Pakistan imposes Eid holiday shutdown as virus cases soar
Ag Agencies
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Saturday began a nine-day shutdown affecting travel and tourist hotspots in a bid to prevent a surge in Covid-19 cases during the Eidul Fitr holiday.
Already battling a third wave of infections and increasingly nervous about the crisis across the border in India, the government has imposed the most severe restrictions since a one-month lockdown in April last year. “The unfortunate catastrophe unfolding in India has grabbed global headlines. Yesterday there were more than 4 lakh cases in India with 4,194 deaths. Hospital systems have been overwhelmed and oxygen supply run out in many places,” tweeted Asad Umar, who has been leading the government response to the outbreak.
“These measures have been necessitated by the extremely dangerous situation which has been created in the region with the spread of virulent mutations of the virus,” he added. “We realise that the mobility restrictions put into place from today till the 16th are going to cause inconvenience.”
Eid sees the mass movement of people around the country and tourist spots crowded with Pakistanis. Last year the country saw a spike in cases in the weeks after the celebrations.
Umar also spoke of Iran seeing “a sharp increase in cases in the same time period with active cases growing two and a half fold and daily deaths exceeding 400 in a day in a country with population less than half of Pakistan”. He added: “Even a small country like Nepal saw an exponential rise in cases going up above 7,000 daily. Deaths also rose sharply. You can see the entire region is exploding with cases and deaths, in the latest Covid wave. We have Alhamdulillah been spared the worst by timely decisions.
“The need for caution is clear. The danger is higher than ever and knocking at our doors. Need the country to unite in response and achieve once again what we achieved in the first wave, for which we received global praise. Inshallah we will do it again, together.”
Businesses, hotels and restaurants as well as markets and parks will be closed, while public transport between provinces and within cities has been halted. The military has been mobilised to monitor the restrictions.
Pakistan has recorded more than 850,000 infections and 18,600 deaths, but with limited testing and a ramshackle healthcare sector, many fear the true extent of the disease is much worse. Health officials have warned that hospitals are operating at close to capacity and they have rushed to increase the number of intensive care beds.
International flights have been slashed and border crossings with Iran and Afghanistan closed, except for trade. Flights and land crossings with neighbouring India—reeling from a devastating outbreak with hundreds of thousands of new cases a day—were closed before the pandemic because of political tensions.
Pakistan, which has so far vaccinated a fraction of its population, received its first batch of 1.2 million AstraZeneca doses on Saturday under the delayed Covax global vaccine sharing scheme.
