Community Transmission Behind Kano Deaths – Young Doctors

The havoc in Kano points in no other direction than COVID-19, research has shown. The research conducted by three female medical warriors otherwise known as the Young Doctors – Maryam Nasir MBBS MSC; Zainab Mahmoud MD DTMH; Khadija Rufai MD MHA, showed the key symptoms, the duration and the age – range of the victims to be all the typical unfolding of COVID-19.

A Twitter picture that suggests one of the young turks by name Maryam Nasir

The research report does not support the inclusion of meningitis and other ailments in the government’s list of the causes of the death which has hit Kano.

The team of three is, instead, concluding that their findings showed that Kano metropolis has been hit by community transmission and the way out is enhanced testing capacity, community-based testing and setting up of mobile testing centers within Kano.

The researchers are further recommending the provision of personal protective equipment (PPE) to all staff with potential exposures especially at points of initial patient contact; the recognition of significant consequences of neglected non-COVID-19 medical care and considering diverting non-COVID-19 cases to private and other community hospitals.

They also favour issuing a strict guideline for burials as well as lifting restrictions around markets and essential businesses such as food stores and pharmacies. Their ground is that “people must have access to food and medications during these unprecedented times”

Other avenues such as mandatory face masks, restricting elderly or at-risk populations from market places should be explored, the team added, indicating that failure to do this could trigger a further spike in deaths from non-COVID-19 causes.

Although the researchers have drawn attention to the a major limitation of the research which is that it was done substantially on telephone, the sort of data they were able to collect support any interpretation of the massive number of deaths between April 18 to April 25, 2020 to be COVID-19 assault.

So many dead at a go!

“Our results cannot determine causality as none of these deaths were tested for COVID-19” and as grieving family members were still lost in the mood or understandably hesitant to give out personal information to strangers over the phone. We therefore created two data sets to avoid including unreliable data and unconfirmed reports.

But, based on what first degree relatives told them over the phone on and data sourced from cemetery officials as well as other narratives, the team came to the position that “our findings indicate a trend of febrile and respiratory illness that progresses to death within one to two weeks”.

Parts of the research report reads: “One of the contacts, who had lost a father stated to the team he became ill about a week after a wedding ceremony. He manifested fever, shortness of breath and diarrhea. Attempts to contact the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) were unsuccessful and he passed away a week later. Another contact stated that the deceased had fever and shortness of breath for a week. He was initially treated for pneumonia at a private hospital and subsequently required a ventilator. There were several reports of multiple people in a household or in a neighborhood dying from a similar illness. Of note though is how, 40 out of 51 deaths had no recent travel history.

The researchers subsequently produced a revealing graphic synthesis of the data base as shown below, albeit in a disorganized form following changing the PDF format of the original text into a word document: