ISLAMABAD: The coronavirus pandemic claimed 135 lives during the last 24 hours in the country, making it the highest single-day death toll reported by the country since June 24 last year.
Pakistan’s death toll from the virus on June 24 remained 148. The new deaths take the nationwide tally of coronavirus cases to 15,754, said the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) on Wednesday.
The daily data issued by the NCOC showed that Pakistan carried out 48,092 Covid-19 tests, out of which 4,681 returned positive. The new cases takes the nationwide tally of coronavirus cases to 734,423. Out of the total, 641,912 coronavirus patients are those who have recovered from the virus.
Sindh currently leads the provinces and federating units in most cases with 269,840, Punjab is second with 255,571 cases, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) has reported 101,045 cases, Islamabad 67,491 cases, Balochistan 20,499 cases, Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) 14,837 cases and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) has reported 5,140 cases.
The current number active cases of the country stands at 76,757 and the positivity rate stood at 9.73 percent. The health facilities across the country conducted 48,092 coronavirus detection tests, taking the total number of Covid-19 tests to 10,878, 086 since the first case was reported.
Meanwhile, Punjab has reported 80 deaths and 2,775 new infections of Covid-19 in the last 24 hours. According to Punjab’s Primary and Secondary Healthcare Department, 80 more patients of the disease died of the coronavirus in the province in a day. The tally of total deaths by Covid-19 in the province has reached 7,141.
With addition of 2,775 new cases, the provincial tally of confirmed Covid-19 cases has surged to 255,571, health department spokesperson said.
Lahore reported 1,436 new cases of Covid-19 in a day, according to the health department.
In order to provide more facilities to the citizens willing to get vaccinated against coronavirus, the NCOC on Tuesday sought provinces’ input on the opening of Covid vaccination centres in two shifts.
Meanwhile, an official told a National Assembly panel that the National Institute of Health (NIH) is going to make Pakistan’s own single-dose coronavirus vaccine soon.
“We are going to make a single-dose vaccine for Covid-19,” NIH Executive Director Major General Aamer Ikram told the NA Standing Committee on National Health Services. “We conducted the clinical trial of Chinese Covid-19 vaccine CanSinoBio in Pakistan.” The tests that were first conducted on 300 subjects are now administered in more than 150,000 laboratories, he added.
