1. I saw both @DrJoeAbah & @CCSoludo discussion on COVID19 response/reaction and I thought to add my own perspective on the matter.

Please understand that there isn't likely to be a right/wrong but just robust debate with differing perspectives

THREAD https://twitter.com/DrJoeAbah/status/1253634552712626176?s=20

2.From my personal interactions, most people seem to swing (as with many things in Nigeria) from one extreme to the other and give little thought to what possibilities lie inbetween. We tend to believe you are either for or against a decision/position instead of "it depends"

2. Imagine that there's a grid for us to follow from 0-10 - where 0 is no infection & 10 is total crisis.

Stratifying 1-10 will require parameters like, number of infections, geographic spread, number of deaths etc. & ALL of these will require a significant amount of testing

3. We NEED TO HAVE DONE 20-50X MORE TESTS to have enough information to take informed decisions. Without tests, these parameters will be, largely, arbitrary & decisions will have the same quality as a coin toss.

We took the most extreme decision based on insufficient data!

4. On a scale of 0-10, when we should have been on 2-4 level of reaction at most, we reacted at the level of 10 & now, we have nowhere to go. We had, at most, 50 infections & 5 deaths & yet, we reacted in panic & initiated response as if we were at level 10.

5. So, herein lies the dilemma of Lagos State in particular.

We reacted at TOTAL CRISIS level by initiating a badly implemented total lockdown.

We should, by now, know that decisions made in panic are generally, suboptimal compared to well thought through ones

6. So now, with 1,000 infections and 50 deaths, (statistically insignificant) perhaps a level 4-6 situation at most, how do we react? if we react at the appropriate level, we would look like we are "easing" & therefore we're caught between either looking irresponsible or silly.

7. Imagine you have a terrorist with an AK47 in a massive mall with & he's shooting randomly & we decide to drop an atomic bomb that could kill him & everyone else; would that make sense? shouldn't we ask:

How many people in the mall?
how many bullets?
what's collateral damage?

8. TESTING! TESTING! TESTING! 123
This is what we need to have done & still do. Adequate initial testing to understand the geographical spread & concentration was necessary & that would've been used to compare other test results to ascertain the rate of growth or otherwise

9. So, should we do nothing? Well No, we have to do something but we have to do what is appropriate & I suspect this involves swallowing a bitter pill of pride to adjust to the appropriate reaction level

We risk massive collateral damage based on what I consider over reaction

10. Look at Kano where so many have died because they couldn't access proper healthcare because hospitals prematurely discharged patients and didn't take new ones in. No, I'll bet that it wasn't COVID19 that killed those people, it was the ill-reaction to COVID19 that did

11. To be honest, considering that COVID19 is a corona virus and so is the common cold and since they both spread in the same manner with very different impact, I would expect that 5-10% of the population will easily catch it. Imagine trying to avoid catching "a cold"!!

12. Viruses are generally very hard to "cure" & so, like the cold, HIV and like the FLU, mankind will, more than likely, eventually come to terms on how to manage it and cohabit the earth with it

Destroying economies & livelihoods with this likely end result isn't prudent!!

13. Panic reaction will cost far more than the illness. We need to work with both empathy and statistics to develop a sensible response to this enemy.

For now, we are responding with little or no statistics as "copy and paste" as @CCSoludo put it, isn't an appropriate reaction