The Sindh government has decided to extend the period of lockdown in the province to April 14. This was stated during a meeting of the Coronavirus Task Force held under the chairmanship of Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah here at the CM House.
The meeting was attended by provincial ministers Syed Nasir Shah, Dr Azra Pechuho, Saeed Ghani and Imtiaz Shaikh, Advisor Murtaza Wahab, CM's Coordinator Haris Gazdar, Chief Secretary Mumtaz Shah, DG Rangers Major-General Omar Bokhari, IG Sindh Mushtaq Maher, Brigadier Sami of Corps 5, Home Secretary Usman Chachar, Dr Bari of Indus Hospital and Dr Faisal of Aga Khan Hospital and Focal Person of Health Dept Zahid Abbasi.
The meeting was informed that another 49 cases of the coronavirus were detected in the province in the last 24 hours, taking the total number to 676. Out of the total number of the cases 274 happened to be in Karachi.
The number of local transmission is 338, which is 50 percent of the total cases. The meeting was told that 265 cases were in Sukkur, 128 in Hyderabad, seven in Larkana, two in Jamshoro and one each in Jacobabad and Dadu. At present 229 patients are in home isolation.
The government had also been focusing on severe pneumonia cases so that the threat of COVID-19 could be tracked properly. PM meeting: The chief minister also participated through a video link in a meeting chaired by the prime minister.
The chief minister said that if the federal government was resuming flight operations then it would have to test each and every passenger at the airports and make necessary arrangements for quarantines.
The chief minister brushed aside the impression that he had also banned movement of goods transport. "No, not at all. The goods transport operation remained on throughout the lockdown," he said.
Shah said that he had already taken necessary measures for food security. "The Sindh Food department has started procuring wheat from Monday, and we have set a target of procuring 1.4 million tons of wheat," he said.
He said that the businesses and industries related to medicines and food were operating normally. The chief minister, nevertheless, said that there might have been some glitches here and there since the country and all the provinces had been going through an extraordinary situation, "but simultaneously we keep solving the problems" when they were brought to the government's attention.