KARACHI/KABUL: Health authorities across South Asia reported rising tallies of coronavirus cases on Monday, raising the prospect of rapidly spreading outbreaks overwhelming poor medical facilities in a region that is home to a quarter of the world’s people.
South Asia has been relatively lightly hit by the virus compared with neighbours to the east, like China and South Korea, and to the west like Iran and parts of Europe.
But measures that have reined in epidemics in China, where the coronavirus emerged late last year, and South Korea are unlikely to work in poor, crowded parts of South Asia, health officials say.
“As compared to developed countries like the United States and China it will be difficult to (enforce) social distancing, especially in slum areas,” said Giridhara R Babu, an epidemiologist at the Indian Institute of Public Health in the city of Bengaluru.
“The living environment itself is crowded and it may not be practical to ask them to maintain minimum distance from each other.” Pakistan recorded a sharp rise in coronavirus cases on Monday, up 40 to 94, according to a Reuters tally of statistics from central and provincial governments.
The majority of new cases were in the southern province of Sindh in patients who had recently travelled from Iran — which has one of the world’s worst outbreaks.
Saeed Ghani, a cabinet minister in the Sindh government, told reporters on Monday existing quarantine facilities in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province on the Iranian border were inadequate, resulting in large numbers of coronavirus cases.
“Out of 100 plus samples, 50 resulted positive, which is a huge number,” he said.
AFGHAN PANIC
Afghanistan saw its tally rise to 21 with the majority of cases in the western province of Herat, which borders Iran and where thousands of Afghans cross back into their home country every day, some after being deported and others to escape a worsening Iranian economy.
Transport costs from the Iranian border to Herat city have quadrupled since the outbreak of the virus, officials said. — Reuters
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