Current Situation of COVID-19 in Pakistan: From Past Three
Months to date
According to the Ministry of Health,
Government of Pakistan, there are total 181,088 cases as on
21st June, 2020 with 3,590 deaths, following highest
cases 69,628 in Sindh province then Punjab with 66,943, 21,997 in KPK,
9,475 in Baluchistan, 10,912 in Islamabad, 1,288 in Gilgit-Baltistan and
845 in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (Covid-19 Cases in Pakistan in Real
Time , 2020). If we look three months back in March, 2020, Coronavirus
was to start rising its curve in Pakistan. The number of COVID-19
patients when reached 500, people of Pakistan start fearing that
Pakistan’s trajectory of Coronavirus will match that of Italy. At that
moment, many celebrities started tweeting to address Prime Minister and
urged him to initiate lock down in the country to protect people, even
Sindh’s Chief Minister Murad Ali shah initiated partial lock down in his
province and urged people of Karachi to self-isolate themselves for
three days (“‘Lockdown Pakistan’: Twitterati Urge PM Imran to Take
Stronger Measures against Covid-19 - Pakistan - DAWN.COM,” 2020). So,
regarding ongoing situation of COVID-19 in spite of having poor economy
and limited resources, a complete lock down in Pakistan was initiated on
24th March, 2020 to control the further spread of
COVID-19 (Guns & Scanners, 2020) at time when there were 884 cases.
However, the Coronavirus curve remained stable during lock down. The
only cases reported were from the visitors coming back from Iran and
other countries. They were sent for 14 days isolation in quarantine
centers. The decision of lock down resulted good in combating
Coronavirus spread to other people, but, as Pakistan is a developing
country, its large population consists of daily wagers who work and earn
on daily basis. Due to lock down, they suffered a lot in two ways, they
either get less suffered by COVID-19 but suffered more by starvation due
to the closure of Market and Industry. They started saying that this
lock down should be eliminated. A brief timeline of COVID-19 in Pakistan
is shown in figure 1.