Coronavirus rears its ugly head

Karachi registers highest positivity rate, followed by Abbottabad and Peshawar

KARACHI:

With Eidul Azha just around the corner, it appears that coronavirus has once again reared its ugly head in the country as various cities have reported a high positivity rate during the last 24 hours.

Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, has reported a positivity rate of over 21 per cent after 138 people from the metropolis tested positive for the virus.

With a positivity rate of 21.23 per cent, the port city has the highest number of cases of any town or city in the country, with more than half of the reported national cases emerging from it, the Sindh Health Department disclosed.

The health department data showed that a total of 650 patients tested for the virus in the provincial capital in the last 24 hours of which 138 came out positive.

According to the government’s official Covid-19 portal, 268 people tested positive across the country over the past 24-hour period after 12,513 tests were conducted. One fatality was also recorded.

Data also showed that Abbottabad had the second-highest positivity ratio at 8.7 per cent as two people tested positive in the past 24 hours.

Peshawar stood third, with a 3.36 per cent positivity rate, as 19 citizens tested positive on Wednesday.

Mirpur recorded a positivity rate of 2.63 per cent, Faisalabad 2.30 per cent and Islamabad 2.05 per cent. The positivity rate in Quetta, Lahore and Mardan stood at 1.92 per cent, 1.91 per cent and 1.43 per cent, respectively.

Health professionals said that the number of positive cases could go up if precautionary measures such as social distancing and wearing masks in public were sidestepped. They further advised the populace to get their booster doses of Covid-19 vaccine.

As of Thursday, 136,422,713 jabs of the first dose of vaccines had been administered nationwide, while 125,250,104 citizens were fully vaccinated. In comparison, only 17,828,826 booster doses had been administered.