With the new coronavirus — COVID-19 — making its way to Punjab and leaving at least 33 infected, people are criticising the Punjab Chief Minister (CM) Usman Buzdar-led administration for “lagging behind other provinces” such as Sindh where strict measures are being taken by the provincial government to contain the pandemic.
Amid accusations of what people say is the “inability” of the Punjab government to take the global pandemic seriously, Dawn has quoted CM Buzdar as asking experts that “how does coronavirus bite”.
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“A few days ago Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar received a detailed briefing on coronavirus from relevant experts and officials. The purpose was to provide him all the information he required as the chief executive of the largest province, so he could make the right decisions. At the end of the briefing, the chief minister asked a question innocently: ‘Yeh corona kaat-ta kaisay hai? (how does this corona bite)?’,” the report by the English daily’s resident editor, Fahd Husain, claimed.
It further said that “nothing could better illustrate the state of affairs in Punjab today than this simple question asked by the head of the province about a crisis that has nothing simple about it”.
READ MORE: Coronavirus: Is Buzdar administration failing Punjab?
“The gap between the magnitude of the challenge that COVID-19 has thrown and the scale of the response so far is wider than anyone would like to imagine. The reasons are far more numerous than the capacity issues of one provincial chief minister,” the report said.
While the national tally of infections for now stands at 302 with at least two fatalities, globally, 158 countries have been affected, nearly 7,000 people have died and more than 190,000 are infected by COVID-19.
The epicentre of the outbreak has now shifted to Europe, which is recording a rapid rise in new cases every day.
