The Chief Medical Director of the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, Prof. Jesse Otegbayo, said on Friday 18 out of 159 COVID-19 patients treated at the hospital died from complications resulting from the virus.
He stated this during the inauguration of the Josephus Foundation-aided new Infectious Disease Centre at UCH.
According to him, the Covid-19 cases treated at the hospital were severe with some of the patients having underlying health conditions.
The CMD said: “From the last figure I saw, we have treated about 159 COVID-19 patients and 18 of them died.
“We have those mortalities because we take the sickest of the sick; the most severe cases are brought to the University College Hospital and that is the only place where they can be treated.
“We have some of them with comorbidities like hypertension, diabetes and asthma and some other chronic lung diseases.
“Some of them have kidney failure that requires dialysis which is not available in many other places in Oyo State; that is why we recorded these mortalities at the UCH.
Otegbayo said the newly constructed Chief Tunde Afolabi Infectious Disease Centre donated by the Josephus Foundation is a 20-bed state-of-the-art centre.
He added that the centre is also the single largest donation the hospital has received since the inception of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We will be taking care of patients’ transmissible infections which will include but not limited to people with COVID-19, Lassa fever, HIV and others.
“It is an infectious disease centre with state-of-the-art hospital beds, multi-parameter monitor for all the beds, a 60KVA generator, CCTV for all the rooms and monitoring centre, nurse bay and doctors call rooms,” the UCH chief added.
