Ariana News Agency-\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The milestone comes as Afghanistan grapples with a surge in violence that is pulling vital attention and resources away from the fight against COVID-19.<\/p>\n Health officials said they have conducted 18,724 tests in the country of about 35 million people and the total number of positive cases was 5,226.<\/p>\n While the official death toll remains low — 132 so far — experts worry the number of fatalities and infections will soar as more tests become available.<\/p>\n The virus is believed to have arrived in Afghanistan via the western province of Herat as tens of thousands of migrants returned from neighbouring Iran, the region’s worst-hit country.<\/p>\n Kabul, with more than five million people, has emerged as the new hotspot, with 1,368 positive cases.<\/p>\n Herat has 935 confirmed cases, while the southern province of Kandahar, once a Taliban bastion, has 579.<\/p>\n Cases are rising amid a nationwide lockdown that has been widely ignored, as impoverished Afghans — many of them surviving on meagre day-to-day wages — choose to seek work rather than stay home.<\/p>\n Health officials, however, claim the lockdown has helped in delaying a surge in infections.<\/p>\n “We have been working hard to increase our testing capacity,” deputy health minister Waheed Majroh told AFP.<\/p>\n The biggest challenge was making people drop their “disbelief” about the dangers of COVID-19, he said.<\/p>\n “This has led to many people not respecting social distancing… there seem to be more people ignoring it, not just the poor but also many wealthy people.”<\/p>\n The International Organization for Migration said last week that social distancing was “unfeasible” in a country where an average family has seven members living in small rooms with poor ventilation.<\/p>\n The growing number of confirmed cases suggests Afghanistan could currently have one of the highest COVID-19 infection rates in the world, it added.<\/p>\n Last month, dozens of President Ashraf Ghani’s staff tested positive. Ghani himself was negative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" More than 5,000 people have been infected with the new coronavirus across Afghanistan, health authorities said Wednesday, with the capital Kabul the epicentre of the deadly disease.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5356,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_mat_hreflang_tags":[],"addvideo":"","video_duration":"","farsit":"","target":"0","top_stories":"0","top":"1"},"categories":[2,12,9],"tags":[226,686,32],"class_list":["post-5355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-security","category-social","tag-afghanistan-war","tag-coronavirus","tag-taliban"],"acf":{"myctype":"change","target":false,"top_stories":false,"top":true,"farsit":""},"yoast_head":"\n