one of these hospitals hasn’t complied with the two-week shutdown order, even though NCDC passed this message on to them.”
