Pakistan this week added a total of 25,306 new coronavirus cases, just slightly down from 25,424 cases that we had reported last week.
After notable decline in weekly cases for two consecutive weeks when new weekly cases dropped 37% in two weeks, it appears the declining trend has stopped and that the number of new cases have started to rebound.
Before we move forward, check below graph for illustration of what’s said above:
As evident from the graph, the declining trend has stopped and weekly new cases are higher than the expected number. If we had continued our trend then new cases in current week should have been around 20K, which is clearly not the case.
To dig this further, we tried to find out the reason for higher than expected number and appears that Sindh and AJK regions are to be blamed here. Punjab’s decline in cases was also marginal, but it still showed a negative growth of 8.30%.
KP, Islamabad and Balochistan were on track and showed 38%, 50% and 51% negative growth respectively.
As mentioned above, Sindh and AJK rebounded and showed 15% and 43% growth respectively. More in below graphs:
Number of deaths, after showing a decline last week, have rebounded as well and reached 595 as compared to 577 deaths we had recorded last week.
This shows that the efforts we have been making are still not enough and some regions, such as Sindh, AJK and Punjab has still a long way before making it to the safe zone.
Number of Tests
One thing which also declined during past week was number of samples that we tested in a week.
During this week we tested a total of 158,461 samples, down from 160,000 samples that were tested a week ago.
While the capacity has increased, the decline in testing is not understandable. While government officials have tried to justify the decline by saying that international inbound passengers are not tested anymore, also that pool testing is done throughout the country, their arguments aren’t convincing enough.
What seemingly is the case that a lot of positive cases are not showing up at testing facilities as they start isolating themselves at home — mainly on recommendation of local (private) physicians.
If such is the case, then its more concerning as true number of positive cases could be much higher than the reported number. Which essentially means that above mentioned reported numbers could be misleading and may not be deemed as the real depiction of ground situation.
Check below the latest on several indicators for all the regions:
| Total Cases | Deaths | Death Rate | Deaths Per Million | Total Tests | Tests Per 1,000 | |
| AJK | 1,342 | 36 | 2.68% | 8.91 | 17,498 | 4.33 |
| Balochistan | 10,814 | 123 | 1.14% | 9.97 | 51,016 | 4.13 |
| GB | 1,561 | 28 | 1.79% | 14.74 | 13,800 | 7.26 |
| Islamabad | 13,494 | 137 | 1.02% | 68.50 | 136,497 | 68.25 |
| KP | 28,116 | 1,028 | 3.66% | 33.68 | 158,861 | 5.21 |
| Punjab | 81,963 | 1,884 | 2.30% | 17.13 | 540,837 | 4.92 |
| Sindh | 94,528 | 1,526 | 1.61% | 31.87 | 502,279 | 10.49 |
| Total | 231,818 | 4,762 | 2.05% | 22.82 | 1,420,788 | 6.81 |
