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General News of Friday, 12 June 2020

Source: www.mynigeria.com

PTF denies fixing June 21 as resumption date for air travels

Sani Aliyu Sani Aliyu

The Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 has said that it didn't fix June 21 as the date for the resumption of air travels in Nigeria.

The National Coordinator of the PTF, Dr Sani Aliyu, made a clarification saying: “What we said to the aviation authority is this; you need to let us know, from the 21st of June onwards, if you are ready to start opening the skies. We didn’t say 21st of June, skies open, we gave them a window of three weeks to prepare and I believe they are preparing.

“We didn’t ask them for regular updates in terms of how things are going, we expect them to come back to us. As you know, the Aviation Industry is highly regulated, there are certain things they have to do before they start flying, such as retraining of pilots, recalibrating the aircrafts and ensuring safety across the board, as well as measures we need to impose at the airports to make sure that people are safe.

“No, we don’t have an update for that. We expect them to come back to us by the 21st of June and if they come back to us and they say they are ready from the 21st of June onwards, we will open the skies for domestic travels and that’s when we will address the issue of inter-state restrictions and curfew, but for the moment, there’s no plan, right now, to say 21st of June, here we go”, he said.

On talks that the rising number of infections could make Nigeria go into another lockdown, Aliyu stated that the number is as a sign that more testing is being done.

How, however, pointed out that for Nigeria to have 13,000 cases of COVID-19, it means the number of infected persons is higher than what has been recorded.

“The number of cases we have is a reflection of the number of tests we do. For those of you who look at the NCDC number very carefully, it you look at the positivity rate, it still remains about ten to fifteen per cent of the tests that we do that come out positive.

“If you do more tests, you are going to find more. When we say about 13,000 Nigerians are with COVID-19, that’s a minimum, it doesn’t mean that there are only 13,000 Nigerians with COVID-19, it means those are the ones that we have been able to diagnosed as positive.”