ARAB NEWS PAKISTAN
ISLAMABAD: The National Command and Operations Center (NCOC), which oversees the country’s pandemic response, decided to relax COVID-19 restrictions in eight cities with the highest vaccination percentage, the country’s planning minister announced in a Twitter post on Wednesday.
Pakistan has witnessed a decline in COVID-19 cases in the past few weeks, and its positivity rate has dropped to 3.19 percent.
The country has also administered more than 80 million doses of various coronavirus vaccines to its citizens since it launched the immunization drive last February.
“NCOC has decided to relax restrictions in 8 cities with the highest level of vaccination. These include Quetta, Peshawar, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Mirpur, Muzaffarabad, Gilgit and Skardu,” Asad Umar said on Twitter while warning that new restrictions would be imposed from next month on people who were not fully vaccinated.
Addressing a media briefing later in the day, he said that indoor gatherings with a maximum capacity of 300 guests were allowed in the eight cities. Previously, such gatherings were limited to 200 people.
Umar said that cinema halls in the eight cities would also be opened from October 1.
Pakistan announced a day earlier it would administer COVID-19 jabs to children aged 12 or above to protect them from the pandemic.
Umar, who also heads the NCOC, said the only way out of the COVID-19 pandemic was to vaccinate as many citizens as possible.
“Therefore as part of the strategy to reward citizens & cities which vaccinate, there will be higher restrictions on cities with low level of vaccination & on citizens who are not vaccinated,” he wrote in a tweet.
According to the NCOC, 1,560 people tested positive for the debilitating respiratory disease in the last 24 hours while 3,948 patients were in critical condition on Wednesday.