The issue of the uk allowing flights from India while barring an equivalent from Pakistan has snowballed into a much bigger India-Pakistan issue as Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s special assistant Dr Faisal Sultan has written to UK health secretary Sajid Javid comparing Pakistan’s Covid situation with other countries, including India. Pakistan’s human rights minister Shireen Mazari took to Twitter to share Dr Sultan’s response and termed UK’s approach to India and Pakistan as ‘partial’. “UK’s Conservative govt with a robust Indophiles’ presence playing discriminatory politics against Pakistan on Covid,” the minister wrote.
Both India and Pakistan were on the red list of the uk till the primary week of August which suggests no passengers from these two countries were allowed within the UK. The restrictions were imposed within the wake of the second wave of the pandemic. From August 8, India has been moved to the amber list allowing India flyers to enter the uk .
Pakistan minister Fawad Chaudhry had tweeted a web petition that involves removing Pakistan from the red list.
Comparing Pakistan’s Covid situation thereupon of India, Iran and Iraq, Dr Faisal said that Pakistan’s daily cases per million people (21.18) are rock bottom within the region. In his statement, he said India’s daily cases per million people is 28.84, while the figure for Iran and Iraq are 421.98 and 276.19, respectively.
The UK government in its statement on why it kept Pakistan on the red list said, “In Pakistan, the mixture of a deteriorating epidemiological situation, combined with low testing rates and limited genomic surveillance, presents a high risk that an epidemic of a replacement variant, or existing VoC, won’t be identified before it’s imported to the united kingdom .” It also said the present trajectory of the pandemic in Pakistan is additionally of particular concern. within the past 7 days, the incidence of cases in Pakistan has increased by 87 per cent on the previous week (19-25 July).
Pakistan has no interest in allowing those of its nationals who pose a health risk to other societies to travel abroad, any longer than allowing potential threats to public health entry within its jurisdiction,” Dr Faisal wrote back .
