Pakistan soon to get Coronavirus detection kit from japan that would reach at National Institute of Health (NIH) Islamabad on Friday morning," Dr Muhammad Salman, the chief of the NIH's Public Health Labs Division, confirmed.

According to the local media, the coronavirus detection kits would enable federal health officials to test at least 1,000 samples for the lethal virus

At the moment, Pakistan lacks the capability to detect coronavirus, which is a new virus that causes respiratory illness in people and can spread from person to person. It was first identified during an investigation into an outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan and has now spread to at least 15 countries, infecting over 7,000 people and causing 150 deaths in China alone.

The NIH official maintained that no person had been diagnosed with coronavirus in Pakistan, Meanwhile, officials at Karachi's Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH) claimed they were also in the process of acquiring the kits and primers to detect the new coronavirus