Our COVID-19 response strategy.

While the number of COVID-19 cases in Pakistan has increased exponentially, the government is being severely criticised by the opposition parties for its failure to contain the spread of the virus in the country. As of June 14, there are as many as 132,405 confirmed coronavirus cases, and the death toll has risen to 2,551 in Pakistan. Thus, Pakistan has just become the fifteenth worst-hit country by coronavirus in the world. It is really alarming that more than 5 thousand such cases have now started surfacing every day in the country. A large number of parliamentarians, ministers, public officials, media persons, celebrities and health workers have been tested positive. As our public sector and private hospitals are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, the government looks somehow clueless about how to deal with this extraordinary situation. At present, there is hardly any viable national response strategy to meet the formidable challenge of fighting this deadly pandemic in Pakistan.

The current spike in coronavirus cases in Pakistan is being largely attributed to the government's policy to gradually ease lockdown restrictions without ensuring the effective enforcement of COVID-19 safety SOPs in the country. We have just observed people of Pakistan recklessly flouting such SOPs in their ordinary daily pursuits. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has also recently expressed its concern over the government's decision of easing lockdown restrictions in Pakistan without fulfilling conditions precedent for relaxing such restrictions. It has urged Pakistan to re-impose some kind of public lockdown restrictions to curb the spread of the disease. It has suggested to the Punjab government imposing 'intermittent' lockdowns of 'two weeks on, two weeks off' to effectively combat the virus in the province. Furthermore, it has also advised the government to enhance its daily testing capacity to 50 thousand to precisely assess the actual prevalence of Coronavirus across the country.

My column titled 'The case for easing lockdown' appeared in this newspaper on April 13, this year. In this column, I keenly made a case for evolving a strategy for easing or relaxing lockdown restrictions imposed across the country since March 24. I advised the government to gradually relax restrictions for few sectors of economy after devising and enforcing COVID-19 safety protocols/SOPs for each sector. I suggested opting for a policy of targeted lockdown whereby only a...