ISLAMABAD: The country’s coronavirus positivity ratio shrunk to 3.96 per cent on Sunday, down from 4.77 per cent a day earlier, the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) said, as the government has licensed three vaccines.
The government portal keeping track of the outbreak in Pakistan posted 1,594 fresh cases in the last 24 hours, taking the active cases to 34,628. Some 40,285 tests were conducted across the country, including 6,207 in Sindh; 19,090 in Punjab; 6,513 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP); 7,102 in Islamabad; 596 in Balochistan; 358 in Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) and 419 in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK).
With 1,981 new recoveries, the number of people who recovered from the contagious disease reached 486,489.
In the last 24 hours, 48 new deaths from coronavirus-related complications took the toll to 11,295. Of these, 39 were under treatment in hospitals and nine in their homes, according to the latest update issued by the NCOC.
According to the NCOC breakdown, the highest positivity ratio was observed in Hyderabad at 11.57 per cent, followed by Peshawar at 11.29 per cent and Karachi at 10.68 per cent.
The transmission rate in federating units was as following: 5.97 per cent in AJK, 3.52 per cent in Balochistan, 0.56 per cent in GB, 1.18 per cent in Islamabad, 5.25 per cent in KP, 2.54 per cent in Punjab and 10.23 per cent in Sindh.
The province-wise data showed Lahore’s positivity ratio at 4.23 per cent, Rawalpindi at 1.14 per cent, 3.21 per cent in Faisalabad, 1.91 per cent in Multan and 4.46 per cent for Bahawalpur in Punjab.
In Sindh, Karachi’s positivity ratio was recorded at 10.68 per cent and 11.57 per cent in Hyderabad.
As for KP, a positivity ratio of 11.29 per cent was recorded in Peshawar, 3.41 per cent in Swat and 0.31 per cent in Abbottabad.
In Balochistan, Quetta’s positivity ratio was recorded at 2.41 per cent. Meanwhile, the positivity ratio in AJK’s Mirpur stood at 5.04 per cent and 2.50 per cent in Muzaffarabad.
The case fatality rate (CFR) stood at 2.12 per cent compared to the global 2.14 per cent. Around 69 per cent of patients who succumbed to the virus were males and 77.9 per cent of all who died were over the age of 50.
VACCINE:
Meanwhile, the Chinese government has directed its pharmaceutical companies to accelerate the provision of coronavirus vaccination to Islamabad a day after Foreign Minister Wang Yi assured his Pakistan counterpart, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, of the “gift” of half a million shots.
“In order to support our brothers and sisters in Pakistan, the Chinese government has decided to provide a batch of vaccines as aid and will actively coordinate with the relevant Chinese enterprise to speed up [the] export of vaccines to Pakistan,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said in response to a question from Associated Press of Pakistan during a press briefing Friday.
In December, the federal cabinet approved $250 million in funding to buy coronavirus vaccines, initially to cover the most vulnerable 5 per cent of the population, including the frontline health workers.
On December 30, a special cabinet committee for procurement of Covid-19 vaccine, chaired by Minister for Planning and Development Asad Umar, decided to procure 1.1 million doses of vaccine from state-owned Sinopharm.
The vaccine is able to be stored at two to eight degrees Celsius, or a normal refrigeration temperature.
The jab has already been approved in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and is slated for use next in Morocco.
Recently, the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca shots for emergency use.
Last week, Dr Faisal Sultan, state minister for health, said that Pakistan has been engaging with a number of vaccine makers, adding the country could get “in the range of tens of millions” of vaccine doses under an agreement with CanSino.
The company’s Ad5-nCoV coronavirus candidate is nearing completion of Phase III clinical trials in Pakistan. The preliminary results of the CanSino vaccine may come in by mid-February, Dr Faisal had said.
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