Three new variants of COVID-19 have been detected in recent weeks, leading to increased vigilance across the world as officials say a variant found in the United Kingdom could be up to 70 percent more transmissible.
However, none of the variants so far has been found to be more fatal, or more likely to be able to evade vaccines or treatments.
A new variant was first reported in the United Kingdom on December 14. Named VUI-202012/01 (the first Variant Under Investigation in December 2020), it is thought to have first appeared in mid-September.
Referred to by some experts as the B117 lineage, this has rapidly become the dominant strain in cases of COVID-19 in many parts of the UK.
UK’s new Covid variant detected in Pakistan
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KARACHI/ISLAMABAD: The new coronavirus strain sweeping the United Kingdom has been detected in Pakistan, the Sindh health department announced, after test samples of people who travelled from Britain suggested a “95 per cent match” with the highly infections variant.
In a tweet on Tuesday, the Sindh Health and Population Welfare Department said 12 Covid-19 samples of United Kingdom returnees were taken for genotyping out of which six tested positive and three showed the new variant of the Covid-19 in the first phase.
“The genotyping showed 95 per cent match of the new variant from the UK,” it said. The samples will go through another phase of genotyping, the health department added. Contact tracing of those patients was under way and their contacts were being isolated as well, it said.
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ISLAMABAD: The provinces on Wednesday showed their commitment to address the population crisis in the country.
The 4th National Consultative meeting on Population and Development was organised by the Planning Commission on December 23, 2020, where all the provinces and regions were invited to share progress and plans to meet the national population goals. This meeting was fourth in a series of national consultative meetings, focused on gauging the headway made by the provinces towards addressing the population crises. In her opening remarks, Member Social Sector Dr Shabnum Sarfaraz steered the discussion towards the critical agenda of the meeting i.e. sharing of provincial experiences vis-à-vis contraceptives’ procurement and efforts made to increase family planning services uptake in their respective provinces. She also emphasised on the potential of unplanned population growth in eroding any advances made towards achieving the socio-economic development and economic growth, exa