‘No doubt’ Pakistan is in the third wave of the coronavirus — planning minister

A man wears a protective face mask as he walks among other people along a street, as the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues, in Karachi, Pakistan June 16, 2020. (REUTERS)

• Says confident AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine doses will start coming from India within March, first batch will have 4.2 million doses
• Umar said global norm not to vaccinate people below age of 18, which left a little over 100 million Pakistanis the government planned to vaccinate

ISLAMABAD: Pakistani planning minister Asad Umar, who also heads the National Command and Operation Center that oversees the nationwide coronavirus response, said on Thursday there was “no doubt” Pakistan was going through a third wave of the coronavirus, driven mostly by the spread of a United Kingdom variant of the disease in the country.
A new strain of coronavirus identified in the United Kingdom last year is up to 70% more infectious than other variants and increasingly being found to be more deadly also, scientists say. 
“Absolutely. There is no doubt in this that the third wave has started and the phenomena that is driving this is the spread of the UK strain,” Umar said in an interview to a local television channel, adding that the Pakistani districts that saw a recent spike in positivity rates were those were a large number of people lived in the UK. 
The minister said previous studies had shown that the UK strain spread much more quickly than the original strain of the coronavirus that had originated in Wuhan, China, “but now in recent research reporters … it is also being established that mortality is also higher. This is a very dangerous situation that is developing.”
Umar said a delay in the delivery of the first batch of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, which was scheduled to arrive in Islamabad on March 2, was because approvals for the South Asian region had not yet formally been given. 
The vaccine is being manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, which will deliver it to 92 lower- and middle-income countries, including Pakistan, under the World Health Organization’s COVAX program — the main global scheme to vaccinate people in poor and middle-income countries around the world.
“Within the month of March, we are confident that vaccines will start coming from there [India],” the minister said. “The first batch will have 4.2 million doses.” 
Speaking about how many Pakistani’s the government planned to vaccinate, Umar said the global norm was not to administer vaccine doses to people below the age of 18, which left about a little over 10 crore, or 100 million, Pakistanis to vaccinate.
“The government of Pakistan has a clear decision: whichever Pakistani is ready to be vaccinated, the government of Pakistan will vaccinate him or her for free,” Umar said. “Whoever is eligible, we will vaccinate them.”