Pakistani PM Imran Khan tests positive for COVID-19

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has tested positive for Covid-19, the country’s health minister said on Saturday (March 20), two days after the premier got his vaccination.

Mr Khan is “self-isolating at home”, said minister Faisal Sultan in a tweet, without giving further details as to whether other people who have been in contact with Khan would also be isolating.

Mr Khan, 68, has been holding regular and frequent meetings lately, including attending a security conference held in capital Islamabad that was attended by a large number of people.

He addressed the conference without wearing a mask, and attended another gathering to inaugurate a housing project for poor people in a similar fashion on Friday.

Mr Khan was vaccinated on Thursday.

The South Asian nation of 220 million is seeing a sharp rise in coronavirus infections.

According to numbers released by the government, 3,876 people tested positive in the last 24 hours – the highest number of daily infections since early July – taking the total number of infections in the country past 620,000.

There were also 42 more deaths, taking the total to 13,799.

Pakistan launched vaccinations for the general public on March 10, starting with elderly people after seeing a poor response from frontline health workers, who expressed concerns about Chinese vaccines.

Chinese Sinopharm and CanSinoBio, Oxford-AstraZeneca and Russia’s Sputnik V vaccines have been approved for emergency use in Pakistan.

Source: Reuters
-Agencies