… As UN warns that pandemic doesn’t slow advance of climate change***
Nigeria on Wednesday recorded three COVID-19-deaths and 299 new infections in 15 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
This was disclosed in an update shared on the Facebook page of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control on Thursday morning.
The additional 299 COVID-19 infections, on Wednesday, showed a decline from the 519 cases reported on Tuesday.
The NCDC said that Nigeria’s total infections now stands at 200,356 while the fatality toll was 2,640.
A breakdown of the data revealed that Lagos State reported 94 cases while the FCT came second on the log with 30 infections and Oyo State ranked third with 27 new cases.
The NCDC said Bayelsa came fourth with 23 cases and is followed by Rivers State with 20.
Edo and Taraba recorded 17 cases each while Kwara and Benue recorded 15 and 14 cases each while Delta registered 11 infections.
The agency added that Osun and Ekiti reported 10 and nine cases respectively while Gombe and Plateau reported four cases each while Kano and Ogun states registered two cases each.
The NCDC also added that Nigeria has tested over 2,942,578 samples out of its estimated 206 million population.
The centre also added that 8,799 patients are currently in its isolation centre with the disease nationwide.
The NCDC said as at Wednesday, 188, 917 people have been treated and discharged.
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It added that a multi-sectoral national emergency operations centre (EOC), activated at Level 2, continued to coordinate the national response activities.
In the meantime, the coronavirus pandemic do not slow the relentless advance of climate change, according to the UN’s United in Science 2021 report.
Between January and July, global fossil fuel CO2 emissions in the power and industry sectors were already at the same level or higher in the same period in 2019, before the pandemic.
Overall emissions reductions in 2020, during the first COVID-19 wave, were a “brief lapse’’ the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other organisations said on Thursday.
The pandemic-related slump was widely accompanied by calls to rebuild the global economy in a more sustainable way.
“This report shows that so far in 2021, we are not going in the right direction,’’ WMO Secretary-General, Petteri Taalas said.
So far this year, CO2 emissions from road traffic had been below the levels before the pandemic outbreak.
However, concentrations of the major greenhouse gases that contributed to global warming continued to increase in 2020, and the first half of 2021, according to the report.
“We are still significantly off-schedule to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement,’’ UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres said with regard to the efforts to keep the global temperature rise well below two degrees Celsius.
According to UN figures, the global average, mean surface temperature for the period from 2017 to 2021 is among the warmest on record, estimated at 1.06 degrees Celsius to 1.26 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial (1850–1900) levels.
By 2025, the value could climb up to 1.8 degrees, even if climate targets were met, sea levels could rise between 0.3 and 3.1 metres by 2300.
-dpa
– With additional report from Xinhua
