The Nigeria COVID-19 National Longitudinal Phone Survey (COVID-19 NLPS) 2020 has revealed that 90% of respondents are willing to take the Covid-19 test, while 89% are willing to be vaccinated for free.
The 6th round of a planned 12 rounds of the COVID-19 NLPS of households in Nigeria was implemented by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) between October 9-24, 2020 and had 2 key innovations.
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- The first innovation was to collect specific information on education for up to six school-aged household members (5-18 years).
- The second innovation was to ask households directly about their perceptions of and willingness to engage in testing and vaccinations for COVID-19.
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The willingness of people to take Covid-19 vaccine is encouraging, considering the recent surge in the number of cases and deaths in Nigeria and worldwide – which appears to confirm the second wave of Covid-19.
Key highlights
- Respondents in urban areas are more sceptical towards a possible vaccine against the COVID-19 virus: 14% of urban respondents would not agree to be vaccinated (even at no cost) compared to 8% in rural areas.
- Out of those who would not agree to be vaccinated, 32% indicated that the main reason is they do not think it would be safe, and 31% say they do not consider themselves to be sufficiently at risk of contracting Covid-19.
- Aside from results confirming that a vast majority of respondents reported that they are willing to use an approved vaccine to prevent coronavirus, about 90% respondents also indicated that they are willing to get tested for Covid-19.
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Why this matters
With the survey result confirming people’s willingness to be tested and use vaccine, more is expected in terms of testing efforts, considering that in a population of more than 200 million people, only 874,617 thousand people have been tested so far according to Nairametrics Covid-19 tracker.
While it may be argued that there are certain barriers to testing, such as costs and delay in getting test results, Nairametrics recently pointed to Africa Union’s new guidance on use of Rapid Antigen Tests.
Experts expects that the new guidance will help increase Rapid Antigen testing capacity across Africa as quickly as possible.
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What you should know
- In April 2020, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), with support from the World Bank, launched the COVID-19 National Longitudinal Phone Survey (NLPS) – a monthly survey of a nationally representative sample of 1,950 households, to monitor the socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and other shocks.
- World Bank teams from the Development Data Group and the Poverty and Equity Global Practice provided technical support in conducting the survey.
- The first round (baseline) of the survey was conducted in April/May 2020, during which a federally mandated lockdown was in full effect. The survey is part of a World Bank global effort to support countries in their data collection efforts to monitor the impacts of COVID-19.
- As of 19th of December 2020 confirmed cases was 920 in Nigeria. Total number of cases stands at 77.93 thousand. Total deaths stand at 1.22 thousand.