Imran Khan becomes first South Asian PM to be infected with Covid-19
Khan is “self isolating at home”
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has tested positive for Covid-19, the country's health minister said on Saturday, two days after the premier got his vaccination.
Khan is "self isolating at home," said minister Faisal Sultan in a tweet, without giving further details as to whether other people who have been in contact with Khan would also be isolating.
Khan, 68, has been holding regular and frequent meetings lately, including attending a security conference held in capital Islamabad that was attended by a large number of people.
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He addressed the conference without wearing a mask, and attended another gathering to inaugurate a housing project for poor people in a similar fashion on Friday.
Khan was vaccinated on Thursday.
The South Asian nation of 220 million is seeing a sharp rise in coronavirus infections.
According to numbers released by government, 3,876 people tested positive in the last 24 hours – the highest number of daily infections since early July – taking the total number of infections in the country past 620,000.
There were also 42 more deaths, taking the total to 13,799.
Pakistan launched vaccinations for the general public on March 10, starting with elderly people after seeing a poor response from frontline health workers, who expressed concerns about Chinese vaccines.
Chinese Sinopharm and CanSinoBio, Oxford-AstraZeneca and Russia's Sputnik V vaccines have been approved for emergency use in Pakistan.
Even though Pakistan PM Imran Khan becomes the first South Asian PM to be infected with Covid-19, he is not the first prolific world leader who contracted the virus in recent times.
Former President of the United States, Donald Trump, the most influential world leader, who refrained from wearing masks in public places and termed the coronavirus as a 'hoax' and 'China virus' had tested Covid-19 positive back on 2 October 2020.
French President Emmanuel Macron had tested positive for Covid-19 on 17 December 2020.
Alongside Trump, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro were one of the most prominent in conducting the anti-coronavirus campaign. On 27 March 2020, the United Kingdom's 55-year-old prime minister announced that he had tested positive for coronavirus and was self-isolating.
Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro who had repeatedly played down risks of Covid-19 and has called it the "little flu", tested positive for coronavirus on 8 July 2020.
President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, who dismissed fears about the virus as "psychosis" and advised drinking vodka to remain healthy, disclosed in 28 July 2020 that he had contracted it but was asymptomatic.
