Afghanistan finds deadly fungal infection in COVID patients (Representational image)
A deadly fungal infection known as “black fungus”, which first surfaced in Indian COVID-19 patients, has been detected in Afghanistan, a brutal third wave of the coronavirus, Health Minister Wahid Majroh said on Saturday. is in between. There has been one death from the fungus, which has been found in two other patients, he said.
In Afghanistan, where people rarely wear masks and there is no social distancing, the number of new cases continues to rise, with 1,272 new cases and 92 deaths in the past 24 hours.
The testing rate in Afghanistan is barely 4,000 per day. Since the pandemic began last year, Afghanistan has recorded 124,757 cases and 5,199 deaths, although the figures are believed to be wildly low.
In the capital Kabul, the health ministry has added hundreds of new beds to increase the number of patients, yet the capacity rate is still around 100 percent.
Oxygen is also running short in Afghanistan and poor Afghans sometimes wait several days to fill oxygen cylinders at some production plants in Kabul.
Meanwhile, barely 2.5 percent of Afghanistan’s more than 36 million people have been vaccinated, as the country struggles to get the vaccines promised under the UN-sponsored COVAX scheme.
The condition of the fungus attracted global attention in India and surfaced in Egypt.
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