The President of the National Association of Nigerian Nurses and Midwives (NANNM), AbdulRafiu Adeniji, has advised the Nigerian government to ban flights coming in from areas where COVID-19 is endemic.
This is against the backdrop of calls by concerned Nigerians that the government should ban flights from areas where the disease is rampant.
Calls to restrict international travels were triggered by the report of another variant of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom and South Africa.
According to Adeniji, it is highly necessary for the government to also secure the land borders to avoid importing the novel coronavirus via land borders.
He stated that the government should learn from past experiences regarding Ebola and the first incident of COVID-19 in Nigeria.
He said, “Even our scriptures do not support that when an epidemic is somewhere, you should go in and come out of the place. Closing the air space is necessary except we have not learnt from Ebola and COVID-19; they have to lock our airspace and we have to also watch, do surveillance and take statistics from neighbouring countries so that people do not pass through the land borders and import COVID-19 cases into Nigeria.”
