Islamabad: Pakistan is threatened for a moment with a wave of viral infections the next Eid holiday as millions of other people travel to their cities and mingle with the circle of relatives and devoted meetings.
The South Asian country – with the current number of contagions in Asia – has been respited in recent weeks with the slowdown in the rate of new infections. But experts warn that the chances of a resurgence are high, as Friday marks the beginning of the devout holiday. And they say it’s hard to assess the trajectory of the epidemic in the country because its detection rate remains one of the lowest in the world.
The Eid festival will “attract millions of people to crowded fairs and meetings of devotees and family members,” said Steve Hanke, a professor of economics implemented at Johns Hopkins University. “Masks and social estrangement will be abandoned” and, like the Chinese New Year in Wuhan, Eid Al Adha “could be a cataclysmic occasion for Pakistan and the region.”
Pakistan will also have to manage the Muharram processions by the end of August. Globally, the meetings have triggered several groups of viruses.
Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government said last month that its estimates showed that the pandemic would peak until the end of July with 1.2 million reported cases. On Wednesday, the country reported more than 276,000 cases shown with 5,900 deaths. The country’s bodies increased by 3.7% last week, the slowest speed since the outbreak began in Pakistan.
Qatar Airways and Emirates are among the airlines that have made it mandatory for pakistani travellers to be checked before travelling. Meanwhile, Pakistan has arrested incoming travelers, one of the reasons for the drop in check rates and new cases shown.
“The importance of this decrease is that cases are reported very little,” Hanke said in an email response.
Khan downplayed the severity of the virus, but its caution in managing.
“Any complacency and we will face the same accumulation that we have noticed before,” said Faisal Sultan, the prime minister’s touch for the Covid-19 strategy and an infectious disease expert. The explanation of why the recent decrease in instances “is more difficult to know, but it is multifactorial. The biology of the epidemic, adding up the interaction between the host, the pathogen and the environment, but also the interventions helped.”
Pressure on Pakistani hospitals has decreased, with patients with fans and low-flow oxygen falling by more than 50% since June 20, Faisal said.
Pakistan’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturer, Getz Pharma, tested 24,210 others in predominantly urban workplaces. His study then extrapolated these effects to Pakistan’s active, adult and urban workforce and found that active COVID-19 infections would likely succeed at 4.11 million, which is nearly 15 times higher than the existing count. The positivity rate for those examined on the test was 17.5%, higher than the government’s knowledge that the rate appears to have dropped below 5% compared to more than 20% in June.
Pakistani medical associations and experts have long warned that poor evidence and lack of knowledge mean there is a belly of virus cases that appear to be in the official figures.
Serological tests, personal hospital knowledge and many virus-related deaths are not reported in official government figures, said epidemiologist Wajiha Javed, getz Pharma’s head of public aptitude and studies. “The initial peak two weeks after Eid and we can be waiting for a moment peak two weeks after the time of Eid.”
Dear reader,
This segment is about life in the United Arab Emirates and data you cannot live without.
Sign up to read and complete gulfnews.com