COVID-19: Pandemonium as professional footballer visits hospital

Many people, including health workers, patients and their relatives, took to their heels when a professional footballer visited the Trauma Centre of the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University Teaching Hospital, (ATBUTH), Bauchi for medical attention with an alleged symptoms of coronavirus.

The footballer is said to have recently returned from Europe.

An eyewitness, who is also a health worker at the centre, told Daily Trust

Saturday that the footballer visited the centre yesterday, asking for the consulting room while coughing and sneezing profusely.

He said one of the attendants who was sensitive enough to observe the symptoms, ordered the footballer out of the building.

“Before you knew it, health workers, including doctors, nurses and other people, started running out of the centre because they didn’t have protective gears in the hospital at that moment. We all ran away. As I am talking to you, I did not return to the centre,” he said.

He added that during the pandemonium, the footballer, who was identified by the attendant as former player of the Wikki Tourist Football Club of Bauchi, returned to his vehicle and drove out of the hospital.

When contacted, the commissioner for health in the state Dr Aliyu Muhammed Maigoro, said that the COVID-19 contact team was not aware of the incident.

He said, “You know there is panic everywhere in Bauchi. If you see a Chinese man coming here now, all of us will run away. It is the same thing when you see a professional footballer who travelled abroad recently. The doctors in that hospital should have alerted us. As I am talking to you, there is panic, and it is common this period.”

When contacted, the representative of the Chief Medical Director, ATBUTH and provost of the College of Medical Sciences, Dr Jibrin Yusuf, declined to comment on the issue of the footballer.

Meanwhile, Dr Maigoro said they had so far taken 70 samples of high risk contacts for coronavirus test, out of which two were positive, 47 negative and 21 pending, with zero death.