Scientific community should be remained careful when communicating technical aspects of COVID19 infection to the public, during the last few days, some news items appeared in the local press regarding the dissimilarity of genomes of Corona virus from Chinese and Pakistani patients have technical flaws.
This has been stated by Prof. Dr. Kamran Azim, Dean, Faculty of life Sciences, Mohammad Ali Jinnah University, Karachi in a statement issued here today.
He pointed out that hundreds of corona virus genomes have been sequenced globally and all of them showed that 99.5 to 99.9% identities with the original Wuhan corona virus in China. He further told that until today, two corona virus genome sequence datasets from Pakistan (i.e. NUST, Islamabad and ARID Rawalpindi) have been reported that as per bioinformatics analysis revealed that corona virus genome from Pakistani patients is 99.7% identical with Wuhan corona virus He said that these findings clearly indicated that Coronavirus has low mutation rate hence without doing further experimentsis impossible to state that Coronavirus in Pakistan.
