- Says Pakistani students in Wuhan thankful for not being evacuated
ISLAMABAD, Mar 29: Special Assistant to Prime Minister on National Health Services Dr. Zafar Mirza has expressed hope that Pakistani health professionals will learn from their Chinese counterparts to stem the tide against coronavirus.
“We are thankful to China for its assistance, even when it is going through a difficult situation itself,” Dr Mirza said on Sunday during a briefing for Chinese doctors at the National Institute of Health in Islamabad.
Dr Zafar Mirza has also said that Pakistan must strengthen its health system to deal with future epidemics.
He counted supplying diagnostic kits and personal protection equipment among the aid China had given Pakistan. It has also sent a team of doctors to help. So far, Pakistan has reported 1,516 cases and none of them are from China, said Dr Mirza, calling this remarkable.
This was only possible because of the coordination and cooperation between the governments of China and Pakistan, he said, explaining that the Chinese government decided not to allow Chinese citizens to travel to Pakistan unless they were quarantined for 14 days and then screened.
The Chinese Embassy in Pakistan then ensured that they quarantined themselves for another 14 days in Pakistan, he said, adding that this was the reason why Pakistan doesn’t have any cases from China.
Dr Mirza said by taking the right measures at the right time, even a country like China, with a population of over 1.4 billion, could make it possible that not a single case moved across the border. This will go down in history, he said.
He said that the Pakistani students who were stranded in the Chinese city of Wuhan, during the peak of the country’s Covid-19 outbreak, are now thanking the government for not evacuating them.
He said: “We decided – it was a tough decision for us – against evacuating our students from Wuhan. We worked very closely with the Chinese government and just followed their recommendations.
“Today, now that the disease is spreading in Pakistan, the same students are thanking the government for not evacuating them and requesting us to take care of their families in the same way they were looked after by the Chinese government.”
He said that when President Arif Alvi Umar and Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi visited China recently, they spoke to the students in Wuhan through Skype.
“They [students] thanked the president and said that the decision [to not bring them back] was the right thing to do, even though their families were pressuring the government to do so,” he added.
The PM’s aide went on to say that China has written a new chapter in the history of public health by putting approximately 60 million people under lockdown.
“The world has a lot to learn from China regarding the prevention and control of communicable diseases,” he said.-PR
