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News

Pakistan daily Covid infections hover around 100

NIH data shows infectivity rate stands at 3.68 : Biden signs law declassifying US intel on Covid origin

March 21, 2023 11:06 AM


Pakistan has diagnosed 105 more Covid-19 infections with no fatality during the last 24 hours (Monday), showed the statistics released by the National Institute of Health (NIH) on Tuesday morning, reported 24NewsHD TV channel.

According to the NIH data, the death toll in the country remained the same at 30,645 whereas the number of total infections now shot up to 1,578,463 after adding the fresh 105 cases.

https://twitter.com/NIH_Pakistan/status/1637980953783021570

During the last 24 hours (Monday), 3,768 tests were conducted throughout Pakistan whereas the positivity ratio stood at 2.79%. The number of patients in critical care stood at 18.

 

Biden signs law declassifying US intel on Covid origin

US President Joe Biden on Monday signed into law a bill requiring the release of intelligence materials on potential links between the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

"We need to get to the bottom of Covid-19's origins..., including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology," Biden said in a statement.

"In implementing this legislation, my administration will declassify and share as much of that information as possible," he added.

"I share the Congress's goal of releasing as much information as possible about the origin" of Covid, he said.

Biden said that in 2021, after taking office, he had "directed the Intelligence Community to use every tool at its disposal to investigate."

That work is "ongoing," but as much as possible will be released without causing "harm to national security," he said.

The bill posed political risks for Biden, who is negotiating a difficult relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Beijing vehemently rejects the possibility that a leak during research at the Wuhan lab could have unleashed the global pandemic.

However, much of Congress wants to pursue the theory further, and the issue has become a rallying point in particular for Biden's Republican opponents.

Congress passed and sent the bill to Biden in March.

The Covid-19 outbreak began in 2019 in the eastern Chinese city of Wuhan, leading to almost seven million deaths worldwide so far, according to official counts, over a million of them in the United States.

But health officials and the US intelligence community remain divided over whether it was spread randomly to humans from an infected animal or leaked during research undertaken at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The US Energy Department -- one of the US agencies investigating the disaster -- concluded with "low confidence" that the virus probably came from a lab, agreeing with the assessment of the FBI, but contradicting the conclusions of several other agencies.

 

With inputs from AFP.



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