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COVID-19 Deaths, Patients Grossly Under-Reported in Pakistan

Ayesha Tanzeem

   ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN - When Saifullah Khan's friend and his father in
   Quetta got sick after going to a funeral in Chaman, a town bordering
   Afghanistan, he asked them to get tested for the new coronavirus. His
   friend refused.

   Two weeks later, his father died.

   "He had all the symptoms of COVID-19, but they never got him tested and
   never disclosed it to anyone even after his death. They had a regular
   funeral," said Khan, a resident of the capital Islamabad who has most
   of his family in Quetta.

   This may be one of millions of cases in Pakistan of people not getting
   tested for coronavirus and not getting recorded in the national
   database of infected persons.

   Several statistical models, official statements, leaked government
   documents, and interviews with people in various cities suggest that
   the number of COVID-19 patients and deaths in Pakistan are grossly
   under-reported.

   "The actual numbers will be two to three times more than what the
   government is reporting," Atta ur Rahman, chairman of Prime Minister
   Imran Khan's task force on science and technology, told Bloomberg news
   Wednesday.

   The current official figure puts the countrywide infections at
   approximately 160,000 and deaths as approximately 3,000. However, data
   scientists and other analysts fear the real number may already be in
   millions of infections and tens of thousands of deaths.

   Random testing in Pakistan's second-largest city, Lahore, by the health
   department of Punjab province in May showed that at least 6 percent of
   all tests came back positive for COVID-19 while in some areas the
   percentage was as high as 14 percent.

   Based on the city's population and the sampling data, the health
   department working group, comprised of epidemiologists, public health
   specialists, applied economists, statisticians, and public policy
   specialists, calculated the number of cases in Lahore to be 670,800 on
   May 15.

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