The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has disclosed that it has commenced the use of the Cobas system at the National Reference Laboratory for COVID-19 testing.

Cobas is a system used for a real-time test aimed at the qualitative detection of nucleic acids from swab samples taken from individuals who display symptoms related to COVID-19.

NCDC, in a tweet on its official Twitter page on Tuesday, noted that the deployment would enable it to conduct 960 Coronavirus tests within 8 hours.

“Today, we began the use of the COBAS system at the NCDC National Reference Laboratory for COVID-19 testing,” it said.

“Using this, approximately 960 samples can be tested in 8 hours.

“This begins the 2nd prong of our national strategy to integrate lab systems & increase testing capacity.”

Meanwhile, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) announced that another 195 new cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in the last 24 hours, bringing to 1,532, the number of confirmed cases in the country as of Tuesday night.