Thread by @Jhagra

1. A few things about this report on fatality rates in Pakistan worth understanding;
Understanding data well will be critical in this fight; as will be the need for all; politicians; administrators; media; to change business as usual behaviour. Read on!

dawn.com/news/1546578

2. From the report; indeed KP health staff has done the best it can; they are working day and night; & there has been no laxity.
But wrong to say that conducting fewer tests is best practice. Across Pakistan, there isn't enough testing, as is the case across much of the world.

3. Given that, we are rapidly increasing testing capacity. From 40 to 300+ /day; within this month we will be at over 1000+ /day. This can only be done keeping in mind HR, safety, quality compliance and test availability. The last thing we need is for contagion in test centres.

4. KP likely has had more fatalities not because the fatality rate is higher; or because the health system is better or worse; fatalities are the one indicator that the world is able to accurately measure; and this is driven by the dynamics of the #coronavirusinpakistan.

5. The first key trend on the data is to look at this chart from PIDE. Exclude Sukkur & DG Khan (because data is skewed by quarantine centres there); you'll see that cases in cities are proportionate to populations / travel risk. Nothing to do with the quality of healthcare.

6. Data shows more people returning from abroad to KP than to any other province over last 2-3 months, it's the nature of our labour market.
This is reflected in this PIDE chart on spread, where KP has the greatest number of districts affected (because of index cases from abroad)

7. What this implies is not necessarily a greater fatality rate. It is possible that rather than the fatality rate being different, the disproportionate death rates in different areas can actually help us to understand the true number of cases across Pakistan.

8. And that is why we are ramping up capacity to test more.