Category: Health

Lahore (Nut-Desk)

The National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) said on Thursday that COVID-19 vaccination centers are open across the country after Eid ul Azha-related one day holiday.

In a Twitter message, the NCOC asked citizens to get vaccinated at the earliest to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic. It added that the vaccination centers will remain closed only once a week on Sundays.  During the past 24 hours, the COVID-19 claimed 40 more lives across the country, taking the death toll from the disease to 22,928.

As many as 2,158 new cases of Covid-19 emerged when 34,216 samples were tested, according to the latest National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) update.

The positivity rate of infections was recorded at 6.3 per cent, it said. The country’s caseload climbed to 998,609 after 2,158 new cases were detected.

A total of 2,525 patients are in critical care at hospitals across the country, the NCOC said, adding 895 people recuperated from the disease in the past 24 hours, taking the number of people who have recovered since the pandemic began to 922,929.

Sindh remains the topmost affected province with 361,160 cases followed by Punjab with 351,592 COVID-19 cases. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has reported 141,288 cases, Islamabad, 85,179, Balochistan 29,301 cases while Gilgit Baltistan has reported 7,551 COVID-19 cases and AJK registered 22,538 cases.

Lahore (Nut-Desk)

Pakistan’s coronavirus tally on Friday crossed the grim milestone of 1 million after the country reported 1,425 cases during the last 24 hours, the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) announced on Friday.

According to the NCOC, 25,215 tests were conducted in the last 24 hours and the positivity ratio was below six per cent. The current positivity rate stands at 5.65% and the total number of cases are 1,000,034.

The NCOC reported the grim milestone exactly two months after Pakistan’s tally of positive cases crossed 900,000.

The nationwide death toll from the coronavirus now stands 22,939 after 11 people lost their lives to the disease. While the number of recovered patients stands at 923,472 and the active cases of the country are 53,623.

Coronavirus has cast a pall on Eid ul Adha celebrations for a second consecutive year, as Muslims across Pakistan celebrate the religious festival.

Eid celebrations in the country come at a time when a steady rise in COVID-19 cases has been witnessed and the threat of the Delta variant looms large. Owing to the potential of Eid becoming a super spreader event — and a probable cause for the fourth wave — the government has urged the nation to scale back on gatherings.

Lahore (Nut-Desk)

The National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) on Tuesday declared compliance of guidelines issued on the occasion of Eidul Adha particularly standard of operating procedures (SOPs) for Eid prayer congregations critical to contain disease spread.

The NCOC session held with Federal Minister for Planning, Development and Special Initiatives Asad Umar in chair where the meeting reviewed implementation of standard operating procedures (SOPs) on Eidul Adha and spread of the pandemic in Karachi and Gilgit-Baltistan.

The forum was briefed that instructions have been issued to the provincial administrations of all federating units to ensure implementation of SOPs pertaining to Eidul Adha.

The forum expressed satisfaction over additional steps taken by Sindh government in view of COVID-19 outbreak. The forum was informed that keeping in view the surging disease spread, some 500 oxygen cylinders and 30 ventilators were added in Gilgit-Baltistan.

The forum was briefed on capacity building of vaccination facilities. “At present, over half a million COVID-19 vaccines are being administered daily in the country,” the forum was informed. The forum announced that the vaccination centers across the country would remain closed only on first day of Eidul Adha.

The forum was told that huge stocks of Moderna vaccine were provided to vaccination centers for inoculations of individuals and students going abroad.

In this regard, instructions have been issued to the administrations of all the provinces to ensure implementation of SOPs. Earlier in a tweet, Asad Umar said that complete restrictions could only be lifted in the country until a major portion of the population fully got vaccinated against COVID-19.

“The number of people administered vaccine in a single day crossed 600,000 mark yesterday (Monday) for first time in the country”, the minister who also chairs meeting of National Command and Operation Center (NCOC) wrote.

However he said although the rising number of inoculated people is an encouraging sign but it needed further boost so that all type of restrictions in every field of life were lifted as soon as possible. Asad Umar said the UK was an excellent lesson of vaccination minimizing health impact of COVID.

Sharing graphs in his tweet, the minister pointed out that the cases had risen in current wave in UK at about the same rate as previous wave, but number of people needing hospitalization was much less due to high rate of vaccination achieved.

Lahore (NUT-DESK) Another 30 people have died in Pakistan due to the global coronavirus epidemic, while 2,452 new cases have also been reported. The number of active cases is nearing 50,000, with the current figure recorded at 48,850.

The National Command and Operation’s daily data sheet on coronavirus from Monday morning showed that 49,503 COVID-19 tests were taken across the country in the last 24 hours. Of them, 2,452 came back positive.

 

According to the official portal, the positivity rate stands at 4.95%.

The number of deaths from coronavirus in the country has reached 22,811 and the total number of cases has reached 991,727. During the last 24 hours, most deaths occurred in Sindh followed by Punjab. Out of the 30 deaths in the last 24 hours, 21 people died on ventilators.

The total active coronavirus cases in Pakistan are 48,850 as of July 19. The active case count in Sindh is 19,655, in Punjab 17,178, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 7,168, in Islamabad Capital Territory 1,916, in Balochistan 1,962, in Gilgit-Baltistan 612 and 1,012 in Azad Jammu and Kashmir.

NCOC’s daily stats show that 903 patients have recovered from the virus in the last 24 hours, pushing the total number of recoveries in Pakistan to 920,066. There is no patient on the vent in Balochistan.

Lahore (Muhammad Yasir) Pakistan today received 1,236,000 doses of COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca through COVAX.

COVAX, co-led by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), Gavi (the Vaccines Alliance), and the World Health Organization, is a global initiative that works with governments and manufacturers to ensure COVID-19 vaccines are available worldwide to both higher-income and lower-income countries.

Sameh Elfangary, Country President for GCC and Pakistan, AstraZeneca, said: “I was delighted to see the arrival of further doses ofCOVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca to Pakistan. This is wonderful news for the people of Pakistan. On behalf of AstraZeneca, I would like to thank our partners at COVAX for making this possible. All partners are working round the clock to ensure that as many COVID-19 vaccines can get to as many people as soon as possible. This milestone further demonstrates the value of governments, industry and others working together to fight against the pandemic.”

AstraZeneca is committed to providing the vaccine broadly and equitably across the globe, at no profit during the pandemic. COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca has helped to save tens of thousands of lives and prevent thousands of hospitalizations since the start of this year. To date, nearly 700 million doses have been released for supply to 170 countries worldwide, and AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine accounts for approximately 90% of COVAX supply to date, with more than 80 million doses released for supply to 127 countries.

STOCKHOLM: The EU”s disease agency said Friday it was predicting a sharp increase in Covid-19 with nearly five times as many new cases by August 1, compared to last week”s level. In its coverage area, which includes the European Union, Norway and Iceland, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) expected to see 420 cases per 100,000 inhabitants for the week ending on August 1, up from just under 90 last week, it said in a weekly report.

NEW DELHI: The number of coronavirus cases in India surpassed 31 million Friday as the country registered nearly 39,000 new infections in the last 24 hours. According to the Health Ministry, 38,949 new cases were recorded, taking the total to 31.02 million, while 542 more fatalities were registered, bringing the death toll to 412,531.”India”s active caseload is currently at 430,422. Active cases constitute 1.39% of total cases,” said a statement from the ministry. There has been an overall decline in cases and deaths in most parts of the country in the ongoing second wave of pandemic. Health experts have warned, however, that people not following COVID-19 guidelines is likely to trigger a spike in cases. Over 390 million vaccine doses have been administered so far under a nationwide vaccination drive according to official figures. Many Indian cities, however, are reporting a shortage of vaccine supplies.

WASHINGTON: In a world first, US researchers have developed a neuroprosthetic device that successfully translated the brain waves of a paralyzed man into complete sentences, according to a scientific paper published Thursday. “This is an important technological milestone for a person who cannot communicate naturally,” said David Moses, a postdoctoral engineer at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), and one of the lead authors of the study in the New England Journal of Medicine. “It demonstrates the potential for this approach to give a voice to people with severe paralysis and speech loss. ” The breakthrough involved a 36-year-old man who had a stroke when he was 20 that left him with anarthria — the inability to speak intelligibly, though his cognitive function had remained intact. Every year, thousands of people lose the ability to talk due to strokes, accidents or disease. Past research in this area has focused on reading brain waves via electrodes to develop mobility prosthetics that allow users to spell out letters. The new approach was intended to enable more rapid and organic communication. UCSF researchers had previously placed electrode arrays on patients with normal speech who were undergoing brain surgery, to decode the signals that control the vocal tract in order to express vowels and consonants, and were able to analyze the patterns to predict words. But the concept hadn”t been tried out on a paralyzed patient to prove it could offer clinical benefit.

Lahore (Muhammad Yasir)Chughtai Public Libraries have inked an agreement with and Masood Faisal Jhandir Library Melsi and Work is underway on this significant joint project thesw days.The Masood Faisal Jhandeer Library, Asia’s largest private library, covers an area of ​​five acres and has about 500,000 books. The Chughtai Public Library preserves the rare collection of books in the Masood Faisal Jhandeer Library through latest digital equipment and presenting them in digital format. For this, the world’s most advanced scanners, Book I-Five, have been sent there. A trained staff of six people is working there day and night. It has scanned more than two thousand rare books and saved them for future generations. And the work is still going on. All scanned books can be accessed through the following link. http://www.chughtailibrary.com/search_result.php?title=&auth_id=&auth_name=&pub_id=&pub_name=&source=Masood+Faisal+Jhandir+Library&subject_new=&lang_id=&language=&type_id=&type_name=&from=&to Similarly, the Chughtai Public Library has hired a staff of seven people to organize and arrange the cataloging, classification and online catalog of the Masood Faisal Jhandeer Library. So far, more than 33,000 books have been registered in the library software named (KOHA). Researchers can view the catalog of books in the library at home through this link. http://opac.chughtailibrary.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?branch_group_limit=branch%3AFMJL Chughtai Libraries at Masood Faisal Jhandeer Library are still working on both the projects. This is a revolutionary development at the level of libraries in Pakistan.