LAHORE – The National Highways and Motorway Police reportedly imposed a ban on entry of public service vehicles on M4 section to control the spread of Covid-19.
A spokesperson of the motorways authority told media that private light travelling vehicles are allowed to enter, adding that freight vehicles will also be exempted from the ban.
The M4 is a north–south motorway in Pakistan that connects the cities of Faisalabad and Multan. The 309 km motorway also connects to the M2, M3 and M5 motorways.
The official said that the ban has been imposed in the light of the directives issued by the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC).
The latest curbs come a day after educational institutions were closed in cities with higher Covid-19 positivity rate across the country.
For the fourth day in a row, Pakistan’s COVID-19 positivity rate was less than 7%, according to official statistics released Saturday morning.
In the past 24 hours, 64,053 COVID-19 tests were performed across the country, with 3,980 of them returning positive, according to the National Command and Operation Centre. This week, the country has seen an average of fewer than 4,000 daily infections.
The percentage of positive cases in the previous 24 hours, according to the official site, was 6.21 percent. Pakistan’s positivity rate has been below 7% on 10 of the last 12 days since August 24.
COVID-19 has claimed the lives of 26,114 individuals in the country, after 79 people died from the virus, bringing the overall number of cases to 1,175,558.
Pakistan is reporting an average of 3,885 new infections each day, which is 66 percent more than the peak – the highest daily average since June 17.
So far, the country has sent out at least 59,384,758 doses of the COVID vaccine. Assuming that each individual requires two doses, it will be enough to vaccinate 13.7 percent of the country’s population.
Pakistan gave an average of 1,072,051 dosages per day over the latest week reported. At this pace, administering enough dosages for another 10% of the population will take another 41 days.
