Claim: The Government of Sindh has ordered the closure of schools across the province and Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah has suggested imposing a lockdown due to the concerning COVID-19 situation.
Fact: The chief minister said the decision to impose a lockdown and close schools would be taken in line with National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) recommendations. As of now, no instruction to close schools across the province has been issued.
However, on 21 January 2022, the NCOC announced that all schools with a high COVID-19 positivity rate will remain closed for one week. Additionally, the Sindh government has now imposed a micro-smart lockdown in dozens of neighborhoods in Karachi after an Omicron surge was reported in District Central and District South.
Fact or Fiction?
On 14 January 2022, Facebook page Campus Guru shared news about the measures being taken by the Sindh government in response to the COVID-19 situation in the province.
The page, with around 96,000 followers, claimed in a now-deleted post:
“سندھ میں اسکول بند, لاک ڈاؤن نافذ کیا جاۓ گا:وزیراعلیٰ سندھ”
[Schools closed in Sindh, lockdown will be imposed: Sindh Chief Minister]
At the time Campus Guru’s report was published, no order mandating the closure of schools had been issued. During a media briefing on 14 January 2022, CM Shah addressed misconceptions about a potential lockdown and the closure of schools across Sindh. Between the 1:55 and 1:59 marks, he can be heard saying, “We will make decisions in this regard after consultation with the NCOC.”
Soch Fact Check also got in touch with the Chief Minister’s Office on 14 January 2022, which quoted Shah as saying, “As far as the lockdown option is concerned, his government will follow NCOC’s recommendations.”
Campus Guru’s English headline correctly stated that the provincial government will take measures in line with the NCOC’s recommendation. However, its Urdu headline is misleading as it implied that the chief minister said schools will be closed and a lockdown imposed across Sindh.
One week after Campus Guru published its report, on 21 January 2022, the NCOC announced that all schools with a high COVID-19 positivity ratio will remain closed for one week across the country.
Additionally, as stated above, the Sindh government has now imposed a micro-smart lockdown in dozens of neighborhoods in Karachi after an Omicron surge was reported in District Central and District South.
Prior to the latest update on 21 January 2022, the NCOC’s guidelines stipulated that for cities and districts with a positivity rate above 10%, schools would be allowed to open with 50% attendance for students below the age of 12 years, and 100% attendance for students over 12 years; for cities and districts with a positivity rate under 10% the NCOC had recommended full attendance.
Virality
Soch Fact Check ran a CrowdTangle analysis for the following search term:
- “Sindh to impose lockdown”
The analysis revealed that the search term received 2,366 interactions across 22 posts on Facebook over the last seven days. On Instagram, four posts gained 10,542 interactions during the same time period.
Facebook page People Magazine Pakistan, which has more than one million page ‘likes’, also used a misleading headline, “Chief Minister suggests to impose lockdown in Sindh”, in its post, which garnered 1,600 likes on Instagram where the publication has 1.3 million followers.
Conclusion: The NCOC has not mandated the closure of all schools across Sindh. In the latest update to the guidelines on January 21 2022, the NCOC stated that all schools with a high COVID-19 positivity rate should remain closed for one week. Further, the Government of Sindh has imposed a micro-smart lockdown in some neighbourhoods of Karachi but has not announced a complete lockdown in the province of Sindh.