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Pakistan Strategy: COVID-19 update; Is the virus curve flattening?

• The new COVID-19 cases in Pakistan have slowed down in the last few days with 3,946 new cases recorded on Jun 22 compared to a high of 6,825 on Jun 13.
• During the last nine days, Pakistan has recorded a Day on Day decline on seven of these days.
• We believe drop in cases is possibly due to abnormal increase in early Jun, due to the ease in lockdown just before EID.
• The government eased the lockdown substantially on May 9, 2020 ahead of the EID holidays to help pick up business activity and to allow people to travel.
• The government has also announced lockdown in parts of 20 cities starting Jun 16, identified as hotspots, where there have been substantial recent cases reported. This may help limit the increase in cases going forward.
• The decline in cases also comes at a time when testing is higher compared to earlier days. Pakistan has ramped up its testing capacity to ~30k/day, from ~10k/day at the end of May.
• The government plans to take this up to 100k/ day over the next month. In spite of the increase, the testing capacity remains short of WHO recommendations.
• The change in Active Cases (Total Cases – Recoveries – Deaths) too have turned favorable, as both new cases have declined and recoveries have increased.
• Providing for a 10 to 15-days recovery day period, these recoveries are the cases recorded during the start of the month, when cases were at their peak. 

While the increase in cases have started to decrease, the number of deaths on daily basis have increased over the last few weeks and have largely remained sticky so far.