ISLAMABAD: The Delta COVID-19 variant is fast spreading across Pakistan, a senior official at the government-funded National Institute of Health (NIH) said on Saturday, confirming that half of the daily positive cases in the country were caused by the highly contagious strain.
The Delta variant, first identified in India last October and which is becoming dominant in many countries, is more easily transmitted than earlier versions of the coronavirus and is suspected to cause more severe disease, especially among younger people.
After a decline in coronavirus cases in recent weeks after a third wave of the pandemic, the daily positivity rate in Pakistan jumped to 3.8 percent on Saturday, from 1.79 percent on June 28. The positivity ratio in Islamabad has also increased to 7.1 percent in the last 24 hours, according to the district commissioner’s office, and Pakistan reported more than 1,700 new infections for a third straight day.
“Half of our daily coronavirus positive cases are found to be of Delta variant which is obviously not a good sign,” Dr. Mumtaz Ali Khan, a focal person at the NIH, told Arab News. “Clearly, the daily contribution of the Delta variant in the positive cases runs in the hundreds now,” he said, adding that almost all types of variants, including the United Kingdom and South Africa strains, were being detected in Pakistan.
Khan said inbound travelers from different countries, including the UK and United States, had brought the Delta variant to Pakistan, but it was yet to be seen if it was deadlier than other strains.
“Our teams have been screening inbound travelers at airports for COVID-19, and those found positive are quarantined to minimize the chances of the virus spreading in the general public,” the NIH focal person said.
The country has administered over 19 million COVID-19 vaccine doses since February and plans to inoculate about 65 million people by the end of the year.
To stem the “extremely dangerous” Delta variant, the National Command and Operation Center (NCOC), which formulates and coordinates the country’s pandemic response, placed a ban on air travel for unvaccinated people on Friday from August 1. It has also declared it mandatory for all adult students to get themselves vaccinated by August 31.
Britain said last week it would provide genomic sequencing support to Brazil, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and Pakistan to help identify, assess and track new variants of the novel coronavirus.
The novel coronavirus, which has killed 4 million people globally since it emerged in China in late 2019, mutates around once every few weeks, slower than influenza or HIV, but enough to require tweaks to vaccines.
Public Health England will extend support to Britain’s partners through the New Variant Assessment Platform Programme which tracks changes in the virus.
“Our government should direct its resources toward the study of local variants and try to develop vaccines as per the local genetic sequencing of the virus,” Professor Dr. Amir Ali Abbasi, chairperson of the National Centre for Bioinformatics at the Quaid-i-Azam University, told Arab News.
He said rapid genetic sequencing of the coronavirus could decrease the effectiveness of the vaccines for two to three months only: “Studying the virus structure and developing vaccines is ultimately the only way to deal with it.”