Centre slow in reacting to tackle COVID-19: Bilawal

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari on Saturday said the federal government was very slow in tackling the threat of coronavirus and it was not playing an appropriate role in supporting the provincial governments to increase capacity or deal with the challenge posed by the pandemic.

“Pakistan's opposition had offered its unconditional support to the federal government to chalk out a joint strategy to deal with the challenge posed by COVID-19, but it was regrettable that the federal government did not seem to be working with the same urgency the provinces are,” he said in an interview with the Sky News.

Bilawal called on the rich countries to help developing countries, saying that Pakistan too has been badly affected by coronavirus. He said that if coronavirus cases keep increasing in Pakistan, its health system will not be able to cope with it.

During the interview, he said that Pakistan has been badly affected by the coronavirus and we have a much weaker health system as compared to Italy or Britain, who are under immense stress at the moment. If coronavirus cases in Pakistan keep increasing, our healthcare system will collapse, he added. The PPP chairman said that we can only avoid this epidemic through lockdown and social distancing as our health system is not robust enough to cope with the outbreak.

Bilawal Bhutto said that poor countries do not have the resources to fight the virus on their own, developed countries will have to step forward and support developing and underdeveloped countries. The pandemic can only be vanquished through multilateral cooperation. Resourceful countries will have to distribute medical supplies and a possible vaccine throughout the world in an egalitarian manner.

During the interview, he further said that the international community will have to change its attitude as there is a lockdown in Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK) and people have had no facilities even before the spread of coronavirus. Moving forward, the PPP chairman said that there are still inhumane sanctions on Iran where people are dying due to the coronavirus.

He emphasised that only through mutual international cooperation the COVID-19 pandemic can be overcome. He said the developed countries have a duty to help developing nations deal with the economic fallout and medical shortages caused by this pandemic. “The only way to protect the lives of millions of Pakistanis was by enforcing a lockdown and advocating and facilitating social distancing,” he said.

He said that if the health systems of countries like Italy and UK were suffering under the deluge of COVID-19 patients, then in a country like Pakistan, where we have 0.6 beds per 1,000 patients, the health system would collapse.