COVID-19 Positive International Travellers Are Arriving Nigeria With Fake Negative Results – PTF Raises Alarm

By Amirah Kuale On Sep 16, 2020

Presidential Taskforce on COVID-19 has raised an alarm that some international travellers who are COVID-19 positive are coming into the country with fake COVID-19 PCR negative results.

It would be recalled that the Federal Government announced that every international passengers must undergo a COVID-19 test 72 hours before arriving Nigeria and that the result must be negative.

However, the National Coordinator of the task force, Dr Sani Aliyu, has on Tuesday disclosed that fraudulent activities have been noticed in some of the test results presented on arrival.

He stated this when he and other members of the taskforce appeared before the Joint Senate Committee on Health and Aviation on the testing procedures following the reopening of the international airspace.

According to Sani, some travellers arrived in the country with negative COVID-19 test results but were later discovered to be COVID-19 positive.

He expressed;

When we started the evacuation flights, the arrangement then was that people coming into the country will need to have a negative COVID-19 PCR result, with the test validity put at the time in seven days.

There were indications from some specific countries where we had up to 40% of the passengers in the single flight coming in with a negative COVID-19 PCR result and subsequently being tested and found positive.

Sani stated that the test results presented by inbound travellers can no longer be trusted.

He said 13 countries have been identified to have travelers with fake COVID-19 test results and the Federal Government has written to the embassies to correct this anomaly.

Meanwhile, international flights on Saturday resumed operations at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, after about five months of being on lockdown due to the pandemic.

The first flight arrived from Lebanon, at about 2:30 pm and passengers did not disembark in the usual way.

They were batched in twenties to the port of entry and were inspected in line with the Federal Government’s COVID-19 protocols.

Nigeria, as at press time, has recorded 56,478 cases of the coronavirus while 1,088 persons have unfortunately died from the virus.