Lahore: The coronavirus pandemic is a public health crisis and until it’s addressed, there will most likely be economic hardships ahead, Pakistan’s central bank governor told media.
Pakistan has reported more than 213,000 cases of infection and nearly 4,400 people have died.
At the moment, the government is targeting coronavirus hotspots in the country and locking those areas down.
Baqir explained that prolonged national lockdowns are a “luxury of the rich.”
“For countries like Pakistan, the trade-off between lives and livelihood is a very real trade-off,” he said. The country has many day laborers who earn daily wages and lockdown would abruptly cut off their source of income. Without having a savings pool to dip into, many of those people would be looking at starvation, according to Baqir.
