KARACHI: Professor Dr Kamran Azim, dean, Faculty of life Sciences at Mohammad Ali Jinnah University, Karachi, has asked the scientific community to remain careful when communicating technical aspects of the COVID19 infection to the public.
In his statement, he pointed out that during the last few days, some headlines regarding the dissimilarity of genomes of coronavirus from Chinese and Pakistani patients have been published in newspapers having technical flaws.
He said that hundreds of coronavirus genomes have been sequenced globally and all of them show 99.5 to 99.9 per cent identities with the original Wuhan coronavirus.
He further said that until today, two coronavirus genome sequence datasets from Pakistan at the NUST, Islamabad, and ARID Rawalpindi have been reported.