Lagos State has declared an end to the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered by the Omicron variant.

Speaking to Channels Television, State Commissioner for Health, Professor Akin Abayomi said the government was now focused on getting more people to take the Covid vaccines.

“We are now out of the fourth wave, we don’t know what will happen next,” he said. “But we want to be prepared and the State Governor has said that we need to hit certain targets this year, so we are going to go back to the drawing board, because there’s a little bit of vaccine hesitancy in Lagos.

“We really need to look at how to encourage Lagosians to accommodate taking these vaccines. We know that vaccines are effective in terms of reducing your vulnerability to severe illness from Covid. It doesn’t so much protect you from Covid but it protects you from getting extremely unwell or even dying and that’s exactly what we want in Lagos: we don’t want people to get sick and die. You can catch a cold or Covid, but we want you to recover.

“In this fourth wave, most people were managed at home, because the Omicron variant didn’t seem to affect the lungs as badly as the Delta variant.”