ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s de-facto health chief said in a Twitter post on Sunday that the country was acting responsibly by not evacuating its citizens from virus-hit China, so as to stem the global spread of the disease.
Dr. Zafar Mirza, the Prime Minister’s adviser on health, made his statement a day after he announced the government was standing firm on its decision not to fly its citizens home.
“To the families of the Pakistani students in China: we fully understand your anxiety. Rest assured that we are working very hard to ensure their safety & wellbeing. And we are very closely monitoring the situation,” Mirza tweeted.
“We want to act responsibly in order not to become a reason for the global spread of #Coronarivus. WHO currently does not recommend evacuation. Our own risk assessment, WHO’s stance & China’s effective outbreak response are the reasons for our current decision at the present time,” he added in a separate Twitter post.
Pakistan has not yet confirmed any cases of coronavirus on its soil, but Mirza listed a number of preventative and awareness measures in a series of Twitter posts. He also announced that Pakistan had received 1,000 testing kits from China and that the country was now equipped to diagnose the virus, with samples taken from around the country and tested free of charge at the National Institute of Health in Islamabad.
Approximately 28,000 Pakistani students are currently studying at Chinese universities, with more than 500 of them in the virus epicenter of Wuhan, according to foreign office data.
Impassioned video appeals from the stranded students continued to flood Pakistani social media after the government’s decision not to repatriate was announced on Saturday. The stance was iterated by Mirza on his Twitter on Sunday.
“We don’t want to evacuate just copying a few other countries. Around 100 other countries are not evacuating their citizens from Wuhan/China. Good public health practice, the larger interest of our people and safety of the world are our key considerations,” he tweeted.
Some countries, including the US, UK, Australia, and India have flown their citizens out of China after the outbreak of the virus which has killed more than 300 people to date, all of them in China and one in the Philippines, and with 14,000 confirmed cases of the infection in the country.
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a global health emergency last week after the infection spread to at least 18 other countries.
On Friday, Pakistan, which shares a large border with China, announced it was suspending all direct flights to and from the country with immediate effect, with the action to be reviewed on Feb. 2.
On Saturday, Mirza said Pakistan had reached an agreement with the Chinese government whereby Pakistanis in China would be allowed to fly out after they had completed an incubation period of 14 days.
“Just by implementing this one measure, we will be able to make Pakistan a safe place,” he said.
But as the daily death toll rises, Pakistani students in China’s cordoned off areas are getting more desperate.
“We are scared even to breathe,” Tatheer Hussain, a student of medicine at Hubei University of Science and Technology, told Arab News via a video message.
” We don’t need money, we need safe passage home,” Hussain said.
“There are 40 other medical students in the university with me, and we are all isolated in our rooms. Day after day, we are being betrayed by our government,” he said.
“We will stay in quarantine, we will self-incubate and prove that we are virus-free,” he said, and added: “If we are not virus-free, you can just send us back to China.”
