Pakistan logs another 36 coronavirus cases, no fatality

Pakistan has posted another 36 coronavirus infections and no death during the last 24 hours (Friday), showed the statistics released by the National Institute of Health Pakistan on Saturday morning.

As per the latest NIH data, the death toll remained the same as it stood at 30,372, whereas the number of total infections now stood at 1,528,485 after adding the fresh 36 cases.

During the last 24 hours (Friday), 5,305 tests were conducted throughout Pakistan whereas the positivity ratio stood at 0.46 percent. The number of patients in critical care was recorded at 105.

A new subvariant is spreading rapidly in US

First came Omicron, then came its highly contagious subvariant, BA.2. That subvariant gave rise to its own subvariants, whose share of new coronavirus cases in the United States is growing.
The coronavirus is constantly mutating. While some variants seem to vanish, causing little ripples of surges in their wake, others have kept driving large outbreaks. Experts say a new form, BA.2.12.1, is spreading rapidly and will probably become the dominant form of the virus in the United States in the next few weeks. There’s no indication yet that it causes more severe disease than earlier forms did.

In the week endied Saturday, BA.2.12.1 made up about 36 percent of all new cases in the United States, according to estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s up from 26 percent of cases in the prior week, and 16 percent of infections during the second week in April.

First detected in the United States by New York State health officials in April, BA.2.12.1 is spreading more rapidly than the first versions of the Omicron variant, which caused a huge surge in cases over the winter. The new version descends from BA.2 and appears to have spread even more quickly than BA.2, although the reasons are still under investigation.

Indeed, the virus seems to keep finding ways to spread more easily. “Omicron was more transmissible than Delta, which was more transmissible than Alpha,” Krista Queen, director of viral genomics and surveillance at Louisiana State University, said in an interview on Wednesday. BA2.12.1 is building on that trend, she added, “and that’s why it’s taking over now, especially in the Northeast.”

New cases in New York have increased, though they remain far below the horrific numbers seen earlier in the pandemic. A number of counties have become hot spots, reminding state health officials that the coronavirus will not surrender, regardless of general pandemic fatigue.

Dr Queen, who oversees genetic analysis of the virus at the university, said she expects rising infections to spread from the Northeast to the South and then the West, driving more outbreaks. “We’re already seeing it here in Louisiana,” she said. “Our most recent sequencing runs of community samples have all been BA.2.12.1, and those samples are from mid-April.”

Reports of new cases nationally have doubled in the past month as Omicron subvariants have spread, according to a New York Times database. In the last two weeks, the daily average number of new cases overall has risen by 50 percent.

Reported cases are probably an undercount of the virus’s true spread, since access to at-home tests has increased and the results are often not officially reported.

India reports 3,805 new Covid cases, 22 deaths

India on Saturday recorded 3,805 new COVID-19 cases in the last 24 hours, taking the coronavirus tally to 4,30,98,743. The country also recorded 22 Covid-related fatalities, bringing the total number of deaths to 5,24,024.

According to the Health Ministry, the daily positivity rate stood at 1.07 percent, while the weekly positivity rate was 0.70 percent.

More than 3,000 people also recovered from the coronavirus, taking the total number of Covid recoveries in the country to 4,25,54,416.