Tag: coronavirus

  • COVID-19: Colony in Lahore under lockdown after massive increase in cases?

    Residents of Lahore’s Imamia Colony claim that the area has been sealed off by the police amid “a massive increase in the COVID-19 cases” as authorities told them to not leave their houses; however, both the government and police deny doing so.

    Reports quoted locals as saying that amid an increasing number of coronavirus cases in Punjab, especially Lahore, the government had put the residential area in the provincial capital under lockdown. They claimed that a fatality was also reported in the locality and the health department was “downplaying the situation”.

    The government, they said, had failed to screen people returning from Iran which led to the outbreak in the colony.

    “The health department is hiding the actual number of the cases,” the residents claimed, urging higher-ups to take notice of the cases.

    According to an audio clip viral on social media, a purported sub-inspector stationed at Shahdara Police Station could be heard telling someone to stay away from Imamia Colony due to a higher number of cases there. As per the clip, a patient also died of the virus and at least 80 per cent were infected in the colony.

    Shahdara Police denied this and said they didn’t seal the area, whereas the health secretary and his spokesperson remained unavailable despite many calls.

    Punjab government spokesperson Mussarat Jamsheed said it was all rumours. “All the areas are under observation and we are not hiding anything from the public,” the official said while asking people not to panic.

  • Two Punjab doctors treating coronavirus patients get infected

    Two more Pakistani doctors have been confirmed to have contracted the novel coronavirus while treating patients, Geo reported.

    Punjab’s Primary and Secondary Health Care Department said on Friday that two doctors involved in the fight against coronavirus had tested positive for the disease.

    The spokesperson for the department stated that the doctors had been performing their duties at a quarantine centre in Dera Ghazi Khan when they started showing symptoms associated with COVID-19.

    Both doctors have since been confined to an isolation ward and are out of danger, added the statement.

    Earlier, a doctor had lost his life in Gilgit-Baltistan while performing his duties at one of the quarantine centres in the region.

    Meanwhile, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Pakistan rose to 1,257 on Friday after more people tested positive in Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Islamabad.

    The country also recorded its ninth death due to the virus while at least 24,000 deaths have been recorded globally, more than 15,500 of which are in Europe since the virus first emerged in December.

    More than 532,000 declared virus cases have been registered in 199 countries and territories of which at least 268,191 are in Europe, the worst-hit continent.

    The countries with the most deaths include Italy with 8,165 deaths out of 80,539 declared infections, Spain with 4,089 deaths out of 56,188 cases, mainland China with 3,287 deaths out of 81,285 cases, Iran with 2,234 deaths out of 29,406 cases, and France with 1,696 fatalities out of 29,155 cases.

  • Fawad says ignorance of conservative religious class, not coronavirus, god’s wrath

    Fawad says ignorance of conservative religious class, not coronavirus, god’s wrath

    Federal Minister for Science and Technology Fawad Chaudhry has said that God’s wrath “was the ignorance of the conservative religious class that had led to the coronavirus outbreak in Pakistan”.

    “The global outbreak of coronavirus has spread in Pakistan due to ignorance of the religious community and now they say coronavirus is a punishment from God and we need to repent,” he tweeted.

    He added that scholars who have the knowledge and the intellect were blessings of Allah, but to give an ignorant status of a scholar was destruction.

    “66 studies are going on in which 43 are on new vaccines, 16 on new antibiotics and seven are focusing on antibodies,” the minister said later.

    On Wednesday, several of Pakistan’s senior religious leaders announced that they would keep mosques open for group prayers, on a day when the country’s confirmed cases of COVID-19 crossed the 1,000 mark.   

    The declaration seemed to counter an announcement from President Arif Alvi that upon his request, Egypt’s Al-Azhar University’s religious clerics’ council issued a fatwa — an Islamic religious edict — that public gatherings, including group prayers in mosques, can be banned in the interest of public health. 

    The Cairo-based university is one of the oldest seats of Islamic learning, founded almost a century before Oxford University, the oldest university in the English-speaking world. 

    The Pakistani clerics said young children, old people, those who were sick or taking care of the sick could stay home. They also guided their followers to install sanitizers at the entrances of mosques, and advised more cleanliness.

  • Pakistan blamed for spread of coronavirus to Muslim World

    Pakistan blamed for spread of coronavirus to Muslim World

    The first two cases of the new coronavirus in the Gaza Strip — a war-shattered Palestinian territory with a fragile health system — were confirmed in men who attended a mass religious gathering 10 days ago in Pakistan, United States’ (US) National Public Radio (NPR) has quoted an Islamabad-based Palestinian diplomat as saying.

    The diplomat said the men were part of a two-day gathering that ended March 12. The gathering of the Tablighi Jamaat, a global Muslim missionary group, brought together tens of thousands of preachers from some 80 countries and raised concerns about the virus’ spread in Pakistan and beyond.

    The Pakistani authorities had urged for the cancellation of the five-day Tablighi Ijtema congregation hosted annually near Lahore but organisers from the movement had ignored government advice to postpone, The News reported.

    A longtime Pakistani Tablighi Jamaat member, Arif Rana, said the gathering was canceled on March 12 because of rain — attendees sleep in the open. But Azhar Mashwani, focal person to the Punjab chief minister (CM) on digital media, said that it ended because of coronavirus fears.

    Most attendees were Pakistani, but at least a few thousand came from other countries, Rana told NPR.

    Omar al-Tabatibi said his 79-year-old grandfather, Mohammed, and friend Amer Doghmosh had attended the Lahore event.

    Previous statements from health officials had misidentified the men as being between 30 and 40. “My grandfather learnt about the conference by chance from a friend while he was in Pakistan so he wanted to attend,” Tabatibi said.

    After returning from Pakistan, his grandfather stayed several days in Egypt before taking the long journey overland to Gaza, Tabatibi said. “Maybe, my grandfather caught corona in Egypt and not Pakistan, no one knows,” he added.

    Five preachers from Kyrgyzstan stayed in a mosque in Islamabad after attending the Tablighi Jamaat gathering and have also tested positive, said a senior health official who did not want to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the press.

    On Twitter, Muhammad Hamza Shafqaat, the deputy commissioner of Islamabad, accused the Kyrgyz group of “criminal carelessness” because “they knew that one of them had symptoms and they kept on roaming around”.

    Concerns have also been raised in Southeast Asia about infection after a Tablighi Jamaat gathering outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in late February and early March. Malaysian media reported that more than half of the country’s known coronavirus cases were traced to the gathering. Preachers who attended also spread the virus to Brunei and Thailand, The New York Times reported, saying the gathering created “the largest known viral vector in Southeast Asia”.

  • CM Balochistan wants you to clap your hands

    CM Balochistan wants you to clap your hands

    Chief Minister of Balochistan, Jam Kamal wants people to support their doctors and medical staff by coming out on their balconies, roofs, and windows, clapping their hands and flashing their mobile lights to appreciate the doctors working to help people during the coronavirus pandemic.

    The CM is not wrong. Different countries have been using this technique to give moral support to their medical workers.

    People clap from their windows in support of medical staff in Paris, France
    Photograph: Omar Havana/Getty Images
    A woman applauds doctors and nurses fighting coronavirus as part of a nationwide initiative to show unity and support in Sofia, Bulgaria
    Photograph: Dimitar Kyosemarliev/Reuters
    Family members applaud from their balconies during a call on social media to thank Spanish medical staff in Ronda, Spain
    Photograph: Jon Nazca/Reuters
    A man plays the violin from a balcony to raise morale in Berlin, Germany
    Photograph: Paweł Kopczyński/Reuters
    People hold up their smartphones on a balcony as part of nationwide flash mob to light up Rome, Italy
    Photograph: Alberto Lingria/Reuters
  • President to meet with religious scholars for discussion on congregational prayers

    President to meet with religious scholars for discussion on congregational prayers

    Friday prayers and mosques have not been closed in any province other than Sindh. President Arif Alvi is meeting with different religious scholars to discuss what can be done to limit religious gatherings at this time. He has also tweeted on the subject, urging the Ulema to take urgent action to help stop the spread of the virus like other countries.

    Arif Alvi had previously tweeted that he was not attending Jummah prayers to protect himself and everyone else from the spread of coronavirus by practicing social distancing.

    The meeting has been organised by the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) and the the ministry of religious affairs. It will be attended by scholars from across the country via video link.

  • Maria B’s chandelier is Pakistan’s latest obsession

    Maria B’s chandelier is Pakistan’s latest obsession

    Maria B has sparked outrage and furore for being highly irresponsible in a time when a global pandemic is raging through the world. According to the police, the designer sent her cook back to his village knowing that he was tested positive for coronavirus. The police arrested Maria’s husband and registered an FIR against him for criminal negligence.

    VIDEO: Renowned designer Maria B’s husband reportedly arrested for ‘criminal negligence’

    Later Maria’s husband, Tahir Saeed was released on bail following which the couple released a video in which they said that they only sent their cook after he promised that he would isolate himself in his village.

    While Pakistanis are not buying Maria’s clarifications and continue to hold her for criminal negligence, the one thing that has caught everyone’s attention is Maria’s chandelier which can be seen in the background of her first video.

    Check out Twitter reactions below:

    https://twitter.com/intellectroll/status/1242427877494124544?s=20
    https://twitter.com/farheenalesyed/status/1242460450421379073?s=20
    https://twitter.com/RidhaAlii/status/1242752297458860034?s=20

    Other memes of the ‘Chandelier Couple’ were also lit.

  • Coronavirus: PM Imran walks out of high-level meeting ‘paid for by Bilawal’

    In what is being termed as his “non-serious attitude towards a health crisis”, Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan on Wednesday walked out after addressing parliamentary leaders on the coronavirus outbreak via video link that, according to sources, was paid for by Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) chief Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari.

    “The link… the subscription of the software is owned by the PPP and was shared with the government for the emergency moot as it only had Skype and couldn’t manage,” sources informed The Current.

    Earlier, the premier said he wanted all political parties to unite on one forum and fight against COVID-19. “All political parties and provinces will be included in the victory against corona[virus],” he reportedly said in his address at the parliamentary leaders’ conference that he later left midway, drawing a strong reaction from opposition leaders.

    Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) President Shehbaz Sharif also left the meeting in protest over the “carefree attitude” of PM Imran while the country suffered because of what Shehbaz said was the worst health crisis in its history.

    With the PPP chief following suit, Shehbaz tweeted:

    Meanwhile, party sources informed The Current that Bilawal will soon be addressing a press conference over the events that marred Wednesday’s high-level meeting between national leaders.

  • Think the bridal masks were just a meme? Think again

    Think the bridal masks were just a meme? Think again

    The coronavirus outbreak has drastically changed our lives and has put a halt to our social activities including our favourite past time: weddings.

    The spread of the virus has postponed or even cancelled many events. But amid all this, some programs have remained unchanged and a few people found a unique way to market their products. We have seen bridal masks memes on social media but who would have thought that this would go this far that some people will actually start making and selling them.

    These masks have zarri and dabka work on them and are being sold for two to three thousand rupees. We are truly living in strange times.

    https://twitter.com/SaharHGhazi/status/1241355421354463232?s=20
  • VIDEO: Azaan against coronavirus echoes from mosques, rooftops across country

    VIDEO: Azaan against coronavirus echoes from mosques, rooftops across country

    In a rather uncommon occurrence, Azaan [call for prayer] on Tuesday echoed across Pakistan at 10 pm — long after Isha prayers — as the nation prayed for mercy to protect them from coronavirus, SAMAA reported.

    Maulana Bashir Farooqui, the chairperson of the Saylani Welfare Trust, and other religious scholars had urged prayer leaders to do so.

    The muezzins and the people complied with Maulana Farooqui’s instructions and as a result, the call for prayer was heard across the country at 10 pm. Other than mosques, Farooqui had also asked people to do the same from the rooftops of their residences.

    According to Maulana Farooqui, Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) used to recite the Azaan at the time of difficulties.

    By the time this report was filed, Pakistan had reported 990 known cases of the new coronavirus. The virus has claimed more than 18,000 lives worldwide, while Pakistan has reported seven deaths since February 26, when the first case was reported in the country.