Pakistan
Commercial activities along tourism banned from May 8 to 16
The National Command and Operations Center (NCOC)— nerve centre to synergize and articulate unified national effort against COVID-19, has announced to completely ban all commercial activities along with tourism from May 8 to 16.
To ensure the implementation of SOPs across Pakistan for a week, the nerve centre has decided to form monitoring teams at federal, provincial and district levels.
According to details, a meeting of the NCOC was held under the chairmanship of Federal Minister Asad Umar and Lt. Gen. Mahmudul Zaman in which the concerned federal and provincial officials including Special Assistant Dr Faisal Sultan participated.
The notification says that all picnic spots, tourist resorts, shopping malls, hotels, restaurants will be closed (also around recreational places), Roads to tourists places will be completely closed while Northern Areas, sea views, coastal areas will remain sealed.
"Travel nodes leading to tourist spots [will also remain] closed; focus on Murree, Galiyat, Swat-Kalam, Sea View/beaches and the Northern Areas," read the statement.
However, Food outlets, medical stores, petrol pumps and bakeries will be exempted from the latest restrictions.
While the People of Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan will be able to visit their home areas from May 8 to 16.
Meanwhile, Asad Umar sharing an update in a Tweet said that significant improvement has been seen in SOP compliance since the stronger enforcement measures including military deployment took place. National average compliance has doubled from 34% on April 25 to 68% on May 3rd.
He stressed, “Need to sustain and build on this compliance level specially till eid.”
According to National Command and Operations Center (NCOC), around 3,377 cases of coronavirus were reported while 161 people succumbed to the disease in the last 24 hours, taking the total death toll to 18,149.
The total number of confirmed cases reached 837,523. As many as 733,062 patients have recovered from the disease with 5,326 critical cases.