ISLAMABAD: A meeting of the Inter-Provincial Education Ministers Conference (IPEMC) to decide on the closure of schools in view of rising infections of coronavirus scheduled for Thursday was postponed until next week, a notification said.
The notification said a next date of the meeting will be announced later. But the ministry did not give any reason for the postponement of the meet.
The development comes as authorities warned of a fifth wave of infections and made preparations to try to contain the fast-spreading Omicron variant.
Only today, Pakistan reported over 3,000 new cases, the highest single-day total in the last four months, according to official data.
The nation registered 3,019 infections in the past 24 hours, bringing the caseload to 1.13 million, Ministry of National Health Services data showed.
“There is clear evidence now of a beginning of another Covid wave which has been expected for the last few weeks,” Asad Umar, the minister in charge of supervising anti-Covid-19 operations, wrote on Twitter in December.
About 70 million people in Pakistan, or 32 percent of the population, have had two vaccine doses.
The government authorised booster doses for citizens over the age of 30 from Monday. Children over the age of 12 are being offered vaccinations at their schools.
The government of Sindh is working on a strategy to contain the variant, which has included a partial lockdown of a Karachi neighbourhood after about a dozen Omicron cases were detected in a family.
