ISLAMABAD: The UK variant of COVID-19 has hit children hard in Pakistan, with thousands testing positive during the third wave of the coronavirus, a week-long investigation by Arab News has revealed, though the Pakistan government has denied higher rates of positivity among children this March.
Last December, scientists from the UK government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group said the new variant of the coronavirus spreading rapidly in Britain carried mutations that could mean children were as susceptible to becoming infected as adults — unlike previous strains.
Last month, Pfizer Inc. and German partner BioNTech SE began testing their COVID-19 vaccine in children under 12, with hopes of expanding vaccination to that age range by early 2022.
While the National Command and Operation Center, which oversees Pakistan’s coronavirus response, has dismissed higher rates of COVID-19 among children during the third wave which is largely driven in Pakistan by the UK virus variant, data collected over a week by Arab News from all four provinces as well as the federal capital of Islamabad shows a spike in the rate at which children tested positive during the month of March, when the third wave of the coronavirus gained momentum.
The Arab News investigation revealed that the government has no centralized data of COVID-19 patients broken down by age. Except in the southern Sindh province, most government officials at health departments in all provinces and the capital were reluctant to share data about positivity rates among children. Many who shared data did so on condition of anonymity, saying they had been instructed not to provide figures to the media.
The NCOC and the federal health ministry did not respond to repeated requests by Arab News reporters for comment for this piece.
In a Twitter post on April 2, the NCOC said: “There is no deviation in positivity ratio in children as compared to previous waves statistics. During all three waves, infection ratio in children aged between 1-10 years remained around 3% of total cases.”
NCOC took stock of reported surge in COVID positivity cases in children. There is no deviation in positivity ratio in children as compared to previous waves statistics. During all three waves, infection ratio in children aged between 1-10 years remained around 3% of total cases.
— NCOC (@OfficialNcoc) April 2, 2021
But data shared with Arab News by the health department in Punjab showed that while only 75 positive cases were reported among children in March last year, 4,830 children tested positive in Punjab in March this year — the highest number for children since the pandemic hit Pakistan in February in 2019.
Just in Lahore, Punjab’s provincial capital, a total of 2,357 children tested positive in March while only seven cases were reported in March last year.
In the federal capital of Islamabad, a total of 1,887 children tested positive in March, though a district administration official told Arab News on condition of anonymity that the number was much higher. According to official data, a total of 5,788 children up to nine years of age have been infected in Islamabad since February last year when the pandemic began.
In Sindh province, a total of 372 kids up to nine years of age tested COVID-19 positive in March while a total of 7,094 children have been infected in the province so far since February 2020.
In the northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, a health department official who declined to be named said 19,808 total positive cases had been recorded in the province from March 1 to April 5.
“Out of these, 2,088 cases are those 16 years or below (11%),” the official said.
Rizwan Malik, a spokesperson for the KP health department, said a total of 6,500 children below the age of 16 had tested positive in the province since the coronavirus outbreak began last year, admitting that the infection rate had spiked among kids in the third wave.
He said as many as 578 kids were currently positive in KP’s provincial capital of Peshawar alone. When asked about accumulative provincial data for March, he said the health department had not compiled it.
Waseem Baig, a spokesperson for the Balochistan Command and Operation Center, said a total of 2,678 children up to fourteen years of age had been infected with the virus in the province since the beginning of the pandemic, but “not a single” child tested COVID-19 positive in March.
Dr. Zaeem Zia, a district health officer in Islamabad, said infections among children were not a new phenomenon.
“There is no scientific data to support that infection among children has increased in the third wave,” he told Arab News.
But the head of the Children’s section at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, Dr. Maqbool Hussain, said more children had tested positive in the third wave as compared to the previous two waves, saying one reason was increased testing.
“People are more sensitive now to the virus as compared to during the previous waves, and more willing to get their children tested,” he told Arab News, adding that the intensity of the disease among children was lower as compared to the elderly, with around 80 percent remaining asymptomatic and less than 10 percent needing to visit the hospital for treatment.
“It is almost impossible to record the exact number of children getting infected with the virus as a majority of them are not brought to hospitals,” Hussain said.
Dr. Qaisar Sajjad, secretary-general of the Pakistan Medical Association, said the UK variant had led to increased infections and transmission among children, which was ‘worrisome’ because they were transmitting the infection among more vulnerable groups.
“Parents shouldn’t let children go out to parks, shopping malls and restaurants as they could return positive with the virus,” Sajjad said. “Majority of the children remain asymptomatic, and we have found that they easily transmit the virus to adults and elderly.”
Additional reporting by Naimat Khan in Karachi, Rehmat Mehsud in Peshawar and Saadullah Akhter in Quetta.