The Federal Government said it is paying each contact of Nigeria’s confirmed Ebola case N100,000 per week to secure their compliance with quarantine directives.
The Minister of Health and Coordinating Minister of Social Welfare, Prof. Ali Pate, said this to State House correspondents after Wednesday’s Federal Executive Council meeting in Abuja.
He said the payment was designed to remove the economic disincentive that might otherwise push contacts to evade isolation and potentially trigger community transmission.
“If they evade quarantine, they go to market. They can transmit it to innocent people out there. So it’s so vital that we get their compliance.
“Many of them, for instance, somebody who may have driven her from one place to the other, is a contact.
“They have a livelihood, and you ask them to stay in quarantine. They have a family,” he said.
The minister described the single confirmed case as “a significant wake-up call,” stressing that the government’s overriding objective was containment before the virus could reach the general population.
He stated, “The purpose of our measures is to ensure that her primary contacts, those she met once she became symptomatic, at the clinic, in the hospital, are all identified but also quarantined.”
Pate warned that the financial incentive strategy, while currently viable, would become unworkable if the outbreak were to escalate to community transmission, a scenario he said the government was determined to prevent.
“By no means will it be applicable if we have the unfortunate situation of community transmission. This is so that we have the maximum defence,” he said.
He contrasted the FG’s containment strategy with the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where thousands of cases and widespread transmission had made targeted quarantine financially and logistically impractical.
He argued, “In DRC, where there are thousands of cases, there is transmission in many places. Essentially, they will advise contacts to remain at home.
“There will be no need, because everybody has it. But here we have been extremely prudent.”
He added that keeping contacts under close monitoring also served an early-detection purpose so that, should any of them test positive, the FG could quickly map and isolate their own secondary contacts before a wider chain of transmission could form.
“If one of them is discovered to have contracted the virus, then because they are at hand, we can quickly circumscribe their own contacts so that it doesn’t spread,” he said.
