Pakistan has registered another 101 coronavirus infections but no fatality during the last 24 hours (Tuesday) as there was a mild uptick in the infectivity rate, showed the figures released by the National Institute of Health Pakistan on Wednesday morning.

As per the latest NIH data, the death toll remained the same as was a day earlier which was 30,362, whereas the number of total infections now stood at 1,526,829 after adding the fresh 101 cases.

During the last 24 hours (Tuesday), 21,284 tests were conducted throughout Pakistan whereas the positivity ratio inched up to 0.47 percent. The number of patients in critical care was 262.

https://twitter.com/NIH_Pakistan/status/1514045705475825669

During the last 24 hours (Tuesday), as many as 113 patients have recovered from the virus whereas the total recoveries stood at 1,487,073. As of Wednesday, the total count of active cases in the country was recorded at 9,394.

As many as 576,407 coronavirus cases have so far been confirmed in Sindh, 505,486 in Punjab, 219,296 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 135,139 in Islamabad, 35,480 in Balochistan, 43,301 in Azad Kashmir and 11,720 in Gilgit-Baltistan.

As many as 13,559 individuals have lost their lives to the pandemic in Punjab so far, 8,097 in Sindh, 6,322 in KP, 1,023 in Islamabad, 792 in Azad Kashmir, 378 in Balochistan and 191 in Gilgit Baltistan.

World surpasses half a billion known coronavirus cases

The coronavirus is continuing to stalk the world at an astonishing clip, racing past a grim succession of pandemic milestones in 2022: totals of 300 million known cases around the world by early January, 400 million by early February and, as of Tuesday, half a billion.

There have almost certainly been far more infections than that among the global population of 7.9 billion, with many going undetected or unreported, and the reporting gap may only grow wider as some countries, including the United States, scale back official testing.

“That’s dangerous,” Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, and formerly of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a recent interview. “If you don’t test, then you don’t know what variants you have.”

Regional officials with the World Health Organization recently urged African countries to ramp up testing and contact tracing, and called for some countries in the Americas to double down on efforts to increase vaccination and testing as cases remained higher in Europe. (Britain, for instance, has ended free testing.) A WHO analysis also recently estimated that 65 percent of Africans had been infected with the coronavirus as of September 2021, nearly 100 times the number of confirmed cases on the continent.

The number of new cases reported around the globe each day has been declining for some time now; the average over the past week has been about 1.1 million cases a day, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. That’s about 32 percent fewer than two weeks ago.

But over the course of the pandemic, countries with limited public health resources may only have detected and confirmed a tiny fraction of the cases in their populations. And more recent figures may miss many at-home rapid test results that are never officially reported. Many people with infections are never tested at all, because they have no symptoms, or lack access to testing, or want to avoid the consequences of a positive test result, or choose not to for other reasons.

Coronavirus deaths have also been declining. The world reported about 3,800 a day on average over the past week, 23 percent fewer than two weeks ago.

Still, the director-general of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, recently said that the world remains in the acute phase of the pandemic, and many health experts agree.

India reports 1,088 Covid-19 cases

India recorded a total of 1,088 new Covid-19 cases in the last 24 hours, taking the coronavirus tally to 4,30,38,016. According to Health Ministry, the country also reported at least 26 Covid-related deaths on Wednesday, bringing the total number of fatalities to 5,21,736.

However, the number of active cases of the infection has further declined to 11,058. The active cases account for 0.03 percent of the total caseload, while the national Covid-19 recovery rate remained at 98.76 percent.

A reduction of 19 cases was recorded in the active caseload in a span of 24 hours.

The daily positivity rate was recorded at 0.25 percent and the weekly positivity rate was 0.23 percent, according to the ministry. The number of people who have recuperated from the disease has gone up to 4,25,02,454, while the case fatality rate was recorded at 1.21 percent.