The number of everyday Covid-19 tests in Pakistan has more than doubled in one day as the country registered 16 more coronavirus infections with no fatality during the last 24 hours, showed the statistics released by the National Institute of Health (NIH) on Wednesday morning.
According to the NIH data, the death toll in the country remained the same at 30,640 whereas the number of total infections now rose to 1,576,426 after adding the fresh 16 cases. During the last 24 hours (Tuesday), 4,700 tests were conducted throughout Pakistan as compared to previous day’s 2,023 whereas the positivity ratio stood at 0.34 percent. The number of patients in critical care stood at 10.
No new variants of Covid-19 emerged in Beijing in the weeks after China ended its zero-Covid policy late last year, a new study said on Wednesday. China saw an explosion of infections after starting to lift its strict pandemic measures from early December, sparking fears the world’s most populous country could become a fertile breeding ground for new, more transmissible or severe strains.
More than a dozen countries promptly imposed fresh restrictions on travellers from China, also citing a lack of transparency about the scale of the outbreak, sparking Beijing’s ire. But the new study by Chinese researchers, which analysed 413 samples from Beijing sequenced between November 14 and December 20, said “there is no evidence that novel variants emerged” during that time.
Instead, more than 90 percent of the cases were BF.7 and BA5.2, Omicron subvariants which were already present in China.
