ISLAMABAD: While the federal and provincial governments have eased the restrictions following a two-month lockdown across the country, there has been a sharp rise in the cases of coronavirus, with no respite in sight.
A detailed study of the data provided by the National Command and Operations Center (NCOC) reveals that the active cases had surged 600 percent since April 16. On May 19, the total number of active cases was at 43,702 while 12,489 had recovered. Total deaths are 939 while 30 people died of the infection in past 24 hours.
If we draw a comparison with previous month, the data reveals that on April 16, the number of positive infections in the country was 6,505 cases out of which 1645 had recovered. So the number of infections was 4,736 while 124 people had died of the disease.
However, on May 19, the number of infections rose to 43,966 in the country – a jump of 37,461 patients in the country in a mere a month’s time. The number of recovered patients is however encouraging as 12,489 patients have recovered while the deaths also increased to 939 — 751 per cent hike.
Experts fear that a major outbreak is likely while the government may not have the capacity to deal with mass outbreak. A doctor at PIMS said, due to poor management at the early stages of the lockdown, the infected population got mixed up with the non-infected populace, triggering the hike in infectious people who later caused a major outbreak in across the country.
“Along with public, the officials on the top too took the contagion casually,” it said, adding strict lockdown and heavy fines are the only way to curtail the infection rate.
The doctor said that the government should massively increase its testing capacity. Moreover, the capacity building of available hospitals should also be increased and new staff should be hired. Whereas the existing staff should be trained under the capacity building programme.
He also said that there was no disposal system in place of used masks and other gears being used by medics and population, which may further infect the healthy population.
“People use masks and throw them on roads. Such masks and other gears may cause further infections as district administrations have no system in place to dispose of such waste. This issue must be taken care of as even there is no system in federal capital – what to talk about in remote cities,” he concluded.
