ISLAMABAD - Rejecting a propaganda against Pakistan, Special Assistant to Prime Minister on National Security Moeed Yusuf on Wednesday said that Pakistan have had the most responsible policy for air travel in the wake of COVID-19 outbreak.
“We tested everyone that came to the country for 2 and a half months totally at our expense and never complained about positives showing up from other countries,” he said in a tweet adding he was glad to see pushback against deliberate sensationalism and fabrication that tried to paint Pakistan as an exporter of COVID.
He was referring to a news story published in the Telegraph few days back, painting Pakistan as an exporter of COVID-19 and the response from another international media outlet; BYLINE TIMES which commented that ‘the Telegraph, in claiming that cases from Pakistan accounted for half of all imported infections, provided no evidence whatever.”
The lead item on the Telegraph news site on 26 June had announced, ‘Exclusive: Half of UK’s imported COVID-19 infections are from Pakistan’. “Glad to see pushback against deliberate sensationalism and fabrication that tried to paint Pakistan as an exporter of COVID. We have had the most responsible policy for air travel. We started outbound screening and have asked all passengers to follow travel policies of their destination countries from day 1,” he said as he took to social media.
The author of the write-up ‘THE TELEGRAPH, COVID-19 & PAKISTAN- The Making of Hate Propaganda’ that appeared at ‘BYLINE TIMES’ on 6 July 2020 commented, “One article smearing Muslims reveals the depths to which journalists and editors have sunk”. Brian Cathcart further said, “When the Telegraph encourages us to believe that we have a problem with people arriving from Pakistan and spreading COVID-19, we know what it is up to”.
He continued that people coming from Pakistan have accounted for a minuscule proportion of all COVID-19 infections ‘imported’ into England. “In fact, the Telegraph’s claim related only to a three-week period in June (though for five days the editor refused to change the headline to make this clear). Even in that three-week period the known ‘imported infections’ from Pakistan represented fewer than 0.05% of all the new cases of COVID-19 in England”.
He further stated that the Telegraph did not state what organisation or expert, if any, supplied the key figure in its headline claim.
He was of the view that the overwhelming overseas source of infection in England has European countries – notably Italy, France and Spain – with COVID-19 often brought home by British people returning from abroad.
The National Command and Operation Center (NCOC) on Wednesday said that about 140,965 COVID-19 positive patients have recovered so far across the country.
The data released by the NCOC said since February 26, some 237,489 Coronavirus positive cases had been detected till date, and 140,965 of them had recovered.
It said that the count was quite significant in terms of recovery.
The NCOC further said that only 83 deaths occurred due to COVID-19 throughout the country on Wednesday, while the total active cases were 91,602 with 2,980 new ones detected the same day.
It further said that strict implementation of the smart lock-down in the country has significantly helped in reducing the number of deaths due to the novel Coronavirus.
The NCOC said that 422 out of 1,573 ventilators allocated for COVID-19 patients across the country were occupied. It said that out of total 237,489 COVID-19 cases, 1,419 belonged to Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), 10,919 to Balochistan, 1,595 Gilgit-Baltistan (GB), 13,650 Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT), 28,681 Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), 83,599 Punjab and 97,626 to Sindh. About 4,922 corona patients have died so far, it added.
