ISLAMABAD: In the daily statistics shared by the Command and Operation Center (NCOC), COVID-19 has claimed Sunday 61 new lives and the rate of new infections stood at 6.47 per cent.

In its tweet from the official Twitter handle, NCOC said of the past 24-hour period that 57,908 Covid tests were conducted in the period out of which 3,747 emerged as COVID-19 infected.

The new positive cases today take the positivity of the past 24-hour period to 6.47, NCOC said.

Moreoever, the NCOC record confirmed that with new deaths reported today due to COVID-19 take the overall death toll to 26,175.

Separately, in a newly conducted research study for COVID-19 infected patients, many people who lose their sense of smell due to COVID-19 eventually regain it, but some survivors later report smell distortions and unexplained smells.

Researchers analyzed survey responses from 1,468 individuals who had been diagnosed with COVID-19 between April and September 2020 and had suffered loss of smell and taste at the start of their illness. Early on, about 10% also reported smell distortions, or parosmia, and unexplained smells, known as phantosmia.

At an average of six to seven months after becoming ill and first reporting loss of smell, roughly 60% of women and 48% of men had regained less than 80% of their pre-illness smell ability, and rates of smell distortions and imaginary smells had increased, the researchers reported on Tuesday on medRxiv ahead of peer review.