ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan today summoned a meeting of the National Coordination Committee (NCC) for COVID-19 to take key decisions in the wake of Omicron variant. The NCC meeting will start around 3pm at PM Secretariat.
The meeting would be attended by NCOC officials, federal ministers and other concerned representatives. The participants would be briefed on the nationwide COVID-19 situation.
The National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) would brief NCC about the steps being taken to control the spread of Omicron cases.
Important decisions would be taken in NCC meeting in wake of Covid-19 situation in the country amid Omicron threat.
Six more suspected cases of Omicron, the new variant of Covid-19, surfaced in Karachi on Thursday. According to the provincial health department, the patients who are suspected to be carrying the Omicron variant have a travel history. Two of them arrived in the port city from Britain while the rest from South Africa where this strain of the deadly virus was first discovered. The patients’ samples have been sent to a private hospital for genome sequencing – a study that confirms the exact variant of the virus – and they have been moved to a quarantine centre.
On Dec 13, the National Institute of Health (NIH) confirmed Pakistan’s first case of Covid-19 Omicron variant in a woman patient from the port city.
In a Twitter statement, the NIH said it has been able to “confirm (via whole genome sequencing) that a recently suspected sample from Karachi is indeed the ‘Omicron variant’ of SARS-CoV2.”
