Effect of Nigeria Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 Pandemic, Nigeria.

Nigeria had a confirmed case of COVID-19 on February 28, 2020. On March 17, 2020, the Nigerian Government inaugurated the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19 to coordinate the country's multisectoral intergovernmental response. The PTF developed the National COVID-19 Multisectoral Pandemic Response Plan as the blueprint for implementing the response plans. The PTF provided funding, coordination, and governance for the public health response and executed resource mobilization and social welfare support, establishing the framework for containment measures and economic reopening. Despite the challenges of a weak healthcare infrastructure, staff shortages, logistic issues, commodity shortages, currency devaluation, and varying state government cooperation, high-level multisectoral PTF coordination contributed to minimizing the effects of the pandemic through early implementation of mitigation efforts, supported by a strong collaborative partnership with bilateral, multilateral, and private-sector organizations. We describe the lessons learned from the PTF COVID-19 for future multisectoral public health response.

Data-Forensic Determination of the Accuracy of International COVID-19 Reporting: Using Zipf's Law for Pandemic Investigation

Severe outbreaks of infectious disease occur throughout the world with some reaching the level of international pandemic: Coronavirus (COVID-19) is the most recent to do so. In this paper, a mechanism is set out using Zipf's law to establish the accuracy of international reporting of COVID-19 cases via a determination of whether an individual country's COVID-19 reporting follows a power-law for confirmed, recovered, and death cases of COVID-19. The probability of Zipf's law (P-values) for COVID-19 confirmed cases show that Uzbekistan has the highest P-value of 0.940, followed by Belize (0.929), and Qatar (0.897). For COVID-19 recovered cases, Iraq had the highest P-value of 0.901, followed by New Zealand (0.888), and Austria (0.884). Furthermore, for COVID-19 death cases, Bosnia and Herzegovina had the highest P-value of 0.874, followed by Lithuania (0.843), and Morocco (0.825). China, where the COVID-19 pandemic began, is a significant outlier in recording P-values lower than 0.1 for the confirmed, recovered, and death cases. This raises important questions, not only for China, but also any country whose data exhibits P-values below this threshold. The main application of this work is to serve as an early warning for World Health Organization (WHO) and other health regulatory bodies to perform more investigations in countries where COVID-19 datasets deviate significantly from Zipf's law. To this end, this paper provide a tool for illustrating Zipf's law P-values on a global map in order to convey the geographic distribution of reporting anomalies.