UK report: Pakistan was the origin for HALF of Britain's imported coronavirus cases

[MenInG]

There are calls for tougher quarantine checks on arrivals from 'high-risk' countries as it emerges half of Britain's imported coronavirus cases originate from Pakistan.

Half the incidents of imported infections are understood to have come from Pakistan since June 4 as data from Public Health England showed 30 cases.

Since March 1, 190 flights have arrived from Pakistan which is reporting 4,000 coronavirus cases a day and has had a new spike since easing lockdown.

More than 65,000 people travelled to Britain and most are thought to have British passports, The Telegraph reported.

There have been reports of some going straight to hospital from arriving and into intensive care as up to two flights from the country arrive in Britain every day.

This week Dubai carrier Emirates suspended flights out of Pakistan after 30 passengers on a flight to Hong Kong tested positive on June 22.

Pakistan International Airlines has been flying directly into and out of the UK since early April.

At first, these were flights organised to repatriate British and Pakistani nationals but they have now resumed more regular daily flights.

A spokesman said passengers were screened with heat sensors and had to wear masks with anyone recording a high temperature prevented from boarding.

A government spokesman told The Telegraph: 'The new health measures at the border are informed by science, backed by the public and designed to keep us all safe.
'We are seeing a high level of compliance and we expect this to continue as the vast majority of people will play their part to help.'

Pakistan have recorded almost 200,000 cases of the virus and nearly 4,000 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus resource centre.

Pakistan's planning minister Asad Umar warned two weeks ago that Pakistan could see a million coronavirus cases by the end of July amid warnings people are ignoring rules on social distancing.

The country is home to more than 212million people. Experts say cases are expected to double to 300,000 by the end of June and reach 1.2million a month later.

Hospitals across the country say they are at or near capacity and some are turning coronavirus patients away.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...HALF-Britains-imported-coronavirus-cases.html

 

[MenInG]

This is pretty serious but maybe we should also be told what is the size of imported cases in comparison to local ones.

 

[saeedhk]

The same case in Hong Kong. Pakistan is the second largest COVID-19 import source country.

 

[saeedhk]

Hong Kong government had banned flights from Pakistan in early May. Now, flights have resumed.

 

[Saj]

Scary numbers.

How can they control it without stopping flights from Pakistan.

 

[Abdullah719]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Awful reporting. Half equates to 30 cases. 65,000 Brits travelled from Pakistan since March. We should have had quarantine in place but why demonise a community based on 30 Brit citizens many who were hospitalised. I am ashamed to be assoc with the UK media on days like today. <a href="https://t.co/C5vggNs57H">https://t.co/C5vggNs57H</a></p>— Adil Ray OBE (@adilray) <a href="https://twitter.com/adilray/status/1276817534638067717?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 27, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Needed a bigger sample for this. 30 isn't much in the bigger picture.

 

[finalfantasy7]

so just a useless story

 

[Syed1]

So 65,000 Pakistani/Brit-Pakistanis travelled to the UK and 30 of them were positive. Mashallah quite objective journalism. Seems like Geo News has opened offices in the UK.

 

[Syed1]

Should we start blaming the UK as well? At the start of the pandemic two lads from the UK came to Karachi and went partying on the beach etc and attended shaadis they were directly responsible for hundreds of people getting the virus. Did we start blaming the UK?

 

[Cpt. Rishwat]

Great headline aimed at giving the white nationalists a boost after they have took a bit of a pummelling from the BLM movement.

 

[chacha kashmiri]

Pakistanis spreading their suicide pact jihad again
They should all be quarantined for a fortnight

 

[Abdullah719]

COVID-19 surfaced in Pakistan after hitting UK first: Zulfikar Bukhari

ISLAMABAD: Special Assistant to the Prime Minister (SAPM) on Overseas Pakistanis and Human Resource Development (OP&HRD) Sayed Zulfikar Abbas Bukhari Tuesday said the deadly coronavirus (COVID-19) had surfaced in Pakistan after the pandemic hit the Britain in start of February.

“There was not even a single case of the virus before it reported in the United Kingdom. The pandemic hit the UK in start of February, while it reached Pakistan by end of the same month,” he said while rejecting the British media reports about the virus outbreak in the kingdom.

In a press release, he said the UK-based publications including The Telegraph, The Sun and Daily Mail had published baseless and misleading news stories in which they claimed that the UK had imported half of the coronavirus cases from Pakistan.

“How can it export the virus to the UK when there was not even a single case reported in Pakistan [at that time],” he questioned.

The SAPM said the publications had done cheap and non-professional reporting by linking the rapid spread of virus in the UK with Pakistan.

Several newspapers had given indication that the life of some 1.5 million British-Pakistanis were in danger after publication of such news story.

Citing the research study of the Oxford University, he said the UK had imported most of the coronavirus cases from other countries including France, Italy and Spain.

The global pandemic in the UK had at least 1,300 origins when it came to import of the virus.

He said the UK had reported some 80 per cent of the coroanvirus cases between February 28 and March 29 while Pakistan had closed its airspace in mid-March.

“Nobody was allowed to travel overseas during the closure of airspace by Pakistan,” he added. Zulfikar Bukhari said Pakistan’s airspace was closed when the coronavirus cases witnessed a spike in the UK.

https://www.brecorder.com/news/4000...istan-after-hitting-uk-first-zulfikar-bukhari

 

[Bhaijaan]

How bad is the Covid situation in Pakistan? India is hitting alarming levels peak right now. Really tough times.

 

[IMMY69]

Great headline aimed at giving the white nationalists a boost after they have took a bit of a pummelling from the BLM movement.

I had the displeasure of going on to The Sun Online and clicking on the article about some BLM protest a couple of weeks ago.
That was ok but then they had a comments button so I pressed it...

Oh my goodness the number of blatant racist comments left me speechless.

Today I clicked on the Leicester lockdown story and then the comments... It makes my blood boil but I just can’t resist it.

 

[JaDed]

I had the displeasure of going on to The Sun Online and clicking on the article about some BLM protest a couple of weeks ago.
That was ok but then they had a comments button so I pressed it...

Oh my goodness the number of blatant racist comments left me speechless.

Today I clicked on the Leicester lockdown story and then the comments... It makes my blood boil but I just can’t resist it.

The part about comments , deserves a thread of its own , current generation that have not seen a life outside social media wonder how they handle it mentally although tiktok has no concept of comments.

 

[IMMY69]

The part about comments , deserves a thread of its own , current generation that have not seen a life outside social media wonder how they handle it mentally although tiktok has no concept of comments.

I’ve kept this from my teenagers although both are old enough to handle it... just that they’re born and bred in England and something like this would shock them as much as it did me.

You’re right though this topic deserves a thread of its own

 

[in_cutter]

What a load of nonsense. The numbers in the article make no sense..it is the Daily Fail afterall.

 

[Abdullah719]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">This sort of journalism is so wrong. It’s race-baiting, divisive and unacceptable. Must be so hurtful and damaging to the vast majority of journalists who are fair and honourable. <a href="https://t.co/PKRhEAQCyj">https://t.co/PKRhEAQCyj</a></p>— Gary Lineker (@GaryLineker) <a href="https://twitter.com/GaryLineker/status/1280195281812848642?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 6, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[Syed1]

How bad is the Covid situation in Pakistan? India is hitting alarming levels peak right now. Really tough times.

We are on other side of the peak (decreasing active cases)

 

[MenInG]

When the Telegraph encourages us to believe that we have a problem with people arriving from Pakistan and spreading COVID-19, we know what it is up to.

The lead item on the Telegraph news site on 26 June announced: ‘Exclusive: Half of UK’s imported COVID-19 infections are from Pakistan’.

As the paper must have expected it would be, this was swiftly repeated in the Sun and MailOnline, to be seen by millions more readers. Just as predictably, it soon featured in far-right anti-Muslim propaganda, which declared – among other things – that this was the explanation for the renewed lockdown in Leicester.

Once again corporate national newspapers were stoking hatred of Britain’s Muslim minority through dishonest and distorted journalism. Because – and the Telegraph must have known this – the claim in its headline bore no relation to reality.

People coming from Pakistan have accounted for a minuscule proportion of all COVID-19 infections ‘imported’ into England.
In fact, the Telegraph’s claim related only to a three-week period in June (though for five days the editor refused to change the headline to make this clear).

Even in that three-week period the known ‘imported infections’ from Pakistan represented fewer than 0.05% of all the new cases of
COVID-19 in England.

The Telegraph did not state what organisation or expert, if any, supplied the key figure in its headline claim.

The overwhelming overseas source of infection in England has European countries – notably Italy, France and Spain – with COVID-19 often brought home by British people returning from abroad.

And while it is correct that, over three weeks in June, contact tracers at Public Health England (PHE) detected about 30 cases of someone suffering from COVID-19 having recently arrived from Pakistan, this was a drop in the ocean in a period when new COVID-19 cases of all kinds in England were occurring at a rate of 22,000 per week.

Put that another way: for every one new case from Pakistan that the health service had to worry about, there were 2,200 others waiting to be dealt with.

What is more, the Telegraph, in claiming that cases from Pakistan accounted for half of all ‘imported infections’, provided no evidence whatever.

The third paragraph in its article reads: “Data from Public Health England (PHE) shows that 30 cases of Coronavirus in people who have travelled from Pakistan since June 4, which is understood to represent half of the incidents of imported infection.”

Although this wording probably led many readers to believe that the figure of half – like the figure 30 – came from Public Health England, the Telegraph didn’t quite say that. And with good reason. PHE has told me that it did not supply the figure of ‘half’ – in fact it says it “has not published data regarding imported cases from Pakistan or any other country”.

Yet, the ‘half’ is the key point in the headline. It is what justifies painting the ugly picture of a flood of infected Pakistanis entering Britain and spreading disease. So where did it come from?

The Department of Health and Social Care? The Office for National Statistics? The Government’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE)? A respectable academic study?

There are plenty of COVID-19 databases and plenty of experts, but the Telegraph was not quoting any of them. If has offered no source at all and no link. It merely ‘understands’.

Sourceless Reporting

The article, credited jointly to home affairs editor Charles Hymas and Islamabad correspondent Ben Farmer, was peppered with these ‘undertandings’.

The word appeared in both the first and third paragraphs, while in the fifth, it was stated that officials “are understood to be worried”, and lower down, more officials “are understood to have” done something else.

To vary the menu of tenuous attribution, there was also an “are thought to have” in the second paragraph, while the fourth paragraph contained not only a “there have been reports of” but also an “amid concerns that”. We are never told who is thought to have, who has reported and who has these concerns. All are anonymous, their identity and existence known only to the Telegraph.

This is gravity-free journalism, its content untethered to the real world. Any conscientious editor requires reporters to quote real people and identify them clearly unless there is a strong reason for anonymity. That is essential for credibility. Yet, in the whole of this article, only two elements were properly attributed and even with those the Telegraph was scarcely candid.

One was that PHE found 30 ‘imported infections’ from Pakistan. According to a PHE spokesperson, on 26 June, it informed the Telegraph in writing that “there have been a small number of cases (approx. 30) detected in the UK with recent travel from Pakistan”.

A “small number of cases” of approximately 30 became simply “30” for the Telegraph.

Just One ‘Call’
The other named source of information in the article was Bharat Pankhania of Exeter University’s medical school. Strikingly, though the Telegraph quoted his view on the need to focus screening on arrivals from high-risk countries, Dr Pankhania did not mention Pakistan once.

He told me: “There is no way I would have said this was specifically pertinent to Pakistan, because it isn’t.” Asked about the true, current picture of ‘imported infections’, he replied: “No one knows.”

Dr Pankhania’s remarks also provide the only on-the-record justification for the claim in the Telegraph’s opening paragraph that there have been “calls for tougher quarantine checks on arrivals from ‘high risk’ countries”. On the evidence supplied in the Telegraph‘s article, there have not been “calls” – there has been, at most, one “call”.

Furthermore, if 30 cases over three weeks really represented half of all ‘imported infections’, that suggests an average total of 20 ‘imported infections’ per week from all countries worldwide. This was at a time when total weekly entries into the UK almost certainly numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

If the Telegraph believed this, then it had a real news story on its hands, which was that the Government’s quarantine measures for foreign arrivals – introduced at the beginning of this period, on 8 June – were probably a waste of time and money given that only a tiny proportion of those arrivals were actually carrying the disease. But that’s not what it published.

Shoddy and Wrong
Such journalism – shoddy, distorted, unsourced and wrong – is tolerated, promoted and defended at the modern Telegraph. Like the Sun and the Mail, the newspaper barely tries to conceal its determination to transform any disparate collection of half-baked whisps of information into a stick with which to beat Muslims.

The story provoked many protests and all three news organisations made modest alterations to what they had published online – with the Telegraph the slowest and most grudging. But, at best, these belated changes only mitigate damage that has already been done.

They don’t learn because they don’t want to learn. As the way in which this article was constructed demonstrates, they want to smear Muslims and don’t seem to care about the harm they may provoke – up to and including violent hate crimes. This is what they do. These organisations are in the business of hate propaganda.

Brian Cathcart is Professor of Journalism at Kingston University London

https://bylinetimes.com/2020/07/06/...9-and-pakistan-the-making-of-hate-propaganda/

 

[finalfantasy7]

When the Telegraph encourages us to believe that we have a problem with people arriving from Pakistan and spreading COVID-19, we know what it is up to.

The lead item on the Telegraph news site on 26 June announced: ‘Exclusive: Half of UK’s imported COVID-19 infections are from Pakistan’.

As the paper must have expected it would be, this was swiftly repeated in the Sun and MailOnline, to be seen by millions more readers. Just as predictably, it soon featured in far-right anti-Muslim propaganda, which declared – among other things – that this was the explanation for the renewed lockdown in Leicester.

Once again corporate national newspapers were stoking hatred of Britain’s Muslim minority through dishonest and distorted journalism. Because – and the Telegraph must have known this – the claim in its headline bore no relation to reality.

People coming from Pakistan have accounted for a minuscule proportion of all COVID-19 infections ‘imported’ into England.
In fact, the Telegraph’s claim related only to a three-week period in June (though for five days the editor refused to change the headline to make this clear).

Even in that three-week period the known ‘imported infections’ from Pakistan represented fewer than 0.05% of all the new cases of
COVID-19 in England.

The Telegraph did not state what organisation or expert, if any, supplied the key figure in its headline claim.

The overwhelming overseas source of infection in England has European countries – notably Italy, France and Spain – with COVID-19 often brought home by British people returning from abroad.

And while it is correct that, over three weeks in June, contact tracers at Public Health England (PHE) detected about 30 cases of someone suffering from COVID-19 having recently arrived from Pakistan, this was a drop in the ocean in a period when new COVID-19 cases of all kinds in England were occurring at a rate of 22,000 per week.

Put that another way: for every one new case from Pakistan that the health service had to worry about, there were 2,200 others waiting to be dealt with.

What is more, the Telegraph, in claiming that cases from Pakistan accounted for half of all ‘imported infections’, provided no evidence whatever.

The third paragraph in its article reads: “Data from Public Health England (PHE) shows that 30 cases of Coronavirus in people who have travelled from Pakistan since June 4, which is understood to represent half of the incidents of imported infection.”

Although this wording probably led many readers to believe that the figure of half – like the figure 30 – came from Public Health England, the Telegraph didn’t quite say that. And with good reason. PHE has told me that it did not supply the figure of ‘half’ – in fact it says it “has not published data regarding imported cases from Pakistan or any other country”.

Yet, the ‘half’ is the key point in the headline. It is what justifies painting the ugly picture of a flood of infected Pakistanis entering Britain and spreading disease. So where did it come from?

The Department of Health and Social Care? The Office for National Statistics? The Government’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE)? A respectable academic study?

There are plenty of COVID-19 databases and plenty of experts, but the Telegraph was not quoting any of them. If has offered no source at all and no link. It merely ‘understands’.

Sourceless Reporting

The article, credited jointly to home affairs editor Charles Hymas and Islamabad correspondent Ben Farmer, was peppered with these ‘undertandings’.

The word appeared in both the first and third paragraphs, while in the fifth, it was stated that officials “are understood to be worried”, and lower down, more officials “are understood to have” done something else.

To vary the menu of tenuous attribution, there was also an “are thought to have” in the second paragraph, while the fourth paragraph contained not only a “there have been reports of” but also an “amid concerns that”. We are never told who is thought to have, who has reported and who has these concerns. All are anonymous, their identity and existence known only to the Telegraph.

This is gravity-free journalism, its content untethered to the real world. Any conscientious editor requires reporters to quote real people and identify them clearly unless there is a strong reason for anonymity. That is essential for credibility. Yet, in the whole of this article, only two elements were properly attributed and even with those the Telegraph was scarcely candid.

One was that PHE found 30 ‘imported infections’ from Pakistan. According to a PHE spokesperson, on 26 June, it informed the Telegraph in writing that “there have been a small number of cases (approx. 30) detected in the UK with recent travel from Pakistan”.

A “small number of cases” of approximately 30 became simply “30” for the Telegraph.

Just One ‘Call’
The other named source of information in the article was Bharat Pankhania of Exeter University’s medical school. Strikingly, though the Telegraph quoted his view on the need to focus screening on arrivals from high-risk countries, Dr Pankhania did not mention Pakistan once.

He told me: “There is no way I would have said this was specifically pertinent to Pakistan, because it isn’t.” Asked about the true, current picture of ‘imported infections’, he replied: “No one knows.”

Dr Pankhania’s remarks also provide the only on-the-record justification for the claim in the Telegraph’s opening paragraph that there have been “calls for tougher quarantine checks on arrivals from ‘high risk’ countries”. On the evidence supplied in the Telegraph‘s article, there have not been “calls” – there has been, at most, one “call”.

Furthermore, if 30 cases over three weeks really represented half of all ‘imported infections’, that suggests an average total of 20 ‘imported infections’ per week from all countries worldwide. This was at a time when total weekly entries into the UK almost certainly numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

If the Telegraph believed this, then it had a real news story on its hands, which was that the Government’s quarantine measures for foreign arrivals – introduced at the beginning of this period, on 8 June – were probably a waste of time and money given that only a tiny proportion of those arrivals were actually carrying the disease. But that’s not what it published.

Shoddy and Wrong
Such journalism – shoddy, distorted, unsourced and wrong – is tolerated, promoted and defended at the modern Telegraph. Like the Sun and the Mail, the newspaper barely tries to conceal its determination to transform any disparate collection of half-baked whisps of information into a stick with which to beat Muslims.

The story provoked many protests and all three news organisations made modest alterations to what they had published online – with the Telegraph the slowest and most grudging. But, at best, these belated changes only mitigate damage that has already been done.

They don’t learn because they don’t want to learn. As the way in which this article was constructed demonstrates, they want to smear Muslims and don’t seem to care about the harm they may provoke – up to and including violent hate crimes. This is what they do. These organisations are in the business of hate propaganda.

Brian Cathcart is Professor of Journalism at Kingston University London

https://bylinetimes.com/2020/07/06/...9-and-pakistan-the-making-of-hate-propaganda/

Yet this wont make any proper headlines here in the UK, no mp / regulator will bring this up

 

[Napa]

So the media took 30 cases out of 65,000 travellers and presented it in a manner that gave a wrong impression.

Totally shocking! Reminds me of the media picking up 2 rape cases in a country of 1.3 billion, ignoring the per capita figures and concluding the country is unsafe for women...

 

[gani999]

So 65,000 Pakistani/Brit-Pakistanis travelled to the UK and 30 of them were positive. Mashallah quite objective journalism. Seems like Geo News has opened offices in the UK.

30 cases is quite a lot, given that coronavirus spreads exponentially with a very high infection rate.

Those 30 imported cases could have resulted in 100,000 getting infected within a week.

Almost half of South Korea's 85,000 infections were traced to *one* infected Chinese tourist who spent a week holidaying in Seoul.

 

[Syed1]

30 cases is quite a lot, given that coronavirus spreads exponentially with a very high infection rate.

Those 30 imported cases could have resulted in 100,000 getting infected within a week.

Almost half of South Korea's 85,000 infections were traced to *one* infected Chinese tourist who spent a week holidaying in Seoul.

UK exported alot more than 30 cases to us. Heck single flights were having 100+ positive cases.

 

[the Great Khan]

fake news. Please delete this nonsensical thread. its been debunked all over social media.

 

[Abdullah719]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Our Tweet 26/6 "Pakistan…origin of half of Britain’s imported virus cases” (below) was misleading as it suggested that half of all the UK’s imported cases originated in Pakistan. In fact, the figures only related to the period 4-26/6.<br><br>This Tweet follows an IPSO ruling</p>— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) <a href="https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1341381857133342721?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 22, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[ahsan17]

So they had to have a ruling against them to fix their lie? Calling the original article "misleading" is also a lie, since that suggests it was a mistake. It was clearly intentional as the statistics were completely made up.

 

[shaykh]

Well saying that 0.005% of Brits traveling from Pakistan carried coronavirus doesn’t quite have the same sensationalist ring to it ...