Islamabad: Pakistan on Tuesday reported for the first time in two months less than 2,000 positive cases of coronavirus. The number of newly-infected persons was 1,979 over the last 24 hours.
Some 50 deaths have also occurred during the same period.
With these latest figures, Pakistan’s tally of coronavirus cases has reached 253,603, (2,151 of them in critical condition).
The country’s death toll, however, displayed a modest figure of 5,320. A total of 170,656 recoveries have also been registered so far.
The number of countrywide tests once again remained as low as 21,020 over the last 24 hours.
Doctor dies
A lady doctor in Hyderabad, Sindh, died of coronavirus hours after giving birth to a baby girl at a city hospital.
As per the details, Dr Erum Zaheer was a medical registrar at the Liaquat University Hospital (LUH) and was admitted to a private hospital for delivery via the Caesarian-section.
However, after giving birth to a baby girl, she developed some coronavirus-related complications and was taken to another hospital dedicated to COVID-19 patients. She was put on oxygen, but four hours after arriving at the hospital, she died.
Dr Erum Zaheer, the contact person for COVID-19 treatment at the District Health Office (DHO), Hyderabad, said the lady doctor died of the virus, which “most likely aggravated her complications following the C-section deliver”.
Bilawal terms success against virus a false claim
While government officials, ministers and spokespersons continued to cite a drop in the number of positive cases in Pakistan as a major success of the Prime Minister Imran Khan-led government against the deadly virus, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the chairman of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), has described it as just an eyewash, a false claim to “hoodwink the people of Pakistan as well as the world”.
While addressing a press conference in Karachi, the PPP chairman said, the government had reduced the number of tests intentionally to show good results and by doing this, it was pushing Pakistanis into a grave danger zone.
“By reducing the [number of] tests, they are putting our frontline workers in danger as the nurses and paramedics won’t know who is infected and who isn’t,” he said.
He, however, said the province of Sindh was committed to the people and would increase the number of tests, even if the other provinces did something to the contrary.
“If you stop testing, then the graph will go down. But the same number of people will fall ill and die,” Bilawal reminded.
“This incompetent government is compromising on a fundamental concept that the whole world has been telling us, i.e. — testing,” he added.
