The Lagos State Government has declared that the fourth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in the state which was triggered by the new Omicron variant is over.

This was officially made known by the Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Professor Akin Abayomi, while speaking to Channels Television, saying that the government was now focused on getting more people to take the Covid-19 vaccines.

Abayomi had in a tweet post on his official Twitter account while giving an update said that there was a reduction in positivity rates of Covid-19 infection from 29.3% recorded on December 21, to 1.9% on January 20. He also put bed capacity utilization at only 2% and fatality rate at 0.71%.

Abayomi said, “We are now out of the fourth wave, we don’t know what will happen next. But we want to be prepared and the State Governor has said that we need to hit certain targets this year, so we are going to go back to the drawing board, because there’s a little bit of vaccine hesitancy in Lagos.

“We really need to look at how to encourage Lagosians to accommodate taking these vaccines. We know that vaccines are effective in terms of reducing your vulnerability to severe illness from Covid. It doesn’t so much protect you from Covid but it protects you from getting extremely unwell or even dying and that’s exactly what we want in Lagos: we don’t want people to get sick and die. You can catch a cold or Covid, but we want you to recover.

“In this fourth wave, most people were managed at home, because the Omicron variant didn’t seem to affect the lungs as badly as the Delta variant.”

What you should know

The Lagos State Government had on December 7, 2021, announced the beginning of the fourth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic as the daily infection figure from the virus spiked with the state regarded as the epicentre of the outbreak.

Days after the Lagos state government made the announcement, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), also announced that the country had entered into the fourth wave of the pandemic.

The Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, as a result of that, emphasised on compliance to the country’s travel protocol by the Presidential Steering Committee on Covid-19, and pledged that his state would ensure total enforcement.

The state government also warned that foreigners flouting Covid-19 guidelines may be deported and that Nigerian residents flouting new travel protocols will be prosecuted.