Punjab records highest single-day death toll in five months

ISLAMABAD: Punjab recorded highest single-day death toll in five months with the virus claiming 57 lives in the past 24 hours, raising the province's fatalities to 3,422. 

Data issued by the National Command and Operations Centre showed on Tuesday that Pakistan's death toll from coronavirus has climbed to 8,905  as the country grapples a second wave of infections.

The most number of deaths have been observed in Karachi as 2,573 people have died of coronavirus so far. Lahore has reported 1,359 deaths, Peshawar 714 and Rawalpindi 562.

At least 2,459 people tested positive for the novel coronavirus out of the total 34,551 PCR tests conducted on Monday, bringing the national positivity rate to 7.12%.

The most COVID-19 prevalence has been observed in Hyderabad as 22.45% of its PCR tests came out positive, closely followed by Karachi at 19.89% and Peshawar with 19.04%.

Sindh and Balochistan have the highest positivity rate of 14.9% and 14.2%, followed by Azad Jammu and Kashmir with 9.4% and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa at 7.2%. Islamabad's positivity rate is 4.3%, Punjab 3.8% and Gilgit Baltistan 0.5%.

The country's cumulative infections tally has climbed to 443,246 with 48,008 active cases - of whom 2,495 patients are in critical condition.

Pakistan's mortality rate remains at 2.0% compared to global rate of 2.22%. With 87.1% of the COVID-19 patients surviving the virus, Pakistan has one of the highest recovery rates.

Globally, a total of 72,849,650 infections have been reported with 1,621,154 deaths and 41,257,161 recoveries.