‘I infected four people with COVID-19’ - Kaduna governor

Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State who announced his recovery from COVID-19 last Wednesday has said that he infected four people with the virus during his own period of infection.

Like the governor, all four have recovered.



El-Rufai spoke on the pandemic at the 24th edition of The Platform, hosted by Poju Oyemade’s Covenant Nation.

But he did not name those he infected.

He said: “I was the first case, fortunately, I’d say, because it served to scare everyone about the reality that COVID is real, it’s not a joke.

“I was the first case, I got it in Abuja and I infected four other people, all of us are OK now, we are all back to our normal lives.”

The state currently has 35 cases, six recoveries, and one death.

He expects more cases in the state especially from some of the almajiris recently brought from Kano State.

His words: “we received 169 Almajiris from Kano, and so far 21 of them have tested positive. We expect more to test positive.

“The spike in our numbers has largely been the Almajiris and other people that have come in.”

He said government has “been successful in closing down our state, in reducing the traffic into our state as every case in the state has been imported.”

El-Rufai said the state government now has a N5miilion life insurance package for each of the frontline health workers dealing with COVID-19.

“We took extraordinary steps to get PPEs for our health workers; we didn’t want to expose any of our frontline workers. We also insured their lives to the tune of N5 million, anyone that dies in this process, his family will get N5 million,” he said.

“We have additional disability insurance for those that get sick and cannot work but are not dead. We are also giving special allowances to all health workers, as well as extraordinary allowances to those on the frontline.

“This is an opportunity to strengthen our public health infrastructure. We are in the process of building a permanent infectious disease hospital. The one that we have is just 16 beds.

“We are building a 139-bed infectious disease hospital to be completed in the next eight weeks. We are building infectious diseases wards in each of our general hospitals in each of the 23 local governments.

“This will be 20 to 30 beds in each local government. We realised from Wuhan that the way to deal with this is to trace, test, treat.”

The governor while announcing his recovery on Wednesday said his family “not only went through the trauma of potentially losing a member but also the risk of being infected as well.”

He urged the people of the state to “do everything to avoid exposure and prevent the spread of this disease in our towns and villages. We must now make the sacrifices of enhanced domestic hygiene, regular hand-washing with soap, staying at home, and avoiding crowds to defeat this disease.”