Omicron spreads wings over Karachi

KARACHI: Six more people died on Tuesday due to complications of Covid-19 overnight in Sindh, mostly in Karachi as the city’s case positivity climbed to 38.79 percent, officials said. Alarm bells started ringing when two major health facilities recorded a record number of hospitalizations with coronavirus cases.

“As many as six more people have lost their lives due to complications of Covid-19 overnight in Sindh, mostly in Karachi while 3,283 more people were tested positive in the province, including 2,829 in Karachi alone”, Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah said in his daily Covid-19 situation report on Tuesday.

On the one hand, hospitals in Karachi have started getting Covid-19 patients with difficulty in breathing and other problems as officials at the Sindh Infectious Disease Hospital at NIPA Karachi said they had 82 patients till Tuesday morning, of which 32 were in Intensive Care Unit (ICU), including seven on ventilators. They said among these patients, two were children under the age of 16.

Officials at the Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH) also reported to have over 50 patients in their Covid-19 treatment facility and said they were adding more beds as the number of Covid patients was rising every hour. Other hospitals said they too were witnessing a surge in patients with symptoms of the infectious disease.

The Sindh Chief Minister, Murad Ali Shah, in his daily situation report, said death toll due to Covid-19 in Sindh had reached 7,709 in the province with six more deaths and added that 17,911 samples were tested, which detected 3,283 cases that constituted 18.3 percent current detection rate. He further said so far 7,385,949 tests have been conducted against which 507,476 cases were diagnosed, of them 93.2 percent or 472,739 patients have recovered, including 215 overnight.

Shah maintained that currently 27,028 patients were under treatment, of them 26,662 were in home isolation, 25 at isolation centers and 341 at different hospitals and added that the condition of 297 patients was stated to be critical, including 23 on ventilators.

According to him, out of 3,283 new cases, 2,829 have been detected from Karachi, including 1,054 from East, 937 South, 464 Central, 153 Malir, 127 West and Korangi 94. Similarly, Hyderabad has 107, Qamber 31, Shikarpur 30, Jamshoro and Thatta 25 each, Sukkur 23, Jacobabad 22, Ghotki 17, Shaheed Benazirabad 14, Matiari and Sanghar 12 each, Badin and Tharparkar 11 each, Umerkot nine, Larkana and Mirpurkhas seven each, Khairpur and NausheroFeroze six each, Tando Allahyar five cases.

Sharing the vaccination data, the CM said that 32,089,383 vaccine doses were administered upto January 16th, and added during the last 24 hours, 171,010 people were inoculated — in total 32,260,393 vaccines were administered which constituted 58.27 percent of the vaccine eligible population. The chief minister urged people to strictly adhere to the SOPs.