–Govt urges people to adopt pandemic SOPs
KARACHI: Nineteen people died of coronavirus and 1,813 new cases were reported in Karachi in the last 24 hours, the Sindh health department said Saturday.
Three others in Badin, Shikarpur and Khairpur, and one out of the province resident died of the virus on Saturday.
Sindh reported 2,262 news cases of the virus on Saturday, the health department said. Of them, 1,813 were from Karachi alone.
The province has so far reported 51,518 known cases of the virus.
The number of active cases in the province stands at 26,315, while 24,387 people have recovered from the infection.
The virus has so far claimed lives of 816 people across the province.
Sindh Minister for Information & Local Government (LG) Syed Nasir Hussain Shah pleaded people to take some responsibility and once again requested them to adopt SOPs, regretting that the citizen’s selfishness by grave violations is putting both them and others at danger.
In a statement, Shah requested the people to follow the SOPs religiously and insisted that social distancing is a must.
He said that people are not taking the coronavirus seriously and negligence could cause severe results which would be unbearable to afford.
“The Sindh government implemented the lockdown in order to save human lives. We requested the people to adopt the precautionary measures and social distancing but unfortunately, extreme violations are being observed in shopping malls and markets. The traders’ community assured us that the business will run in accordance with the SOPs, which isn’t being seen, unfortunately,” he said.
The minister stated that preventive measures of the Sindh chief minister (CM) had just begun giving positive results when the federal government’s policies had to be enforced as per the directives of the Supreme Court (SC).
“The measures taken by Murad Ali Shah have been applauded at the international level. We took all the stakeholders on one page before implementing the lockdown policy. We are deeply concern to save the lives of our people which are important to us more than anything, but we cannot achieve the target without the cooperation from the people,” he added.
Nasir Shah also asserted that the provincial government would adopt every preventive step in order to save the lives of people and if any tough decision would be made this time for saving peoples’ lives, it would be stricter than the previous ones.
