9:30pm, Wed April 29, 2020.
Latest update on Covid 19 in Borno State.
The high powered response committee for prevention and control of COVID-19 cannot reveal identities of persons who died from the disease because doing so is an ethical crime against the dead and highly unethical in healthcare practices’, health commissioner, Dr Salihu Kwayabura has said. 
The commissioner gave the clarification on Wednesday evening at the response team’s daily briefings which held at the Government House in Maiduguri.
Kwayabura, was responding to questions from journalists who asked if some high profile names were among the nine persons he mentioned that have so far died from the disease.
“As a medical doctor, I am bound by doctor-client privilege and also the ethics of healthcare services to protect the privacy of all patients. Naming anyone would amount to violating his or her privacy even in death. If you observed, we have never as a response team, listed the names of those who have died. We do not give names. We only mention that we have deaths, at most we give sex of those who died, whether male or female and maybe age but we have never mentioned any name. This is the ethics all over the world. The fact that some people do it does not make it right. Please let us respect that”, Kwayabura said.
Although he did not mention, he implied that families of deceased persons reserve the right to discuss the causes of death of their loved ones.
The commissioner also corroborated NCDC’s statistics of Borno’s number of positive cases which stood at 53 out of over 160 contacts that were screened of the virus.
Majority were traced persons of interest.
Dr. Kwayabura explained that of the 53 postive cases, one is reported from Biu, three from Pulka, three from Dikwa, while the rest of the cases were reported from MMC and Jere in the metropolis.
Giving breakdown of the cases in the metropolis, he said Mairi had eight positive cases, Maisandari had 11, while the remaining 28 cases spread across other communities of the metropolis.
The Commissioner further explained that all the cases can be traced to a positive index contact, except for three among them for which they are not traced to any positive contact. He however added that the state hasn’t reached the level of community transmission yet.
Lockdown compliance satisfactory
Borno State Commissioner for Home Affairs, Information and Culture, who is a member of the State’s High Powered Response Team, Babakura Abba Jatau, said during the briefing that despite very few people were found violating the lockdown order, he described the compliance level as satisfactory.
The Commissioner appealed to the general public to observe the preventive measures put in place to combat this deadly virus in the state.
