It's been more than six months since Coronavirus first came into notice of the medical community and it still has the whole world in its hold. With more than 5.7 million infections and 354,000+ deaths worldwide this virus has devastated billions of people.
Pakistan reported its first positive case of COVID-19 on 26th February. Since then the number of cases have increased rapidly as more testing is being done now. It took Pakistan some time to increase its testing capacity but now it's testing 12,000-15,000 people daily. The number is still quite low but the government is making the efforts to increase it significantly. Federal minister Asad Umar is optimistic that Pakistan's testing capacity will be increased to 30,000 by early June.
According to Umar, who isn't only the Federal Minister for Planning, Development and Special Initiatives but also the chairperson of "National Command and Operations Centre (NCOC)" to deal with the Covid-19 in Pakistan, 30k tests/ day would be sufficient for Pakistan to control the spread of novel coronavirus.
He said this while talking to a media outlet recently:
“Currently we are in a position to hold over 25,000 tests per day and with every passing day our capacity to conduct tests is increasing. We hope that by the end of the month or at the start of next month we will be able to hold 30,000 tests per day."
He told that since the start of lockdown Pakistan has increased the number of tests significantly. We were holding less than 500 tests by the mid of March, but for the past few days around 12,000-15,000 tests are being conducted on a daily basis.
He further added:
“At the moment we've been getting most of the samples, for tests, from the tertiary care hospitals or from the travellers who cross the point of entries of Pakistan. We hope that health facilities, other than tertiary care hospitals, will also start collecting and sending samples soon due to which number of tests will be increased."
As of today, Pakistan has 59,121 COVID-19 cases with 1,225 fatalities. The authorities have conducted 499,399 tests so far in Pakistan. Tests per million people is a reliable metric that tells us the testing capacity of a country. By applying this metric and then comparing Pakistan's numbers with other countries we get following figures:
* Pakistan has tested only 2265 people per 1 million of its population.
* Bangladesh has tested 1620 people/1m
* India tested 2352 people/1m
* UK tested 54,255 people/1m
* US tested 47,031 while Russia tested an impressive 64,525 people per 1 million.
These numbers clearly show that there is massive room for improvement for us. So we hope that our government raises their game ASAP.
