Pakistan defends its coronavirus strategy, says WHO looking at it only through ‘health lens’
Pakistan’s senior health official Zafar Mirza said the country was following a holistic strategy in its fight against the coronavirus.
Pakistan’s Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Health Zafar Mirza on Wednesday said the country was following a “holistic strategy” in its fight against the novel coronavirus, and that the World Health Organization was only looking at the country’s situation through a “health lens”, The Express Tribune reported.
This came after the WHO asked Pakistan to implement intermittent lockdowns to counter the surge of coronavirus cases, as the country eased some of the restrictions it had imposed to contain the outbreak.
Last week, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan announced that lockdown restrictions would be lifted. The decision came while Pakistan’s infection rate is up and the deaths from the contagion is on the rise. Pakistan reported 1.19 lakh Covid-19 cases and 2,356 deaths till Thursday evening. But the real rates might be higher, as testing is limited.
Mirza said that the country has put in place a very robust coordinating and decision-making mechanism. He said they have to make tough policy decisions to maintain a balance between lives and livelihoods.
The minister said the WHO was a “specialised UN technical agency on health”, while accepting that it has assisted Pakistan during this pandemic. “We understand that it is their [WHO] role to provide recommendations to member states but understandably theirs is the health-lens whereas governments have to take into account a holistic picture and make decisions on relative risk assessment basis and this has been the case in Pakistan,” Mirza said.
The minister added that while easing lockdown restrictions, the government had also focused on implementing certain coronavirus standard operating procedures including at shops, industries, mosques, public transport among other places.
“Mask-donning has been made compulsory in the country,” Mirza said. “Along with this we have developed a robust tracing, testing and quarantine policy to identify hotspots and cordon them off.”
On Wednesday, the global health agency had said that because much of the country had not adopted behavioural changes such as physical distancing and frequent hand-washing, “difficult decisions” such as intermittent lockdowns in targeted areas, will have to be taken.
While countries around the world took unprecedented measures including stopping all movement of people and enforcing indefinite stay-at-home orders, Khan has argued that an impoverished country such as his cannot afford a nationwide lockdown.
On Sunday, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had said that the outbreak was worsening globally and asked countries to continue their efforts in fighting the virus. “More than six months into the pandemic, this is not the time for any country to take its foot off the pedal,” he had said.
Globally, the coronavirus has infected more than 74.03 lakh people and claimed over 4.17 lakh lives so far, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker.