Daily Times

The National Command and Operations Centre (NCOC) thoroughly deserved the rich tributes showered upon it by the prime minister, president and the army chief for having completed 500 days of work on August 8. Prime Minister Imran Khan very rightly called it the “linchpin” of Pakistan’s coronavirus response strategy because without its meticulous data collection and attention to detail, the smart lockdown novelty that won praise from all over the world would never have been properly implemented. The reason is that if it hadn’t been for NCOC’s data analytics driven approach and its ability to monitor real-time statistics, identifying hotspots that needed smart lockdowns would have been an infinitely more complex challenge.

Yet while the country has been able to do much better than perhaps all other countries in the world so far, there is no guarantee that the trajectory will remain just as impressive. As we are well aware, the Delta variant that has come with the so-called fourth wave of the coronavirus is upsetting comeback plans practically across the globe. It spreads very fast and even affects children, something that is also raising questions about the international economic recovery without which states will simply be unable to provide medical cover to thousands of people that continue to fall prey to the virus.

That is why the NCOC’s duty is becoming tougher with time and the last thing it has time to think about is sitting pretty and enjoying the laurels of its hard work. For if the Delta variant is really able to overwhelm our medical infrastructure, which seems imminent unless the greatest care is taken right now, then all its hard work of the previous 500 days will also go waste. Such is the weight of its assignment, and so grave the consequences of complacency, that everybody in the NCOC must simply digest the praise, keep their heads down, and keep up the good work. If we have come out more or less unscathed from the coronavirus so far, there is no reason for us not to be smart and vigilant enough to wriggle well enough to avoid the axe this time as well. We are, after all, very lucky to be guided through this storm by a body as able as NCOC. Its results speak for themselves. *