Web Desk
Ninety percent of the COVID-19 cases in Pakistan’s Punjab province are due to the British variant of the corona virus, according to provincial health minister, Dr. Yasmeen Rashid.
“The Punjab province has its own gene-sequencing system in place; according to the molecular biologists, 90pc of our cases are of the British variant and 10pc are the strain from Wuhan,” she told a news conference in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore on Sunday.
However, she refuted reports that the Brazilian and South African variants had spread in the province. “Two patients were identified [as having the variants], one from Islamabad and the other from Mianwali. Their contact tracing was done and no other person tested positive.”
She said that the the vaccines of Chinese origin , were completely effective against the UK variant. The basic configuration of coronavirus will remain the same. When mutations come, they will be studied, because it is a rapidly evolving virus.”
Meanwhile, the authorities in Southern Pakistan province of Sindh have confirmed the detection of Brazilian and South African coronavirus variants
“ 13 samples underwent genomic study at the Agha Khan University Hospital, of these 10 were of the UK variant, and 2 were of the [South] Africa and Brazil variants”, Minister for Health & Population Welfare, Dr. Azra Fazal Pechuho said.
The highly contagious variants were discovered at a hospital in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, which has also reported the most deaths in any city, accounting for 3,903 of the country’s 17,811 deaths. Some 820,823 cases have been detected in the country, with 5,112 in the last 24 hours, according to the National Command Operation Center (NCOC), which oversees the government’s pandemic response.
“You can see these strains and the kind of pressure that can be put on our health facilities,” Pechuho said.
Pakistan has seen record deaths in recent days from the coronavirus, and stricter restrictions on movement and gathering in public are planned for the upcoming Eid holiday.
