China And Pakistan Shake Hands In The Time Of Coronavirus

By Zofeen T. Ebrahim/thethirdpole.net

Just a few days after Pakistan president Arif Alvi’s visit to China, where he shook hands with Xi Jinping in this time of physical distancing, the Chinese government has sent medical supplies that have already arrived in Karachi. The planeload of supplies included the most sought-after item in several countries today: 500,000 face masks, including 50,000 N-95 masks, donated to the provincial government of Sindh by China.

President Alvi’s visit, the first by any country head to Beijing after the Covid-19 outbreak, was seen by diplomacy experts as an expression of Pakistan’s solidarity at a difficult time for China.

“Pakistan was one of the few countries [which decided] not to get its nationals out of China,” said Michael Kugelman, senior associate for South Asia at the Washington DC-based Woodrow Wilson Centre. He added that in all likelihood, it wanted to “telegraph a message of solidarity” which indicated that China was Pakistan’s “top ally”.

Mushahid Hussain, chairman of the Pakistani Senate’s standing committee on foreign affairs, told thethirdpole.net, “We not only showed confidence in our friendship but this was a medically correct decision as there isn’t a single case in Pakistan of Covid-19 that came from China.”

The decision appears to have produced results. China is giving preferential treatment to Pakistan in the provision of urgently needed medical supplies. The medical equipment sent by China is on the wish-list of all doctors across the world today and in high demand in Pakistan. By the morning of March 30, there were 1,593 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the country.

[“It feels very hot, restrictive and suffocating. You cannot go out, touch anything or go to toilet or even eat anything,” said Shobha Luxmi, a doctor at the Dow University of Health Sciences in Karachi (image courtesy: Shobha Luxmi)]

In January, when that figure was zero, the shadow of the Coronavirus outbreak in China loomed heavy on Pakistan. A report published by thethirdpole.net at the end of January noted that the large movement of people enabled by the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor would be severely affected by the pandemic.

According to Aamir Jafarey of the biomedical ethics and culture centre at the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT), Pakistan desperately needs personal protective equipment (PPE).  “[We need real PPE], not jugaad [improvised] ones that we are using in this country,” he said.

Gap in supplies persists

Infectious disease specialist Syed Faisal Mahmood at Karachi’s Aga Khan University Hospital is leading the medics from the front and said he  hoped the government had also put an order for the purchase of ‘viral transport media‘ —  a system suitable for collection, transport, maintenance and long-term freeze storage of clinical specimens containing viruses. “Even if you have thousands of test kits, you can’t do the test if you can’t collect the samples,” he pointed out.

Ventilators are another major requirement. The province of Sindh, which has the highest number of confirmed Coronavirus cases in Pakistan, has 484 ventilators, of which 353 are working, 52 are out of order and 43 yet to be installed. While the chief minister has approved the purchase of 290 more, he acknowledged that at least 5,000 are needed.

But these purchases and donations failed to calm Aamir Jafarey. “Machines don’t save lives; doctors do and a dead doctor, or even a sick one, is of little help,” said the academic. “We can import thousands of ventilators but we don’t have trained personnel in Pakistan who can run all of these. We have to realise that these ventilators can’t just be plonked anywhere and hooked on to humans. The environment needs to be conducive for these machines which means intensive care units with the correct sort pressures and so on,” he said.

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