Top US economist praises Pakistan’s handling of pandemic

A top US economist has lauded Pakistan’s efforts against the novel coronavirus pandemic that challenged the world's major economies.

Lawrence H Summers, who was the senior US Treasury Department official throughout president Bill Clinton's tenure and director of the National Economic Council for president Barack Obama, also termed the United States’ failure on Covid-19 ‘unimaginable’ while speaking to Fareed Zakaria's show on CNN.

Tweeting from his official handle, Summers – who is President Emeritus at Harvard – said: “America’s failure on Covid-19 is almost unimaginable. Heck, if the US had handled the pandemic as well as Pakistan, we would have saved in neighbourhood of $10 trillion.”

He also wrote on another tweet that “we should be making investments in renewing infrastructure, supporting state & local govt and helping the unemployed and lower-income families. It cannot be that the highest priority in the US today is lending money to creditworthy corporations”.

In September, the World Health Organisation also appreciated Pakistan’s effort against the coronavirus.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a media briefing said Pakistan had deployed the infrastructure built up over many years for polio to combat Covid-19.

He also said that Pakistan was among countries from whom the international community should learn how to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Pakistan reported its first covid-19 case on February 26, a few weeks later in the month of March, the country decided to go for the countrywide lockdown

According to the official statistics, Pakistan has so far reported more than 323,000 coronavirus cases with nearly 6,700 deaths. Meanwhile, at least 307,200 patients have recovered from the virus.