ISLAMABAD/ LAHORE: The National Command and Operation Center (NCOC), Pakistan’s central pandemic response body, has said the Delta variant now accounts for more than 70 percent percent of daily COVID-19 positive cases in major Pakistani cities, though experts question this statement, saying it was difficult to track new variants in Pakistan given the absence of the genome sequencing technology required to identify and assess them.
The Delta variant was first identified in India in December 2020 and led to major outbreaks in the country. It then spread rapidly and is now reported in 104 countries, according to a US Center for Disease Control tracker. The strain has mutations on the spike protein that make it easier for it to infect human cells, which means people may be more contagious if they contract the virus and can more easily spread it to others.
While scientists are still trying to determine how deadly the Delta variant is, based on hospitalizations in the UK, the variant seems to be more likely to lead to hospitalization and death, particularly among unvaccinated people, according to a recent study published in The Lancet.
In Pakistan, data collected by Arab News from government officials in Islamabad and the four provinces of Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, showed an alarming rise in the number of Delta variant cases across the country.
“What is being reported in media in Karachi, Lahore, it has spread a lot,” a top NCOC official said last week, commenting on Delta variant cases in major Pakistani cities. “It is somewhere around more than like 70 percent.”
However, he also added that only Islamabad and the southern Sindh province currently had the genome-sequencing kits needed to track new strains of the virus. The center was trying to procure more kits to distribute to the other provinces, he added: “Health is a provincial subject, therefore provincial governments should procure their kits for the purpose, but unfortunately they haven’t done this so far.”
Dr. Zaeem Zia, the district health officer for Islamabad, said the Delta variant had been identified in Islamabad Capital Territory but it was difficult to provide exact numbers.
“We only send a specific number of samples to the National Institute of Health for genome-sequencing, therefore it is difficult for us to give an exact number of how many people in Islamabad are infected with the Delta variant,” Zia told Arab News.
When contacted, NIH officials declined to share a figure for the ratio of Delta variant cases among daily positive reports in all the country’s federating units.
Provincial governments, however, shared some provisional figures with Arab News, based on samples sent for testing to the NIH in Islamabad.
Of 85 samples collected for genome sequencing from different hospitals of Lahore, the capital of Punjab province, 56 cases were confirmed to be the Delta variant, the Punjab health department said on July 15.
Secretary of the Public Primary Healthcare Initiative (PPHI) in Balochistan province, Aziz Ahmed Jamali, told Arab News of 21 samples sent to the NIH for testing in July 2021, 17 were confirmed to be the Delta variant.
Dr. Ikram Ullah Khan, additional director general health in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, said 16 out of 21 samples from the province that were genome sequenced turned out to be of the Delta variant.
Abdul Rasheed Channa, a media consultant to the chief minister of Sindh, told Arab News that of 356 samples tested on July 12, 66 were of the Delta variant cases.
Professor M. Iqbal Choudhary, director of the International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences, said the Delta variant “now accounts for 92 percent of COVID-19 cases, which are fast spreading in Karachi.”
Citing his organization’s Virology Institute, Choudhary said that from one sample of 90 cases tested earlier this month, 83 cases were identified as the Delta variant.
But many experts question the authenticity of the data provided by provincial authorities.
Professor Dr. Amir Ali Abbasi, chairperson of the National Center for Bioinformatics at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, said there was no credible way to identify COVID-19 variants in Pakistan since the provinces did not possess genome-sequencing kits.
“Sequencing is a complicated thing and requires a rigorous process to detect COVID-19 variants, and our institutions lack the capacity and expertise to do it,” Abbasi told Arab News. “Scientists collect the data through sequencing, compare it with the data of the whole world and then come to a conclusion about the variants present in a sample.”
He said the National Center for Bioinformatics had sequenced 150 samples during the first wave in June 2020 and found 327 variations of the coronavirus in Pakistan, which had entered the country through 28 countries, including Oman, the United States, Jordan and Qatar.
“This took us one and half years,” he said.
The GISAID and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), two international authentic database repositories of coronavirus genotype data, does not have any listing for the Delta variant in Pakistan, Abbasi said.
“The NCBI lists 472 Delta variants sequences from Asia,” he said, “but none of them are from Pakistan.”
Additional reporting by Naimat Khan in Karachi, Rehmat Mehsud in Peshawar and Saadullah Akhter in Quetta.