How Pakistan Has Been Doing With the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Middle East is one the most densely populated areas of the world and also the poorest, making the area to be seen as having a significantly high risk to the Coronavirus pandemic. Pakistan, officially known as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a middle eastern country located to the west of India and east of Afghanistan. As reported by The Borgen Project, 31.3 percent of Pakistan’s population lives below the poverty line. Despite Pakistan’s extremely high poverty rate, it has done notably well with the handling of the pandemic.

According to the COVID-19 Data Repository by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has reported over 800,000 confirmed Coronavirus cases and over 18,000 coronavirus-related deaths. As stated by the Pakistani government’s Coronavirus website, over 700,000 Pakistanis have contracted and recovered from the virus.

According to the World Health Organization’s website, Pakistan currently has 378 cases per 100,000 people. In comparison, Pakistan’s neighboring country, India, has a whopping 1,470 cases per 100,000 people. So, why is Pakistan doing so well in comparison? Some people believe that it’s because of Pakistan’s lack of lockdowns. On March 24 in 2020, the Indian government ordered a 21-day lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Pakistani government, on the other hand, has been quite hesitant with the issuing of lockdowns and has only issued a small number since the beginning of the pandemic. As reported in an article by aa.com, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan told a news conference “ “Unfortunately, the [previous] lockdown has already hit the poor people. We no longer can afford that,” and later noting, “We have to save our people from coronavirus and hunger simultaneously.” In fact, Pakistan decided to lift a lockdown in May of 2020 despite averaging at over 5,000 cases a day.

In late February, Pakistan began rolling out vaccines for the coronavirus. Our World in Data has reported that Pakistan has administered over 2 million vaccines as of April 28th. Ary News has reported that Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on National Health Services Dr. Faisal Sultan has said that 150,000 vaccines are being administered on a daily basis, but the government plans to increase that number to 300,000 per day. Further, Sultan stated that the government has ordered 30 million vaccines and the government is on-track to vaccinate 70 million people by the end of the year. Though this number may seem high, this is only about 32 percent of the country’s population.

Though Pakistan hasn’t been doing excellent with its vaccine distribution, it has been doing considerably well with containing the spread of the Coronavirus given its circumstances.