Security agencies have informed the Kaduna State Government that armed bandits had invaded Kawaran Rafi village in Igabi loycal Government Area, and killed one Danleeman Isah, the Chief Imam of the village.
This was contained in a statement signed by Kaduna state Commissioner of Internal Security and Home Affairs, Samuel Aruwan.
The statement said the bandits invaded the village and went straight to Isah’s residence, shot him dead and left the village without taking any items or hostages.
It’s reported that the diseased has been vocal against the killings and kidnapping of people by bandits in the state.
It will be recalled that in October 2020, bandits kidnapped and killed Ardo Musa Layi, in Kajuru Local Government for his advocacy against killings, kidnapping and cattle rustling in the state.
Ardo Ahmadu Suleiman was also shot last year by bandits at Kasuwan Magani in Kajuru Local Government, leaving him with bullets wounds for his voice against the insecurity in the state.
Similarly, a gang of kidnappers have also killed Sarkin Yaki of Godogodo, Mr. Yohanna Abu. The gunmen invaded Nisama village in Jema’a local government on Friday night and abducted the diseased along with one resident, Mr. Charles Audu.
Later, Mr. Audu escaped from the kidnapper’s den but they shot Mr. Abu dead. Five people have been arrested in connection with the killing and the security agencies are investigating the incident.
In his condolence message, Kaduna state governor Mallam Nasir El-rufa’i expressed his sadness over the two reports. He also prayed for the repose of the slain cleric and community leader.
Kaduna state governor Malam Nasir El-rufa’i has ordered the release of 12 inmates from Kaduna prison.
This was disclosed by the governor’s Special Adviser on Media, Muyiwa Adekeye.
Muyiwa said, ten of the beneficiaries were sentenced to three or more years and they have three or four months to exhaust their terms, while the remaining two were released as a result of their long stay in prison.
“Gabriel Olugbenga was sentenced to seven years in prison for murder in 2016 and now he’s 60 years of age, and he’s expected to exhaust his stay in June, 2020, while 64 years old Tunde Ikuenaya was also sentenced for four years in November 2017, and he’s also expected to exhaust his remaining days on March, 2021.
El-rufa’i has also reduced the terms of three inmates to five years after they have spent 10 years or more, and are now morally okay.
He further said “Ifeanyi Chiebuike Nweke, Muhammad Mamman Santare, and Samaila Danjuma were sentenced to prison for murder on different times.”
Muyiwa said, El-rufa’i exercised his right as executive governor of Kaduna state as enshrined in the constitution of the Federal republic of Nigeria to release and reduce the years of the inmates.
Real Madrid have reportedly emerged as the clear favourites to sign Bayern Munich defender David Alaba.
Despite remaining as a key player at the Allianz Arena, the Austria international has less than six months remaining on his contract.
The 28-year-old is now in a position where he can hold discussions with any foreign clubs who are interested in his signature.
However, some Spanish tabloids claim that Real are now regarded as the frontrunners after offering Alaba a contract until the end of the 2024-25 campaign.
Zinedine Zidane is said to have given his blessing to a deal being negotiated with the player.
Manchester United, Manchester City and Barcelona have also been linked with the Austrian captain.
Aljazeera: How scientists in Africa – the most genetically diverse continent on earth – looked deep into the data in 2020 to make headway in understanding diseases that affect millions.
Dr Ambroise Wonkam carries hundreds of thousands of years of history in his blood. The impacts of pathogens, migration, environment and geography are written into the braids of DNA he inherited from tens of thousands of generations of ancestors.
This richness, he remarks, is not unique. It is a shared legacy for more than one billion people: in South Africa, where he works; in Cameroon, where he is from; and across the African continent – the most genetically diverse landmass on earth. With such wealth all around him, how could he not spend his life studying it?
Wonkam is one of several scientists from Africa who made significant gains in 2020 towards understanding diseases that affect millions – and are not novel pandemic viruses. He and others lead large experiments that analyse whole genome data from thousands of African volunteers in South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria and beyond.
The knowledge these scientists are collecting is broadening humanity’s reference genetic archive, the libraries scientists around the world use to identify and compare genomic information. It is filling in blind spots in a field that has been dominated for a generation by institutions in the Global North and in data that has historically not included African participants. Despite lockdowns and working from home, 2020 was a productive year for Wonkam and his peers.
Dr Ambroise Wonkam presenting his work to the 2018 American Society of Human Genetics annual meeting, in San Diego, US [Photo courtesy of Dr Wonkam]
The power of place
Humans diverged from chimpanzees 5 to 6 million years ago in East Africa. Modern humans appeared just 300,000 to 200,000 years ago, and some time after that (about 100,000 years ago, though the evidence is still being interpreted), our species started migrating beyond Africa, probably over several attempts. As we walked, humans homogenised, sharing traits, discarding others and becoming more similar the further we went.
“We are all African,” Wonkam said from Cape Town. “But ancestral Africans, like me, who have stayed on the continent for a very long time, have at least 300,000 years of human genetic history in their blood, which makes the variation in the African population thousands of times higher than in any other populations in the world.”
When presented on a chart, the data shows the exodus effect: a plot of genetic diversity among humans against distance from East Africa looks like a slender, almost 45-degree line sloping downwards, through the Middle East, Europe, Asia and, finally at the tail end, the Americas, where populations tend to be the most genetically similar.
Africa’s rich, varied dataset is attractive to scientists, and also to companies and health institutes abroad. Over the years, several have exploited lax patient privacy laws and left scandal and mistrust in their wake. A drug company settled a high-profile lawsuit after running trials that were poorly explained to its African participants; one health technology company shut down a product after a whistle-blower revealed it would be sold against the agreements of volunteers whose data was used to produce it; and during and after the West Africa Ebola epidemic, certain European governments were accused of “biological colonialism” after allegations that blood samples extracted from survivors could not be requested back by their home countries for research purposes. The legacies of these missteps persist, and investigators today must work hard to instil trust and accountability into their process.
Equipment used inside a DNA lab in China [File: Reuters]
Solving sickle cell
Dr Wonkam’s lab at the University of Cape Town studies the genetics of people living with sickle cell disease, a congenital misshaping of the blood cells that affects how effectively they transport oxygen. The disease is prevalent in Africans and some people of African ancestry.
Having one of the genes that cause sickle cell disease confers some natural resistance to malaria, a parasite that targets the blood and is also often fatal. This was a nudge by evolution to relieve pressure from the parasite on early humans. But when the gene is inherited from both parents, the resulting condition is brutal. Sickle cell disease can cause anaemia, frequent pain, increased illnesses due to a weakened immune system, and vision and growth problems. It can lead to a life of complications that ends too early, before the age of 50 in developed countries. Across Africa, 2 to 3 percent of babies are born with it, but the mortality rate before the age of five is more than 50 percent.
“[Sickle cell] mortality for adults has not changed for 40 years” in the United States, where the best treatments are readily available, Wonkam said. “If we put that in context, the disease was described 110 years ago, but there has been only one [primary] medication over the last 110 years and some new ones that were approved [just a few] years ago.”
The US is a leader in medical research, but also a place of well-documented racial disparities in access to healthcare. Sickle cell disease, which affects Black Americans almost exclusively, received far lower federal research funding per patient than cystic fibrosis, which mostly affects white children, a 2020 study showed. The study also cited a similar inquiry from 40 years ago, which showed the same disparities.
At the start of his career, Wonkam saw the inequity in medical research and vowed to correct it from within Africa. “There is a lack of interest by researchers, or by funders, and someone had to take the battle somewhere. Fortunately, we have a network on the continent that is getting stronger and stronger.”
A researcher injects DNA material onto a laboratory dish at a genomics lab in Shenzhen, China [File: Reuters]
Wonkam’s laboratory sequences entire exomes – the parts of DNA that code proteins – from hundreds of Africans who have lived past the age of 50 with sickle cell disease – so-called “long survivors” – and compares the results to those patients who have experienced stroke or shock, as well as a control group. Volunteers in the five-year-long study were mainly from Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where sickle cell is more prevalent – fewer people in South Africa are born with the disease.
Each volunteer signed a consent form that offered options: allow their genetic data to be studied solely within the context of the experiment, for other experiments as well, or more broadly (anonymously) as part of a global dataset. Wonkam’s lab drew blood and extracted the DNA in Africa, sent the condensed samples to a sequencing facility in the US, and returned the data to Cape Town where his team did a sort of mathematical “brute-force analysis”. They looked as wide as they could, without bias, at the activity of every gene on the genome, trying to glimpse unique differences that might be keeping these long survivors alive. They found much more than they were looking for.
The results were curious. Some confirmed pathways that were known to be implicated in sickle cell disease, such as the body’s production lines for Vitamin B, anticoagulants or nitrous oxide. But other findings surprised the researchers. “The pathway we could not anticipate at all was [linked to causing] low blood pressure. Most sickle cell disease patients tend to have lower blood pressure already,” Wonkam said, so why would an otherwise unhealthy tendency for lower blood pressure be associated with rare long-term survival? That is a question the researchers are trying to answer. Additionally, some genes associated with insulin, which processes starches in the body, were mutated in the long-term survivor group, meaning that this pathway is connected to their overall longevity. Wonkam’s findings have kicked open the door for future analysis.
“What we found is that if you look at what nature [has] evolved over time, you can inspire yourself to design treatments. Those will likely be the most successful because it’s the way nature managed to get some of the patients to [live longer],” he said.
Dr Ambroise Wonkam and his research team at the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, University of Cape Town, South Africa [Photo courtesy of Dr Wonkam]
The study, published in June 2020, revealed a dozen mutated genes that were shared across the volunteer group; genes that were different, often by only one letter, from the general population and, as a result, built abnormal proteins. “Basically, every single discovery we found in that paper might be a route for a new treatment for sickle cell disease.”
Wonkam intends to build a cohort of patients and follow them for life. His data will add to large repositories of other human genomic data held in facilities in Europe, the US and, now, in Africa. This, he said, is vital.
“Without an African population database, at least 10 percent of variation is not present,” in global archives. He was referring to a 2018 study carried out with Johns Hopkins University, that showed up to 300 million base pairs – or a tenth of the human genome – appearing in unique forms in Africans compared with the references from the Human Genome Project, which largely excluded Africans. “Every variation discovered in Africa [adds] more genomic sequencing in the public database, and that has a value for all studies – not just African studies, but all studies.”
Siren’s call
In 2016, while filming and producing a report on DNA research for Al Jazeera, I visited the stroke clinic at the Korle Bu teaching hospital in Accra, Ghana. At the clinic, a man was learning to move again. Slowly, he pulled himself onto a low rung of a wooden ladder while a physical therapist held his arm. He had lost basic motor skills in an instant when a stroke hit deep in his brain, and his rehabilitation was expected to take weeks or years. He was not yet 50.
Dr Albert Akpalu was doing rounds through the clinic and told us about a future in which this patient’s treatment could be improved by tailoring medications to his genetic profile. Akpalu was running one part of the SIREN stroke study collaboration with colleagues in Nigeria and within a consortium called Human Heredity and Health (H3) Africa that stretches across the continent – and is jointly supported by the UK’s Wellcome Trust and the US’s National Institute of Health.
Were it not for COVID, SIREN might have published its most comprehensive findings yet in 2020. “To make a genetic inference, you need a sample power of more than 3,000 [samples],” Akpalu explained from Accra in December. “We’re getting close to that.”
Dr Rufus Akinyemi, right, with Samuel Diala, the SIREN biorepository manager, measuring DNA samples [Photo courtesy of Dr Akinyemi]
Akpalu works closely with Dr Rufus Akinyemi, a stroke specialist in Ibadan, Nigeria. In addition to running experiments, Akinyemi oversees several biobanks – storage centres that keep hundreds of thousands of samples of patient blood, serum, DNA and tissue at subfreezing temperatures – in Nigeria and Ghana.
A stroke happens when blood flow to the brain is blocked, suddenly choking oxygen to neurons, which often leads to loss of function, dementia or death. Stroke is the leading cause of neurological emergency in Africa, Akinyemi said, though granular detail is not as well recorded as in other regions.
Africa maintains a higher incidence rate of stroke than the US – according to overviews from 2015 and 2016 – and strokes probably kill at least 300,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa every year, according to one review.
Akinyemi began his career studying the cognitive impairments like dementia that so often follow a stroke. “I realised that if I study this, the risk factors and the genomics, I would be tackling one of the greatest disease burdens in Africa,” he said.
Over four years, SIREN colleagues collected samples from stroke survivors and control-group, non-stroke volunteers in West Africa. Now they have nearly 4,000 of each – enough to run a Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) to identify genes linked to the condition, its risks and recovery. “The initial findings,” Akinyemi said, “are looking exciting.”
Akinyemi, Akpalu and their colleagues hope to build bedside tools. “We want to develop Afrocentric [genetic] risk scores that can help us predict stroke. We have these for populations of European descent, but for people of African ancestry, they do not give very accurate results. We need these for populations in Africa to correctly predict the chances of stroke.”
Hundreds of thousands of human biological samples like blood, DNA, serum and tissue must be kept at -80 degrees C, even when the power cuts, necessitating a cold chain that stretches from Ghana to Nigeria [Photo courtesy of Dr Akinyemi]
The genomics of stroke have been studied before. Previous analyses have described the genetics of the disease, but are often based on data gathered from mostly caucasian volunteers. A June 2020 study in the US, Canada and Europe looked at the genomes of 22,000 people of African descent, identifying genes implicated in the disease. The SIREN study focuses on Africans in Africa, where it will be the first and the largest yet.
“One thing the consortium has done is develop a very unique chip that is enriched in African content, derived from African populations,” Akinyemi explained. Built by the H3 Africa network in partnership with Illumina, the American genomics company, the card-sized gene chip is an array of tiny wells that hold thousands of genes and genetic variations that are more prevalent in Africa. Introduced just a few years ago as a not-for-profit tool, and developed from early H3 studies, it allows researchers to capture a broad snapshot of the genetics at work in a chosen sample, tailored for populations on the continent.
H3 Africa ensures that genomic data collected will be added to accessible global databases. “We do hope that the findings from this study will unmask some novel variants,” Akinyemi concluded, “perhaps genetic variants that are associated with ischaemic stroke that have not been previously reported in other populations … which will benefit not just African patients, but all global stroke patients in terms of prevention, early detection, treatment and rehabilitation.”
Three million unique variants
Dr Nicola Mulder thumbs through her notes when I ask how many human genome samples from Africa have been added to global databases over recent years. She is a scientist, so it is an unfair prompt on a Zoom call, but she accepts, tabulating aloud “…We put in 348 sequences, additional exome sequences, 10,000 samples on the genotyping array, exomes from Botswana, shotgun metagenomic studies, deep-sequencing of neurological diseases … we’re getting a flood of data…” She makes an estimate: “If I look briefly, I would say maybe 11 or 12 thousand samples for which we have genomic data in the repository, which is significantly different to what we had before. This is probably over the past three years.”
Mulder is the principal investigator for H3ABioNet at the University of Cape Town, a bioinformaticist overseeing a team of 50, working with a network of 28 institutions spread across the continent. “We do all the support: data collection, some analysis, processing, submission, and training to analyse the data,” she said from Cape Town. Although Mulder works with Dr Wonkam, his sickle cell study was conducted independently of H3Africa.
In October, Mulder co-authored a paper in the journal, Nature, that combined some of the most intriguing genomic findings from across the continent.
Mulder and colleagues looked for unique single-letter changes in genes and compared these anomalies to public datasets. “In other studies [like GWAS] you’re looking for signals that jump from the noise. In this study, we’re looking for something that doesn’t exist elsewhere,” she explained. The work produced 300 terabytes of genetic sequence data, enough to make the problem of sending it all from the US to South Africa a three-month project.
The analysis revealed the undocumented richness of genetics in Africa in one bold headline: three million unique genetic variants, letters along DNA’s thread that had never been seen where they were being seen; each one found, named and recorded. Only more interesting was the small size of the volunteer group they studied. The team had analysed just over 400 people from 13 countries, covering 50 ethnolinguistic groups – Africa is not only the most genetically diverse continent, it also hosts the highest number of languages spoken on earth.
“Three million is a lot,” Mulder said when asked about what that number meant to her as a bioinformaticist, the type of specialist who deals with large datasets. “We never hit a plateau, we just keep finding novel variants. These are variants that have never been seen, but some populations are walking around with many people having it. The number is quite significant.”
Blood samples waiting to be processed [File: Reuters]
Within the data, more links. Some of the unique variants revealed evidence of the pressures that diseases have exerted on populations since the dawn of the species. Others indicated tendencies towards decreased mortality for certain infectious diseases like flu. There were dozens of genetic locations that were undergoing “strong selection”, areas that are still actively evolving today. A wider look at the dataset showed the history of migration between populations, revealing evidence of movements and geographical stopovers that were lost to archaeology, but etched into the genome.
The study pointed to a wide horizon yet to be explored, and piqued the curiosity of institutions around the world.
Where to now? Some of the genomics hardware these researchers rely on was repurposed during the coronavirus pandemic to identify unique variants of COVID-19 as they appeared. In South Africa, Wonkam’s lab was working from home for several months before instituting an office-return schedule. Patient recruitment was delayed in Ghana but has begun again.
Now colleagues, funders and startup genomics companies are watching closely, designing the experiments they will embark on as the continent opens up again.
International inspectors have today revealed Iran’s plans to enrich uranium up to 20% at its underground Fordo nuclear facility, according to the AP.
This is an indication that Iran is pushing its program a technical step away from weapons-grade levels, as it increases pressure on the West over its atomic deal.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) acknowledged Iran had informed its inspectors of the decision after the news leaked overnight on Friday.
The move came amidst heightened tensions between Iran and the US in the last days of President Donald Trump’s administration.
Trump unilaterally withdrew America from Tehran’s nuclear deal in 2018, which set in motion an escalating series of incidents capped by a US drone strike killing a top Iranian general in Baghdad a year ago.
An anniversary of the attack is coming on Sunday, which has American officials now worried about possible retaliation by Iran.
A former minister in Mali and other six prominent figures in the country were on Thursday charged with plotting a coup against the government.
This was disclosed by the office of the public prosecutor in the nation’s capital Bamako.
He said in a statement that the six people were under investigation for “plotting against the government, criminal association, insulting the head of state and complicity.”
A group of lawyers defending the six said the individuals, who include Boubou Cisse, the prime minister at the time President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita’s government was overthrown in August, had been charged with an “attempted coup.”
“All of those charged are civilian figures with no established connection to anyone in the military,” they said.
Five of the six have been detained in custody, except for Cisse, whose whereabouts are unknown, the public prosecutor said.
Details about the affair are sketchy, but it comes at a time of turbulence following the ouster of Mali’s elected president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, by young army officers on August 18.
Threatened by international sanctions, the junta named an interim government which is supposed to last for up to 18 months until elections are held.
But disenchantment at the slow pace of reforms is growing, fuelled by accusations that figures with army links dominate the transitional body.
In its statement, the prosecutor’s office did not use the term “attempted coup” as the attorneys did.
It alleged there had been deeds that “harmed domestic security” and serious evidence of a “criminal enterprise” and “actions to sabotage” initiatives taken by the transitional authorities.
APF reported that, on Monday, security sources said a number of people had been detained on December 21, while the prosecutor’s office said a “preliminary inquiry” had been opened “relating to violations of state security”.
In the run-up to their arrest, social media said there had been a scheme to “destabilise” Mali’s post-coup transitional institutions.
Apart from Cisse, those charged include his half-brother Aguibou Tall, who runs an agency connected with telecommunications, and Mohamed Youssouf Bathily, a campaigner and radio presenter who is popular among young Malians and whose stage name is Ras Bath.
The others are Vital Robert Diop, director of Mali’s Pari Mutuel Urbain (PMI), an agency that is in charge of gambling on horse races, and two senior financial officials, Mamadou Kone and Souleymane Kansaye.
Niger electoral commission has confirmed that there will be second round of the country’s Presidential election held last week Sunday, 27 December, 2020.
The president of the electoral board, Barrister Isiaka Sunna, said the decision was taken because none of the candidates get the 50% of the votes cast, which is the requirement to be the winner of the polls.
According to the election schedule, the second round of the election will come on 21 February 2021.
The current result showed that Muhammed Bazoum of the ruling party, PNDS, got the 39.33% of the votes, his cumulative votes reached 1,879,000, while Mahamane Ousmane of RDR who has 16.99% of the votes cast out of 100%, had 811,838.
That means the second round will be contested between two candidates who had the highest votes in the first round of the election.
The two candidates are expected to start campaign from 29 January to 19 February 2020.
A bomb explosion has killed five women in the Red Sea port city of Hodeida, Yemen, at a wedding held on New Year’s Day.
Yemeni’s Government has blamed Houthi rebels for the attack on Friday night, which happened at a hall near Hodeida’s airport.
This explosion happened just two days after at least 26 people were killed in blasts that rocked the airport of the southern city of Aden, as government ministers got off a plane.
General Sadek Douid, the government representative in an UN-sponsored joint commission overseeing a truce, condemned the Hodeida blast, which also left seven wounded, as “an odious crime committed by the Houthis against civilians”.
Hodeida’s Houthi-appointed governor, Mohammed Ayache, said on Al-Masirah television, which is run by the Shiite Muslim rebels, that “the forces of aggression never hesitate to blame others for their crimes”.
Saudi-backed government forces launched an offensive in June 2018 to retake Hodeida, the main entry point for humanitarian aid to poverty-stricken Yemen.
Over 300,000 children in north-eastern Nigeria have been projected to die due to Severe Acute Malnutrition(SAM) in 2021.
The projection, which was made by United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on Friday, further said that over 800,000 children in the North-East are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition in the course of the year.
The North-East, comprising Borno, Yobe, Adamawa, Taraba, Gombe, and Bauchi states has been ravaged by Boko Haram insurgency for years.
In the statement, UNICEF said, “In North-East Nigeria, more than 800,000 children are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021, including nearly 300,000 with severe acute malnutrition who are at imminent risk of death.”
Apart from the North-East, UNICEF also said cases of malnutrition among children were dire in the North-West, with states like Kebbi experiencing a chronic malnutrition rate of 66 per cent.
“In Sokoto State, also in Nigeria’s North-West, close to 18 per cent of children suffer from wasting and 6.5 per cent suffer from severe wasting,” UNICEF added.
Further, the agency predicted that in 2021, an estimated 10.4 million children would suffer from acute malnutrition in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central Sahel, South Sudan and Yemen.
“For countries reeling from the consequences of conflicts, disasters and climate change, COVID-19 has turned a nutrition crisis into an imminent catastrophe,” said UNICEF Executive Director, Henrietta Fore
UNICEF also estimated that 21,439 children might have been born on January 1 in Nigeria, making the country to have recorded the third highest number of births globally on the New Year’s Day.
In a statement in Abuja by the acting UNICEF Representative in Nigeria, Renu Wadhwa, an estimated 371,504 babies might have been born globally on the New Year’s Day.
According to the statement, India might have recorded the highest number of births at 59,995, while China having had 35,615, followed by Nigeria at 21,439.
The agency, however, advocated that more needed to be done to improve the life expectancy of Nigerian children, estimated at 62.8 years, which is 21.2 years lower compared to a global average of 84 years.
“These figures, while difficult to contemplate, are estimates and not predetermined – there are many things we can do to improve the fate of those children born today in Nigeria. We can and must work to change the underlying factors that can improve the life expectancy of Nigerian children,” Wadhwa said.
Meanwhile, Borno State Governor, Zulum, has pleaded for food for 800,000 IDPs in critical need across 11 towns in the state.
The governor made the appeal at the headquarters of the National Emergency Management Agency in Abuja during a visit on Thursday.
Zulum, who presented a letter to the Director-General, NEMA, Air Vice Marshal Muhammadu Mohammed (retd.), said the IDPs in Monguno, Bama, Damboa, Gwoza, Dikwa, Gamboru, Ngala, Damasak, Banki, Pulka and Gajiram needed urgent access to food supplies to complement efforts by the state government.
The governor pleaded that food interventions be sustained for the IDPs, who were mostly farmers but could no longer access their farmland because of insurgency.
In his response, Mohammed assured Zulum of the agency’s support for the IDPs.
Manchester City Manager, Pep Guardiola, has confirmed that the club will have five players unavailable for Sunday’s Premier League game at Chelsea following positive coronavirus tests.
City’s game at Everton on Monday was postponed at short notice after three more players tested positive for Covid-19 following the positive tests returned by Kyle Walker and Gabriel Jesus on Christmas Day.
The latest results bring the total number of first-team personnel at the club isolating to seven, including two other staff members.
“It was four people – (including) two players – the first time and then three more,” Guardiola said.
He added that the club were not yet in a position to reveal the identities of the three latest players to test positive.
“We have to respect the privacy of the players maybe. You will see the line-ups and three important players not there, so you will know exactly but I’m not allowed to tell you,” he concluded.
Guardiola insisted City had enough players available to play at Everton but, with news of the positive tests only coming through late in the day, there was little alternative but to call off the game.
Blood samples waiting to be processed [File: Reuters]