ISLAMABAD: The rate of COVID-19 positivity in Karachi has reached 28.30%, a health authority official told JEE News, after 30 out of 106 people screened for the viral infection tested positive.
Meanwhile, the nationwide positivity rate was just 3 percent with three out of 100 people testing positive for the pandemic.
An official of the National Institute of Health said that the rate of positivity for Covid-19 in the country has started increasing after 100 people tested positive in the last 24 hours after 3,147 tests were conducted across the country. Health (NIH) Islamabad told JEE News.
According to data shared by NIH Islamabad, the three major cities of Karachi, Islamabad and Peshawar had a positive rate of COVID-19 above 10 percent. The positivity rate reached 12.20 percent in Islamabad, where 25 people tested positive out of 205 tests conducted to detect the virus, while Peshawar had a positive test rate of 14.29 percent with 14 people tested against 94 tests. .
On the other hand, in Lahore, the positivity rate was 4.14% with 18 new cases of COVID-19 in 435 tests. Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan have emerged as COVID-19 free areas as not a single case of COVID-19 has been reported there.
Commenting on the situation, an NIH official said that cases of COVID-19 are increasing due to the Omicron variant subtype of SARS-CoV-2.
He added that the spread of the virus was high but the hospitalization rate in the country was still very low as only 18 people were being treated in the ICU and High Dependency Units (HDU) in the country.
He said that only people showing symptoms of the virus are being screened, which is why the positivity rate is so high. He said that the government has asked the provinces and the center to increase the number of tests to find out the actual situation.
