Pakistan Prime Min­ister Imran Khan leads a nation heavily in debt, a legacy of his predecessors. The International Monetary Fund has given Pakistan US$1.5 billion in emergency financing to help absorb some of the devastating economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Pakistan is spending billions in relief to mitigate the effect on its poorest citizens. Pakistan has started ramping up testing, with more than 6,000 tests conducted in the last 24 hours _ twice the 3,000 that had been carried out daily for much of the past month. The country has 7,025 confirmed cases including 135 deaths, an increase of 11 in the last 24 hours.-AP

Source: The Standard April 17, 2020 07:30 UTC