Science must be the guide during pandemics
PTI’s image builder Shahbaz Gill had accused the Sindh government of politicising the coronavirus situation through doctors. The accusation was however given the lie by prominent Lahore doctors who endorsed the views expressed by their Karachi colleagues a day earlier. PMA President Dr Ashraf Nizami in fact went a step further by maintaining that coronavirus cases in Pakistan were not in thousands, as being officially projected, but more than 100,000, a figure based on mathematics rather than guesswork, he claimed. He asked the government to follow in the footsteps of Saudi Arabia and Turkey to avoid pushing the country into a test it is not prepared for. Dr Amir Taj Khan, President KP’s Provincial Doctors Association, told the media that the doctors in the province supported complete lockdown and an increase in the number of tests. The thoughtless tweet by the PTI publicist has stimulated acerbic rebuttals from PPP Sindh leaders.
Heeding the doctors’ warning, the Sindh government has restricted taraweeh prayers in mosques to three to five persons. On Friday it strengthened the lockdown to ensure that there were no big crowds for Juma prayers. Sindh cannot however successfully implement the lockdown on its own if there are contradictory signals from the federal government. The 20 point agreement brokered at the Presidency with the ulema leaves it to them and local prayer leaders to ensure that the prescribed preventive measures are duly enforced. The doctors however maintain that it would be unrealistic to hope that the measures could be enforced in big gatherings.
Prime Minister Imran Khan has promised that if the worshippers fail to follow the agreed 20 points and this leads to the spread of covid-19, the mosques will be closed down. It will take days before the symptoms start appearing to show that the inevitable has happened. By the time the government acts, the virus would have spread far and wide, nullifying much of what has been achieved through hard work. Closing the mosques after the mischief has been done will not bring back the dead or cure the ill. It is time now to strictly restrict the Ramzan mosque gatherings to up to five.
