Nigeria doctors to strike over treatment by police during lockdown

Doctors in Nigeria’s commercial capital Lagos will go on strike from Wednesday evening because of what they describe as police harassment of health workers trying to move through the city to treat patients during a coronavirus curfew.

The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) doctors’ union said it had become unsafe for its members to “continue to provide healthcare under the present confused arrangement”.

It cited an example in which it said an ambulance carrying a patient was “prevented from moving to a destination while the attending healthworkers were harassed and temporarily detained”.

Nigeria has had more than 6,000 confirmed cases of the virus and 192 deaths. Most of the cases have been in Lagos, sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest city with some 20 million inhabitants.