Reopening of educational institutions may cause havoc

Islamabad: Another four confirmed patients of COVID-19 belonging to Islamabad Capital Territory and Rawalpindi district lost their lives due to the disease in the last 24 hours taking the death toll from the region to 1,718 while 147 new patients were diagnosed with coronavirus illness from the region taking the tally to 105,350.

According to District Health Officer ICT Dr. Muhammad Zaeem Zia, the weekly positivity of COVID-19 in ICT has dropped down to 2.46 per cent that was 5.94 per cent for the previous week.

The number of patients being tested positive from the twin cities is on a continuous decline hinting that the third wave of COVID-19 outbreak has started losing intensity but the statistics show that it cannot be said under control at the moment.

The Punjab government has decided to reopen educational institutions from next week that according to many health experts is a decision made in haste. It is important that last year in September, educational institutions were reopened in at least three phases and before that, there were not reported more than 50 cases per day from the twin cities for at least five weeks, from August 7 to September 13, 2020.

Educational institutions at all levels were made operational in October 2020 and in November, the population in the region had to face a much severe second wave of COVID-19 outbreak. On October 9 in 2020, over 140 cases were reported from the twin cities after at least three months and in November, the average number of cases reported per day was well over 420 from ICT and Rawalpindi district.

At present, the situation is worse than that of October 2020 during which a total of 3,833 patients were reported from the region. In May so far, 8,315 new cases have been registered from the twin cities and the government has planned to reopen educational institutions in a week.

Experts say that the government should rethink on its decision of reopening of educational institutions at the time as it is time to convince the public that the pandemic is still hitting the population and it may get more severe if individuals do not follow SOPs properly and get themselves vaccinated against the infection.

In the last 24 hours, the virus has claimed two more lives from Rawalpindi district from where another 38 patients have been tested positive for COVID-19 taking the tally to 24,234 of which 22,654 have recovered. A total of 961 patients from the district have lost their lives due to COVID-19. The number of active cases from the Rawalpindi district was 619 on Sunday.

Meanwhile, another two deaths due to COVID-19 in the federal capital in the last 24 hours have taken the death toll from ICT to 757. Confirmation of another 109 patients from ICT in the last 24 hours has taken the total number of confirmed patients so far reported from the federal capital to 81116 of which 74,791 patients have so far recovered. There were 5,568 active cases of the disease in ICT on Sunday.