With an alarming rise in the number of coronavirus cases in Lahore where the total reached 347 as reported by 24NewsHD TV channel on Thursday, the question remains why the city is experiencing this trend.

And the answer is given by a BBC report in which a government official said that the cases were mostly reported from the posh areas and that too for two reasons:

a)     They travel abroad on a regular basis and brought the infection with them, while also resulting in community spread.

b)    The residents of these posh localities do not follow the social distancing guidelines. As a result, parties and other gatherings are going on unchecked.

These points were shared by Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) Punjab Director Nisar Ahmed who told BBC that around 150,000 people had entered Punjab from abroad during the recent days. Out of which, 70,000 had been traced so far.

Nisar said influential and affluent people had managed to leave the airports after paying bribes and it was difficult to trace them out.

In one of such posh localities, over 30 coronavirus cases have so far been reported. In this connection, SP Saddar Ghazanfar Shah told BBC that two streets were sealed in the locality, as the coronavirus cases were found in two or three houses there.

He added that they were employing the ‘contact tracing’ mechanism to get information about the people with whom the infected persons had contacted during the last 14 days.

Meanwhile, most of the coronavirus patients in the city are being treated at Mayo Hospital. Lahore has so far witnessed 10 deaths because of the pandemic.