The Nigerian Center for Disease Control (NCDC) said Nigeria had recorded a total of 49 cases of Omicron as of December 20, 2021.
NCDC Incident Manager Luka Lawal made this known during a virtual media briefing on Friday.
Ms Lawal said Nigeria ranks third on the list of African countries with the highest Omicron cases after South Africa and Botswana with 1,296 and 291 cases respectively.
He noted that as of Monday, a total of 13,758 sequences have been uploaded to GISAID, a global epidemic database.
Omicron
Nigeria, on December 1, 2021, joined the growing number of countries that have recorded cases of the omicron variant also known as the B.1.1.529 lineage.
Omicron’s index case was detected in South Africa, after which the World Health Organization (WHO) designated Omicron as a “variant of concern.”
Although the first cases of the Omicron variant were detected among travelers from South Africa to Nigeria, the NCDC explained that subsequent cases detected are not from travelers but within Nigeria.
Ms Lawal said that the NCDC incident manager noted that the Delta variant contributed the most to the third wave of COVID-19 experience in Nigeria.
He said the Delta variant remains the most dominant since the COVID-19 outbreak, with 2,237 cases detected in Nigeria as of December 20, 2021.
“There are other variants, but the Delta variant is the most contagious yet and can trigger serious illness compared to others,” he said.
COVID-19 in Nigeria
The NCDC announced the fourth wave of the coronavirus pandemic in Nigeria on December 20, 2021.
He said the country has seen a 500 percent increase in the number of confirmed cases in the past two weeks.
The director general of the disease center, Ifedayo Adefila, in a statement said that the increase in infections has been linked to the Delta and Omicron variants of the devastating virus.
However, the latest statistics from the NCDC show that the number of infections in Nigeria has risen to 233,353, while the death toll is 2,991.
As of Wednesday, the number of active cases increased from 12,547 to 16,569 cases, while the number of discharged cases now stands at 212,040.
The data also shows that Nigeria has so far analyzed 3,751,696 samples.