Around 300 fatalities and over 18,000 pneumonia cases were registered in eastern Punjab for January.
Around half of childhood pneumonia deaths are associated with air pollution, according to Unicef.
The provincial government extended school holidays, clipped classroom hours and mandated face masks in a bid to shield children.
Children’s Hospital Lahore has nevertheless admitted hundreds of cases every day.
In a paediatric ward, a chorus of infant coughs and straining lungs is the toll of a frigid winter, compounded by choking smog and lagging vaccination rates.
“Please pray for him,” the mother of four-month-old pneumonia patient Ibrahim begs a nurse, delicately arranging a blanket around ventilator tubes piping air in and out of his heaving chest.
The wheezing sound really scared me. I did not know it was pneumonia but I was sure something was really wrong,” Liaquat said.
The first question doctors asked him was whether Ali was fully immunised, which he was, spurring his road to recovery. But many are not, according to senior doctor Junaid Rashid.
“We feel uncomfortable when a child comes to us with the disease and he has not been vaccinated,” the 55-year-old medic said.
Free jabs are offered for respiratory disease at six, 10 and 14 weeks of age.
But the federal government has long grappled with the challenge of increasing vaccine uptake when misinformation is rife and some fringe clerics declare it un-Islamic.
Premature births and stunting caused by malnutrition are also prevalent, weakening children who are then easy prey for pneumonia.
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