A video of Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Overseas Pakistanis and Human Resource Development Sayed Zulfiqar Bukhari, known as Zulfi Bukhari, saying Prime Minister Imran Khan has tested negative for coronavirus has been removed from the PTI official Instagram account.
“Khan sahab has tested negative, thank God. I don’t need to give him any suggestions […] He knows exactly who to meet and who not to meet,” Bukhari had said in the video shared on Wednesday afternoon.
The video, a copy of which is available with Dawn.com, has since then been removed from the PTI account.
In a video message, he said: “The test takes a few hours. We will release the report through official channels once it is received.”
Prime Minister Imran was tested for Covid-19 a day earlier after it emerged that Faisal Edhi, son of world-famous philanthropist Abdul Sattar Edhi and chairman of the Edhi Foundation, had contracted the virus.
“Prime minister will undergo Covid-19 test as he met philanthropist Faisal Edhi who later tested positive for the deadly virus,” Dr Faisal Sultan, the prime minister’s focal person on Covid-19, had said on Tuesday at a news conference.
Faisal Edhi had visited the prime minister last week in Islamabad and handed over a cheque for Rs10 million to the prime minister for the coronavirus relief fund.
An official of the National Institute of Health (NIH) had said yesterday that as per the Standard Operating Procedure, all contacts of a confirmed Covid-19 patient should be tested. When asked about the definition of a contact, he said any person who had talked to a confirmed patient for 15 minutes in a closed room or stood at a distance of less than six feet was called a contact.
“Though according to Faisal Edhi, he spent just a few minutes with the premier, the picture we have seen in newspapers showed that the distance between the two personalities was less than six feet. Though they did not shake hands, the virus can be transferred through cheque,” the official had said.
Meanwhile, Faisal Edhi in a video statement urged his team to continue welfare activities and he would join them after having recovered from Covid-19.
Saad Edhi, a son of Faisal Edhi, told Dawn in Karachi that his father had developed Covid-19 symptoms a day after meeting PM Imran. The impact of symptoms, he added, continued for four days and then subsided. However, on Monday, he got tested in Islamabad and on Tuesday his report came as positive.
Saad said his father’s health was better and he was in self-isolation, adding that he was not admitted at any hospital.
