El-Rufai: We have N5m life insurance for every health worker on the frontline

Nasir el-Rufai, governor of Kaduna state, says the state government has a life insurance package for frontline health workers dealing with COVID-19 to the tune of N5 million.

Speaking at the 24th edition of The Platform, hosted by Poju Oyemade’s Covenant Nation, the governor said the state is taking extraordinary care of its health workers.

“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.”

KADUNA HAD ONLY 20 ICU BEDS

El-Rufai said his state was the first to implement a lockdown in Nigeria due to the fact that they considered that the best strategy was to stem the spread of the disease because the state did not have the capacity to deal with it.

He said the state had about 20 intensive care unit beds at the beginning of the pandemic, with the entire country having less than 400.

The governor said if they recorded 1,000 cases, it would not have a place to treat them, so it had to lock down to prevent the spread.

“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,” he added.

“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.”

EL-RUFAI: I INFECTED FOUR PEOPLE WITH COVID-19

The governor, who doubled as the index case in the state, said he infected four people, all of whom have now recovered.

He said the state has tested about 400 people, and now has three testing centres, from zero when the outbreak hit Nigeria.

The governor added that a hotel has been converted to isolation centre to take care of the Almajiris received into the state.

“As I announced some days back, 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 have largely been the Almajiris and other people that have come in.

“We have been successful in closing down our state, in reducing the traffic into our state, every case in the state has been imported.

“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.”

Kaduna state has recorded 35 cases, six recoveries, and one death.