ISLAMABAD: The head of Pakistan’s National Institute of Health warned this week that with the Eidul Azha holiday around the corner, the public needed to continue to strictly follow social distancing rules, wear masks and take a range of other precautions to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

Pakistan, where the first coronavirus case was reported in late February, has so far officially recorded 5,386 deaths and 252,636 infections. 

Cases spiked in May after the government lifted an almost two-month long lockdown, mostly over its economic and financial impact, and ahead of the Eidul Fitr festival. Instead, the government imposed ‘smart’ lockdowns in selected areas of several cities, saying that it feared COVID-19 cases could multiply eightfold by the end of July and hit 1.2 million.
“After Eidul Fitr, we had witnessed a surge in the COVID-19 positive cases,” Major General Prof. Aamer Ikram, Executive Director of National Institute of Health (NIH), told Arab News in an interview on Monday. “Now Eidul Azha is arriving and by strictly adhering to the SOPs [standard operating procedures] we can make a real difference.”
He said the government was not downplaying the true extent of the country’s COVID-19 death toll, adding that the rate of infections had gone down in the last week and the coronavirus curve had “plateaued.” 
“We cannot hide number of deaths,” Ikram said. “If you see the statistics of the last one week, there is a reduction in number of deaths. There is nothing like hiding the data.”
He said authorities wanted to ensure “data accuracy” and were vigilant in digging out any discrepancies in numbers.

The coronavirus curve had flattened in Pakistan, the NIH chief said, and data from the last ten days would show that Pakistan had “attained the plateau and it is coming down now.”
“The government’s strategy of smart lockdown has played a very pivotal role in reducing the number of COVID-19 cases,” he said. 
On Tuesday, Pakistan recorded 1,979 new cases of the coronavirus, following 21,020 countrywide tests in the last 24 hours, marking the lowest number of new infections in weeks. 
However, critics have said the rate of infections had gone down because of decreasing rates of testing. 
“One of the reasons of reduction in tests is that the WHO [World Health Organisation] has changed earlier policy of two mandatory negative tests of recovered patients, 24 hours apart, before discharging them from hospital, which is not required now,” Ikram said, commenting on reduced testing figures in Pakistan. 
Another important reason, he said, was that Pakistan was previously testing all incoming international passengers but now only testing those who showed coronavirus symptoms:  “We are now only screening them, that also reduced the [testing] load”.
The NIH chief said Pakistan was the first country in the region to start COVID-19 Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests, used to detect the coronavirus, saying the country started out by conducting just 300 tests per day in a few odd labs but now had 135 testing labs nationwide with the capacity to carry out over 150,000 tests per day.
On Wednesday, the government’s coronavirus portal showed 21,749 tests had been conducted in the last 24 hours, while the total tests conducted since March is 1,627,939.
Last month, Pakistan’s minister for science said the country would begin manufacturing testing kits locally from July, but the NIH chief said indigenous kits were still under final evaluation and would be put out for commercial use after all mandatory protocols had been completed. 
He also said the government was already working on preparing a strategy to acquire the vaccine for COVID-19 as soon as it became available anywhere in the world.