PPP lawmaker gauges people’s pulse on lockdown

KARACHI:
On the day that the provincial chief minister hinted at easing lockdown restrictions while maintaining he wanted to extend it, one Pakistan Peoples Party lawmaker went a step further and posted a poll on the matter on social media.

“What is your opinion in this current situation lockdown should end on 14th April?” asked Sharjeel Inam Memon, who is the government’s focal person on coronavirus in Hyderabad.

At the time of filing this report, the tweet had been retweeted hundreds of time, including after a retweet by Murtaza Wahab, the Sindh government spokesperson.

What do u think people? https://t.co/c9I0vdUe4W

Sindh’s response to the coronavirus crisis has been hailed with CM Shah lauded for being proactive. The southern province was the first to go into lockdown and in almost all other measures, which other provinces and the federal government followed.

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But with Prime Minister Imran Khan’s statement earlier today suggesting that the situation is likely to get worse towards the end of April as the country fears a spike in cases, Sindh also has a tricky choice: whether to continue the lockdown and endanger the survival of the majority of its people or to ease it at the risk of letting the virus spread.

The response to Memon’s poll has overwhelmingly been in the negative, with close to 70 per cent of the nearly 5,000 votes cast at the time of the writing of this report saying nay to lifting the lockdown. This is despite the fact that those who are on Twitter are unlikely to experience the challenges that those in the rural parts of Sindh – as well as many of those in the impoverished parts of the cities – face on a daily basis.

This was one of the reasons cited by the chief minister when talking about easing restrictions, albeit with the caveat that the government would introduce standard operating procedures (SOPs) for businesses as well as social interaction in order to control the spread of the virus that has claimed 21 lives in the province so far.

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“Till today, 11,623 tests have been conducted, of which 1,188 people have tested positive. A total of 349 people or 31 per cent of those who had the virus have recovered, with 79 of those recovering in the last 24 hours,” he had said while also outlining how the government had dealt with the situation of the pilgrims who caught the virus in either Iran or the Taftan border, where they were quarantined prior to being sent to their respective provinces.

However, he also pointed out that there had been an incident where the inhabitant of a Karachi slum had taken the virus back to his family and infected them. Calling it a serious concern, he said that authorities would be hard pressed to contain the spread if it occurred in kachi abadis, where large families live in small homes in densely packed patches.