Skip to main content

Call for broad strategy on virus outbreak

LAHORE: The two major opposition parties, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), have called upon the federal government to increase the number of free-of-cost coronavirus testing facilities under a comprehensive strategy to determine the extent of the malaise across the country.

Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly and PML-N president Shahbaz Sharif has called for expanding the testing facilities to ensure that each and every citizen undergoes free-of-cost screening. “Monitoring against and prevention from the virus is the key to protecting the people from the disease,” he said, urging the authorities to immediately shift Covid-19 patients from general hospitals to other places.

He suggested using buildings of marriage halls, schools, colleges and mosques as quarantine centres.

Mr Sharif also called for informing the people about the exact number of patients being screened for the virus daily as “covering up” facts would serve no purpose.

In an apparent reference to reported mistreatment of a coronavirus patient in Lahore’s Mayo Hospital, he called for training of health professionals so that they could handle these cases properly. Training manuals should include information on patient care, treatment, use of machines and testing, he added.

Opposition parties ask federal government to increase number of free testing facilities

Mr Sharif, as the president of PML-N — the ruling party in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, held a meeting with the chief executives of the two regions through a video link. PML-N general secretary Ahsan Iqbal, Khawaja Asif, Marriyum Aurangzeb and other party officials were also in attendance.

AJK Prime Minister Raja Farooq Haider and GB Chief Minister Hafizur Rehman informed the meeting about their requirements for dealing with the cases of Covid-19. They claimed that the federal government was not fulfilling their requirements in this regard.

Mr Haider said AJK needed 50 ventilators, 15 portable X-ray machines, personal protective equipment and hand sanitiser at once, while Mr Rehman sought testing laboratories in Gilgit, Skardu and Diamer, doubling the wheat quota for the region, ventilators and protective equipment.

He said in proportionate to its population GB was the most coronavirus-affected area in the country. He called for a six-month strategy in coordination with the federal government by declaring the region a red zone to tackle the disease.

The PPP has also demanded that at least one per cent of Punjab’s population should be tested for Covid-19 for devising an effective strategy to deal with the outbreak.

The demand was made at a meeting of the executive council of the PPP’s Punjab chapter. The meeting held through a video link on Sunday was presided over by PPP provincial president Qamar Zaman Kaira.

The meeting rejected the proposal by Prime Minister Imran Khan for forming a volunteer force with the name of ‘tiger force’ for delivering relief goods to poor people during the ongoing lockdowns.

Mr Kaira said that like Sindh, neighbourhood committees should be formed in Punjab and they should have representation from all political parties as well as NGOs operating in areas where relief goods would be distributed.

He also demanded restoration of the local body set-up which was earlier suspended by the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf government in Punjab and called for using them in relief goods’ delivery operations.

He said the PPP had appointed Syed Hassan Murtaza, the party’s parliamentary leader in the Punjab Assembly, as the focal person to meet the Punjab chief minister and the speaker for offering suggestions for tackling coronavirus-related crisis.

Published in Dawn, March 30th, 2020



from The Dawn News - Home https://ift.tt/2w2qpHE
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trump says he urged team to ‘slow’ COVID-19 testing

US President Donald Trump said Saturday he was encouraging health officials in his administration to slow down coronavirus testing, arguing that increased tests lead to more cases being discovered. The president has claimed falsely on several occasions that surges of COVID-19 in several states can be explained by greater numbers of diagnostic tests. At his first rally since the outbreak forced nationwide shutdowns in March, Trump told the crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma that testing was a “double-edged sword.” The United States — which has more deaths and cases than any other country — has carried out more than 25 million coronavirus tests, placing it outside the top 20 countries in the world, per capita. “Here is the bad part: When you do testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases,” Trump argued. “So I said to my people ‘slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.” It was not clear from Trump’s tone if he was playing to the crowd, who ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sir Anwer Pervez, richest Pakistani British businessman, loses £432m in pandemic

Sir Anwar Pervez OBE, the founder and chairman of Bestway Cash & Carry has lost £432 million during the coronavirus pandemic to bring him down to No 50 on the richest British people list. The list has 1,000 people and is published by the Sunday Times newspaper . Pervez was at No 42 previously.  The 2020 list of the UK’s richest shows its first fall in wealth in a decade as Britain’s wealthiest people lost tens of billions of pounds in the coronavirus pandemic, the Sunday Times reported in its Rich List 2020. The newspaper, which has produced the respected annual ranking of the country’s 1,000 wealthiest people since 1989, found the past two months had resulted in the super-rich losing £54 billion ($65 billion). More than half of the billionaires in Britain had seen drops in their worth by as much as £6b, a decrease in their collective wealth unprecedented since 2009 and the financial crisis. The Hinduja brothers, who topped last year’s list with a £22b fortune, saw among ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Despite reservations about jury, Pakistan to implement FATF reforms: envoy

WASHINGTON: Despite its reservations about the fairness of the jury which is to determine Pakistan’s performance against terror financing, the government is committed to implementing its action plan for dealing with this issue, says Islamabad’s Washington envoy Asad Majeed Khan. In a conversation with a prominent US scholar George Perkovich, recorded at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington on Monday afternoon, Ambassador Khan said the actions that Pakistan had taken so far to eliminate terror financing were “reflective of the political will”. “We feel that we have done a lot. We are also clear and determined to do more,” said the envoy while responding to a question about a meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) held in Orlando last week, which asked Pakistan to implement its own action plan for eliminating terror financing by October. Failing to do so could put Pakistan on a blacklist of violators and bring strict economic sanctions too. “But we w...
Post a Comment
Read more