Pakistan’s COVID-19 Positivity Rate Dips, But 'We Aren’t Out of the Woods', Official Tells VOA

Pakistan reported Monday that the national coronavirus positivity rate had remained well below 5% over the past week, with the country’s top health official attributing the declining trend to “effective” government policies, including restrictions on public movement and effective screening of international travelers.

Officials recorded 43 deaths and detected more than 2,100 new cases in the last 24 hours, raising the national tally of deaths to nearly 21,000 and infections to more than 921,000 since the pandemic hit the South Asian nation early last year.

The national positivity ratio decreased to just over 4% from more than 11% a couple of weeks ago.

Last week, health authorities reported the detection of the first case of a fast-spreading variant of the coronavirus which has caused record infections and deaths in neighboring India, threatening Pakistan’s gains against the disease.

But Faisal Sultan, an infectious disease physician who is also special assistant to the prime minister on national health services, told VOA that an “effective” screening system for international travelers and other measures to deal with the health crisis have so far enabled the country to keep the situation under control in a country of about 220 million.

“I would say we are not out of the woods yet, but it seems at this point that I don’t foresee an India-like situation,” Sultan, who is directing all health-related interventions and measures against the pandemic, told VOA in a detailed interview at his office in Islamabad.

He noted that while his team has also detected a few cases of the variants prevalent in South African and Brazil, Pakistan is one of nearly 100 countries where a variant first detected in Britain, known as B117, is currently predominant.

“A large part of this wave that they [India] are going through, at least as best as I am aware, it was B117, and it was not necessarily the Indian variant that was doing it,” he said.