As the Covid-19 situation worsens in neighbouring India with 2.5 million active cases, Pakistan on Saturday expressed its support and sympathy to the Indian people.
Prime Minister Imran Khan expressed solidarity with the people of India battling a ‘dangerous wave’ of Covid-19 pandemic with 2.5 million active cases in the country. “Our prayers for a speedy recovery go to all those suffering from the pandemic in our neighbourhood & the world,” the prime minister said on Twitter.
“We must fight this global challenge confronting humanity together,” the prime minister remarked.
Earlier, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi also expressed Pakistan’s support and sympathy to the Indian people. “We express our support to the people of India in the wake of the current wave of COVID19 infections, that has hit our region hard. On behalf of the people of Pakistan, I extend our heartfelt sympathies to the affected families in India,” Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said on Twitter.
He said Covid-19 pandemic was yet another reminder that humanitarian issues required responses beyond political consideration. He said that Pakistan continued to work with SAARC countries to foster cooperation to tackle the pandemic. Minister for Information and Broadcasting Chaudhry Fawad Hussain said on Saturday that in these difficult times our prayers are with people of India. With coronavirus situation getting worse in India Fawad said in a tweet. “May God be kind and may these difficult times gets over soon”.
India’s coronavirus infections rose by 346,786 overnight, the health ministry said on Saturday, setting a new world record for the third consecutive day, as overwhelmed hospitals in the densely-populated country begged for oxygen supplies.
India is in the grip of a rampaging second wave of the pandemic, hitting a rate of one Covid-19 death in just under every four minutes in Delhi as the capital’s underfunded health system buckles. The government has deployed military planes and trains to get oxygen from the far corners of the country to Delhi. Television showed an oxygen truck arriving at Delhi’s Batra hospital after it issued an SOS saying it had 90 minutes of oxygen left for its 260 patients. “Please help us get oxygen, there will be a tragedy here,” Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a conference on Friday.
India surpassed the US record of 297,430 single-day infections anywhere in the world on Thursday, making it the global epicentre of a pandemic that is waning in many other countries. The Indian government had itself declared it had beaten back the coronavirus in February when new cases fell to all-time lows. However, Covid-19 deaths across India rose by 2,624 over the past 24 hours, the highest daily rate for the country so far. Crematoriums across Delhi said they were full up and asked grieving families to wait. The country of around 1.3 billion has now recorded a total of 16.6 million cases, including 189,544 deaths.
