No case of new Covid variant found in Pakistan yet: Caretaker Health Minister

No case of a new Covid variant found in Pakistan yet, Caretaker Health Minister Dr Nadeem Jan informed on Friday.

However, the Caretaker Health Minister emphasised that “we are on red alert”.

Speaking in the Senate today, the interim health minister said that Pakistan was closely monitoring the new variant and the government was on “red alert”.

He also mentioned the government’s efforts to implement lab testing systems across different districts for extensive testing among the population.

Caretaker Health Minister informed the upper house of the parliament that the government had issued three advisories on the matter.

“We will urge the Pakistan Electronic Media and Regulatory Authority (Pemra) to ask TV channels to run it,” he said.

The statement from the interim minister comes a day after the federal government decided to procure 500,000 doses of a Covid vaccine, amid a possible resurgence of the new variant of the virus in various countries.

On the other hand, the Nati­onal Institute of Health Sci­ences (NIH) in Islamabad has also issued an advisory to provinces about the mutating strain of the COVID-19 virus.

As per the advisory, the new variant has been classified by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a Variant of Interest (VOI) with genetic changes predicted or known to affect virus characteristics such as transmissibility, disease severity, immune escape, and diagnostic or therapeutic escape.

“The JN.1 is classified as VOI and fundamentally an offshoot of BA.2.86 sub-variant Omicron variant Covid-19 virus, first reported in August 2023 by US-CDC,” reads the NIH advisory.

“This rapid growth is observed across the three WHO regions with consistent sharing of SARS-CoV-2 sequences, i.e. the region of the Americas, the Western Pacific and the European regions, with the largest increase seen in Western Pacific from 1.1 per cent in epidemiological week 44 to 65.6pc in epidemiological week 48.”