Health

KARACHI: As 500,000 more doses of Sinopharm vaccine arrived from China, the Sindh government’s plan to import 10 million doses from the neighbouring country may take another few weeks to materialise as first such shipment is likely to arrive in the third week of May, officials and sources said on Sunday. A senior Sindh government official confirmed that the authorities …

• 118 die of virus, 5,611 more infected • 1m doses reach Pakistan • Expert warns country entering dangerous phase ISLAMABAD: With the number of Covid-19 cases hovering over 5,000 for more than a week, all provinces as well as Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) have sought services of the armed forces to get the standard operating …

The Sindh government on Monday imposed several restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus, including closing down all schools, colleges and educational institutions. The decisions were taken during a meeting of the provincial Coronavirus Task Force, chaired by Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah. Provincial ministers Dr Azra Pechuho, Saeed Ghani and Nasir Shah also attended the meeting. Decisions …

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Saturday offered medical supplies to India that has been struggling to cope with an overwhelming wave of Covid-19 while its leaders expressed solidarity with Indian people. After Prime Minister Imran Khan’s tweet praying for the ‘speedy recovery’ of the Indian people affected by the virus and calling for cooperation in fight against the pandemic, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi …

At least 27 people were killed and 46 injured in a fire on Saturday at a hospital in southeastern Baghdad that had been equipped to house Covid-19 patients, medical sources at three nearby hospitals said. The fire at the Ibn Khatib hospital in the Diyala Bridge area of the Iraqi capital occurred after an accident caused an oxygen tank to …

The Indian government asked social media platform Twitter to take down dozens of tweets, including some by local lawmakers, that were critical of India’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, as cases of Covid-19 again hit a world record. Twitter has withheld some of the tweets after the legal request by the Indian government, a company spokeswoman told Reuters on Saturday. The government …

ISLAMABAD: Army was on Saturday called in to assist the local administration in enforcing the standard operating procedures (SOPs) to check further spread of Covid-19. Talking to Dawn, Deputy Commissioner Mohammad Hamza Sahfaat said teams from the army under the supervision of officers from the rank of colonel to captain were assisting assistant commissioners and magistrates to enforce and implement the …

PESHAWAR / QUETTA: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government on Saturday requested the federal government to authorise deployment of armed forces and civil armed forces in the province to ensure effective implementation of the guidelines of the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Likewise, the Balochistan government said the army would be called in if the people …

LAHORE: With the ventilator occupancy reaching 94 percent in Lahore’s all 16 state-run hospitals, the Covid claimed lives of 98 more people in Punjab during the last 24 hours, taking the total death toll in the province to 7,879. Of these Covid-19 deaths, 43 were reported in Lahore, where the toll reached 3,258. As per the official figures, the bed …

The European Commission said it expects to seal the world’s biggest vaccine supply deal within days, securing up to 1.8 billion doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for the next few years as a debate rages over unfair access to shots for the world’s poorest people. The vaccines from the U.S. drugmaker and its German partner BioNTech would be delivered over …