Assad Umar said on Thursday that the third wave of coronavirus had started in the country. He said there was no “doubt” that a third wave had begun, citing the spread of a variant of the coronavirus from Britain as the reason.
“The phenomenon driving the third wave is the spread of pollution in the UK”. He said, “when the government looked into the areas where more new cases appeared. It found that this was an area where a large population of Pakistanis in Britain lived”
“We asked the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to do genome sequencing, and we first saw British tribes in northern Pakistan, including Islamabad. Then we did genome sequencing for the whole country”.
“The dominant burden at that time was the burden of England,” he added.
Umar said the new coronavirus strain was more transmissible than the original Wuhan strain. Recent studies have shown that the death rate is also higher, he added.
About 36 patients have died from COVID-19, while another 1,632 new cases appeared in Punjab Province in the past 24 hours.
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The situation has worsened in Lahore, where 991 people have tested positive for the virus in the past 24 hours. One of the main reasons for the surge in cases in the city is the presence of a highly contagious variant of the British virus.
Punjab’s death toll has so far risen to 5,698, while the province’s confirmed coronavirus cases have reached 182,576, according to a report by Punjab’s Ministry of Primary and Secondary Health (P&H) on Friday.
Testing report
15,736 tests have been carried out in the past 24 hours. Bringing the number of tests to 3,480,725 in the province, according to a spokesman for Crown Observation Hall’s primary and secondary health departments.
219 patients have recovered in the past 24 hours. Bringing the total number of recovered patients in the province to 168,186. The spokesman said the province had so far vaccinated 7,582 people over the age of 60. While the entire province had registered 207,464 people over the age of 60.
On the first day of the vaccination campaign at the Lahore Expo Center, 1,298 people were vaccinated. And on the second day, 910 people were vaccinated. The Lahore Expo Center has 20 vaccinations on the first day, 40 on the second, and 80 on Fridays. The spokesperson also said that of the registered provincial health workers, 88,974 received the first dose and 15,177 received the second dose.
