The inter-provincial education ministers’ meeting has decided to keep all educational institutions of ‘high-risk areas’ of Punjab, KP and Islamabad closed until April 11, 2021, due to an alarming rise in coronavirus cases in the country.

The Punjab Minister for School Education, Murad Raas, announced this on Twitter.

ANNOUNCEMENT:
All Public & Private schools of Lahore, Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Gujrat, Multan, Faisalabad, Sialkot, Sargoda, Sheikhupura will remain closed till April 11th, 2021. The remaining Districts will be open on previous schedule.

— Murad Raas (@DrMuradPTI) March 24, 2021

As per the decision, all public and private schools of Lahore, Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Gujrat, Multan, Faisalabad, Sialkot, Sargodha, Sheikhupura will remain closed till April 11th, 2021.

The decision was made on Wednesday at the National Command and Operation Center (NCOC), Islamabad. The important meeting was attended by the education and health ministers of the four provinces, Gilgit-Baltistan, and Azad Jammu, and Kashmir.

ALSO READ

February 27th Operation Was a Piece of Cake for PAF: Sohail Aman

The meeting was called by Federal Education Minister, Shafqat Mahmood, who also chaired the session to assess the coronavirus situation in the country. The country has observed a sudden spike in the UK-strain COVID-19 cases in the past few weeks, with the positivity ratio remaining above 8% in the last few days.

As per the NCOC data, the number of active cases was 17,352 on March 6 which reached 36,849 on Wednesday.

ALSO READ

Shahid Afridi Launches His Own Skincare Product Lineup

In a separate statement on Monday, Mahmood had said that he was not in favor of shutting down educational institutes altogether, but the NCOC believed that schools are at higher risk of coronavirus spread.

 50 million children are linked with education and if someone got infected, the disease would spread.

Earlier, the federal government had closed schools in several parts of Punjab, KP, and Islamabad for two weeks from March 15 due to a sudden spike in the UK-strain of COVID-19. The variant, according to scientists, is much more lethal and spreads faster than the original one.