As COVID-19 subsides, Pak cities faces dengue scare

dpa Islamabad An outbreak of dengue fever has hit major Pakistani cities, overwhelming hospitals and further exhausting health workers already fatigued by...

dpa IslamabadAn outbreak of dengue fever has hit major Pakistani cities, overwhelming hospitals and further exhausting health workers already fatigued by the coronavirus pandemic, officials said on Wednesday.Hospitals in the capital Islamabad and eastern city of Lahore were running out of beds in the isolation wards as patients with the symptoms of the deadly fever continued to stream in.Dozens of new cases of the mosquito-borne fever were being admitted to hospitals in Islamabad and the nearby city of Rawalpindi, the capital’s health chief, Zaeem Zia, said.More than 2,000 people were being treated in the central province of Punjab, where damp soil after heavy monsoon rains provides fertile ground for mosquitoes to multiply.“It is an alarming situation. Our teams have found larva of the mosquito that causes dengue at around 2,000 locations,” the provincial health minister, Yasmin Rashid, said.Dengue fever causes the blood platelets of the patient to drop to a dangerously low level that, if not treated in a timely manner, results in death.Hundreds of people die of dengue every year across the South Asian region, where health-care systems aren’t well equipped to deal with the disease.Dengue fever is hitting Pakistan as the intensity of a fourth wave of the coronavirus has started to subside.Less than 3 per cent of people who were tested for Covid-19 on Tuesday turned out to be positive, a ratio much lower than around 10 per cent in July.