Fawad Chaudhry warns country has less than one week to prevent lockdown

While addressing media, the information minister said that almost 90% of the available oxygen capacity has already been utilized.

“The hospitals are dealing with an influx of patients. We need to be very careful in upcoming days. Supply chain is most important in the provision of oxygen. Karachi has less coronavirus patients and that is the reason we have supply of oxygen from there but the situation in some of the major cities of Punjab including Lahore and Multan is concerning,” he added.

Fawad Chaudhry further stated that coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc around the world including our neighboring country India.

“The government of Pakistan has extended its support and sympathies towards the Indian people battling the deadly wave of coronavirus. Pakistan is standing by Indian people in these difficult times,” he added.

Referring to the issue of banned Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan (TLP), the minister said that political parties should refrain from doing politics over that issue.

Pakistan has reported 157 deaths in one day as the third wave of the pandemic continued to rage across the country.

According to National Command and Operations Center (NCOC), around 5,908 cases of coronavirus were reported while 157 people succumbed to the disease in the last 24 hours, taking the total death toll to 16,999.

The total number of confirmed cases reached to 790,016.

As many as 682,290 patients have recovered from the disease with 4,682 critical cases.

On the other hand, India’s current Covid wave has taken on frightening proportions, driven in part by a new variant of the virus which has double mutations. Earlier this week, India overtook Brazil as the country with the second-highest number of cases in the world, behind the USA.

Experts are concerned that given the low testing rate, India possibly has higher number of cases than either US or Brazil.

On Friday, the country reported almost 3.46 lakh cases in a single day while deaths hit a grim new record of 2,600. Real numbers could be much higher, with crematoriums and graveyards both running out of space across the country.