Major improvement in COVID-19 recoveries witnessed in Pakistan

Tariq Butt, Correspondent

There is a significant improvement in the number of recoveries from COVID-19 in Pakistan with the tally reaching 219,783.

The coronavirus curve is flattening in Pakistan as more than 81 per cent of COVID-19 patients have recovered in the country. The of recovery in Sindh province — which also has the greatest number of coronavirus patients — is 86 per cent.

According to the latest data on the pandemic released by National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) on Saturday, 270,400 people have so far got infected by the disease in the country and 219,783 of them have already recovered.

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The NCOC statement put the total number of active coronavirus cases in Pakistan at 44,854.

These include 115,883 in Sindh, 91,423 in Punjab, 32,898 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 14,766 in Islamabad, 11,523 in Balochistan, 1,989 in Balochistan and 1,918 in Gilgit Baltistan.

Interestingly, only 1,209 cases were reported on Friday. “(There are) 734 hospitals with COVID-19 facilities with 2,241 patients admitted across the country,” said the NCOC statement.

“As of today, more than 100,000 patients have recovered from COVID-19 in Sindh. This is 86 per cent of the total patients in the province,” claimed Murtaza Wahab, Sindh Chief Minister’s Adviser on Law and Information, in a post on Twitter.

Around 40 per cent of Karachi’s population has already been exposed to coronavirus infection by the third week of July 2020 and by the first week of September 2020, at least 65-70 percent of its people would be carrying Covid-19 antibodies, renowned hematologist Prof. Dr Tahir Sultan Shamsi said.

He said this means that Pakistan is rapidly heading towards achieving herd-immunity in around one and a half months.

Dramatic decline in Covid-19 positive cases, reduced hospitalisation and decreasing number of deaths as well as Anti-SARS-COV-2 antibody tests done on around 2,200-2,300 people from three different segments of the society in Karachi since April 2020 indicate that around 40 percent of the city’s population has developed CVOID-19 antibodies so far, Prof. Shamsi said.

"Our research on three different segments of the society reveals that around 40 percent of Karachiites have so far been infected with the coronavirus asymptomatically and by the first week of September 2020, 65-70 percent of city’s population would have been infected with the virus, which is a minimum requirement for achieving herd immunity in COVID-19 case.”

Citing the example of Indian capital New Delhi, where officially only less than 1 percent of population has been tested positive, Dr Shamsi said a population-based survey conducted by the Indian government has revealed that one in four persons in Delhi has already been exposed to coronavirus infection.