February 11, 2021
By: Sulaiman Stom Koroma
The government of Sierra Leone through the National Covid-19 Emergency Response Center, (NaCOVERC) has debunked talks going around about a possible three days lockdown in the Western Area.
According to Solomon Jamiru the Spokesperson for NaCOVERC,, the rumors of the three days lockdown is untrue. He said the President has not announced any lockdown, nor has NaCOVERC which is the body responsible to disseminate information to the public on such issues of COVID-19 protocols.
“We have not declared any lockdown nor have we proposed any for now, so any information on a possible lockdown is not true,” he said.
Recently, especially on different social media platforms, it is being rumored that there will be a possible lockdown by the end of this week. This has caused panic and apprehension among many people who say a lockdown at this time is inappropriate.
It could be recalled that during the beginning of 2021, NaCOVERC recorded a huge number of new Covid-19 cases, among them, is the reported 100 new coronavirus cases which was the highest infection rate in just a day since the outbreak started in March 2020.
It has been observed that slack observance of public health measures such as physical distancing and wearing of face masks, are some of the factors behind the upsurge in cases.
Recently, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) rates Sierra Leone as Tier 1 low risk. The country has under 3% case fatality ratio and only 79 recorded deaths.
Just after the December holidays, the case of Covid-19 increased considerably, forcing the government to announce a partial lockdown in the Western Area effective Monday 25th January 2021 for two weeks.
It was done with the view that during that period, community testing will be conducted; night time curfew will be introduced nationwide from 10 pm to 5 am, an electronic pass system (E-Pass) will be used to regulate all essential movements among others.
Meanwhile, NaCOVERC has generated le22.3 billion Leones funds on inbound and outbound passengers and about 1 billion Leones on fines.
It also been disclosed that by the end of January: the Corona virus infections rate rose by 295 from 125(week 43) to 420(week 44).
January 2021 is the most infectious month with more than a thousand cases, which is over 790 and more than 2020 December (198) as Western Area Urban recorded over 2,004 cases (55.8%).
Global confirmed cases as of Wednesday, February 10th, 2021 were 107,501,623 affected persons, 2,353,467 deaths, and 79,425,440 recoveries.
In Sierra Leone, as of the 9th of February 2021, there were 12 new cases, 3,801 confirmed cases, 79 deaths, 2,494 recoveries, 463 on quarantine, and 13, 933 discharged from quarantine.
