Reuters :
Pakistan will begin lifting its coronavirus lockdown on Saturday, Prime Minister Imran Khan said, hours after the country announced its highest daily increase in new cases.
Pakistan, where a poorly enforced shutdown has been in place since late March, has recorded 24,073 cases of COVID-19, with 564 deaths. On Thursday, authorities said there had been 1,523 new cases and 38 deaths in the preceding 24 hours.
“We’re deciding that we are ending this lockdown now,” Khan said in a televised address on Thursday. “We know that we’re doing it at a time when our curve
is going up … but it is not edging up as we were expecting.”
Impoverished Pakistanis cannot survive under lockdown any longer, Khan said. “Since we started this lockdown, we had this fear that these people who are daily wagers, who feed their kids on daily earnings, what will happen to them?” he asked.
He said the shutdown would be lifted in phases and warned people that the disease could get out of control if they didn’t take precautions.
The government’s handling of the virus has been strongly criticised by scientists and doctors who fear the outbreak will gather pace among a population of more than 200 million and overwhelm the country’s struggling health system.
