Former Kano State Governor, Rabiu Kwankwaso has written a letter to the President Muhammadu Buhari alleging that the cause of recent deaths in the state is not malaria but COVID-19.
According to Kwankwaso, the unavailability of testing centres has led the residents of Kano to resort to “self-help”.
He also made the bold claim that those who died in the state had COVID-19 but were unaware.
Part of the letter read, “Permit me, Mr President, to draw your attention to the spike in mystery deaths among the aged population in Kano State in the last couple of weeks. Hundreds of funerals have been recorded in all the cemeteries of the eight metropolitan local governments alone.
“Looking at the pattern elsewhere in the world where senior citizens with preexisting conditions were the main fatalities of the novel coronavirus, we are concerned that the inability to conduct tests in the state to determine the status of these senior citizens might be responsible for their death.
“We are even more concerned that if sincere and efficient machinery is not urgently put in place to understand and mitigate against this, more lives of innocent senior citizens will be lost.
“I should inform Mr President that since the announcement of the positive results of the members of the committee, no test was ever conducted in the entire state again. This is very frightening as neither asymptomatic nor active cases are being identified and isolated, as such carriers of this dreaded virus are all about and spreading it and causing the untimely death of especially our senior citizens.”
One of the recommendations Kwankwaso gave read, “the State Government should be made to constitute a proper State Taskforce on COVID-19 with members selected base on their professionalism and competence.
“At least five additional test centres should be established with 10 other sample collection centres across the State.
“An independent Federal Government team of experts should be mandated to investigate the rise in cases of death in the elderly population across the State.”