Pakistan has registered 49 more coronavirus infections and no fatality during the last 24 hours, showed the figures released by the National Institute of Health (NIH) on Wednesday morning. The death toll in the country remained the same at 30,620 while the number of total infections now rose to 1,573,164 after adding the fresh 49 cases.
During the last 24 hours (Tuesday), 10,693 tests were conducted throughout Pakistan whereas the positivity ratio stood at 0.47 percent. The number of patients in critical care was recorded at 29.
There is not yet enough evidence to recommend Omicron-specific Covid-19 jabs over the original versions, the World Health Organization’s vaccine experts said Tuesday.
Four variant-containing RNA vaccines which include Omicron subvariants BA.1 or BA.4/5 in combination with the ancestral virus have been authorised for use as booster doses. The vaccines adapted to the globally-dominant variant may offer only a “minute incremental benefit”, the WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunisation (SAGE) said.
The WHO has given its Emergency Use Listing green light to nine Covid-19 vaccines and variations — Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Janssen, Moderna, Sinovac, Sinopharm, Bharat Biotech, Novavax and CanSinoBIO. “Currently available data are not sufficient to support the issuance of any preferential recommendation for bivalent variant-containing vaccine boosters over ancestral-virus-only boosters”, SAGE said in a statement. SAGE executive secretary Joachim Hombach said the experts had found that the variant-containing vaccines neutralise to the same extent as the ancestral ones, with a “slightly superior neutralisation of the Omicron variant”.
