Daily Covid tests, infections plummet in Pakistan

The number of everyday Covid-19 tests and infections has plummeted in Pakistan as the country recorded only 22 coronavirus cases with no death during the last 24 hours (Monday), showed the statistics released by the National Institute of Health (NIH) on Tuesday morning, reported 24NewsHD TV channel.

The daily tests were reduced to over 3,000 which were nearly half the number of the previous day’s which were nearly 6,000.

According to the NIH data, the death toll in the country remained the same at 30,630 whereas the number of total infections now rose to 1,575,147 after adding the fresh 22 cases.

During the last 24 hours (Monday), 3,248 tests were conducted throughout Pakistan whereas the positivity ratio stood at 0.68 percent. The number of patients in critical care was 32.

COVID-19 Statistics 29 November 2022
Total Tests in Last 24 Hours: 3,248
Positive Cases: 22
Positivity %: 0.68%
Deaths: 01
Patients on Critical Care: 32

— NIH Pakistan (@NIH_Pakistan) November 29, 2022

Nearly nine out of 10 Covid deaths are people over 65

US President Biden may have declared the coronavirus pandemic “over”, but experts believe it’s not over, just different.

Now, more than ever, it is a plague of the elderly.

In October, a medical team logged six deaths due to the virus, many of them among vaccinated people. Their ages: 80s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 90s. They included Betty Witzel, 88, described by her family as a tomboy who carried snakes in her pocket as a child and grew up to be a teacher, mother of four, grandmother of nine and great-grandmother of five. And there was Nadine Alice Stark, 85, a ranch owner who planted sugar beets and corn.

Yellowstone County made the decision early in the crisis to recognize each death individually, and experts said that is as important as ever to acknowledge the unrelenting toll on a still-vulnerable older generation, while most everyone else has moved on.

More than 300 people are still dying each day on average from Covid-19, most of them 65 or older, according to data from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. While that’s much lower than the 2,000 daily toll at the peak of the delta wave, it is still roughly two to three times the rate at which people die of the flu — renewing debate about what is an “acceptable loss.”

And while older Americans have consistently been the worst hit during the crisis, as evident in the scores of early nursing home deaths, that trend has become more pronounced. Today, nearly 9 in 10 covid deaths are in people 65 or older — the highest rate ever, according to a Washington Post analysis of CDC data.

Some epidemiologists and demographers predict the trend of older, sicker and poorer people dying at disproportionate rates will continue, raising hard questions about the trade-offs Americans are making in pursuit of normalcy — and at whose expense. The situation mirrors the way some other infectious diseases, such as malaria and polio, rage in the developing world while they are largely ignored elsewhere.

S. Matthew Liao, a professor of bioethics, philosophy and public health at New York University, argued that it is possible to keep the economy open while still aggressively pursuing a national booster campaign and requiring masks in health-care settings and nursing homes, for example. 

But US leaders have chosen not to do so, he said. That worries him. “There’s a bit of ageism, so to speak, attached to it,” he said, adding, “People, even if they are older, they still have as much claim to live as me.”

In an open letter published Oct. 7 in the BMJ, formerly the British Medicine Journal, Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health, and about a dozen other experts emphasized that “pandemics do not end with a flip of the switch.”

“Despite the widespread belief that the pandemic is over, death and disruption continue,” they wrote.