ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Planning Minister Asad Umar has warned against “very dangerous” circumstances if the spike in COVID-19 cases, observed in the past few days, was not contained on time.

“Maybe till now people haven’t realized what dangerous situation we are facing in the third wave of COVID-19,” Umar, who is also chief of the National Command and Operation Center (NCOC), the federal body dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, told reporters on Saturday.

He added that the “situation developing in the country is becoming very dangerous” after Pakistan saw an uptick in daily infections and the number of critical patients being hospitalized.

“If this continues, in the next few days or next week, the number of critically ill patients will go beyond the level we saw in the first wave in June 2020,” he said.

As of Sunday, 3,043 patients were critically ill, slightly less than the 3,300 cases reported during the peak of the pandemic’s first wave in June last year.

The South Asian nation of 220 million also recorded its highest single-day spike in COVID-19 cases since June last year, with 4,767 infections and 57deaths reported in the past 24 hours, government data showed. 

The positivity rate also rose to 10.44 percent on Sunday, while the national tally of coronavirus cases reached 654,591, and the total fatality count jumped to 14,215 on Saturday.

As part of its restrictive measures to limit the outbreak, authorities on Saturday imposed “smart lockdown” across 27 localities of Lahore, the second-largest city of Pakistan and capital of its populous Punjab province.

“There has been a constant increase in positivity percentage and prevalence of COVID-19 in the Province of Punjab during the last two weeks, which poses a serious and imminent threat to public health. Hence, it is mandatory to take all possible safety measures for prevention and control of this disease,” a notification issued by the provincial government said.

It added that all markets, shopping malls, restaurants, and public and private offices would “remain closed in these areas,” in addition to a complete ban on the movement of people “to and from these areas by public and private transport except for limited movement of one person per vehicle to and from the exempted facilities.”

In recent weeks, Pakistan has been struggling to stem the third wave of the pandemic and re-imposed restrictions in serval parts of the country, including in the capital city Islamabad, with Planning Minister Umar urging the public to follow Standard Operating Procedures (SoPs) to limit the outbreak.