Pakistan detects two cases of South African strain, one of Indian strain in KP

The government’s two-pronged approach to dealing with the coronavirus pandemic appears to be bearing fruit as the country reported the lowest positivity rate in the past three months on Friday.

Reporting Thursday’s statistics, the National Command and Operation Center on Friday said that 52,859 tests were conducted across the country, out of which 1,893 came out positive, thus registering a positivity rate of 3.58 percent. During this period, 83 people died of coronavirus-related complications.

According to the NCOC’s statistics, 928,588 cases have been confirmed across the country through 13,420,779 tests since the outbreak started last year, and 21,105 people have succumbed to the virus. 856,005 have recovered from the virus during this period.

Out of these confirmed cases, 341,390 have been recorded in Punjab, 321,425 in Sindh, 133,746 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 81,540 in Islamabad, 25,476 in Balochistan, 19,388 in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and 5,623 in Gilgit-Baltistan.

It is worth mentioning here that after gradually including different age groups in its vaccination campaign across the past few months, the government finally started vaccinating all adults on Thursday.

As of the data released on Friday, 2,174,169 citizens have been fully vaccinated across the country while 3,746,786 have been partially vaccinated. During the past 24 hours, 304,862 citizens were administered vaccines across the country.

As the positivity rate declines, the government has started lifting restrictions on public activities, including education. On Wednesday, Federal Minister for Education Shafqat Mahmood announced that all universities would be allowed to resume in-person classes from Monday. On Thursday, Sindh’s Information Minister Saeed Ghani also said that the provincial government was considering a gradual ease in lockdown restrictions.

While the positivity rate is coming down, the dangers posed by the pandemic persist. On Friday evening, Dawn reported that authorities in KP had detected three cases of coronavirus variants first detected in India and South Africa. While all three of them had recently returned from the United Arab Emirates, they were infected with different strains of the virus. Two of them, aged 18 and 38, were diagnosed with the South African strain while the other, aged 41, was diagnosed with the Indian strain. Pakistan had detected the first case of the Indian variant merely days ago.