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.