Staff Reporter :
Bangladesh has overtaken China in terms of the number of coronavirus cases to emerge as the world’s 18th largest outbreak after recording new cases on Saturday.
China, where the deadly virus reportedly originated in late December last year, has so far recorded 83,075 cases, while it is 84,379 in Bangladesh, according to worldometer.info, a website that provides real-time statistics.
Bangladesh’s Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) on Saturday reported that it had recorded a total of 2,856 coronavirus cases and 44 deaths in the 24 hours to 8:00 in the morning.
Saturday’s tally of cases and deaths took the total to respectively 84,379 and 1,139, according to the DGHS that briefed the media about the update on the coronavirus situation in the country.
The new spike in infections and deaths came on the 14th day of easing the lockdown enforced by the government allowing resumption of offices from May 31 and then of public transport services.
During the briefing, the DGHS also confirmed a recovery of 578 people from the contagion, taking the total recovery tally to 17,827.
In general, the 20 worst-affected countries are being globally treated as the hotspots with the dubious distinction of having more infections, according to healthcare experts.
Bangladesh was first placed among those hotspot countries on June 05, surpassing the European hotspot of Belgium as the 20th worst affected country.
Five days later on June 10, the densely populated nation of around 170 million overtook the Arabian Peninsula hotspot of Qatar as the world’s 19th worst hit country.
In South Asia, only Pakistan and India have more cases, while globally, 17 countries, including those two, have more cases than Bangladesh.
Bangladesh first confirmed its coronavirus cases and deaths in March and since March 26 enforced a 66-day shutdown in parallel with its general holidays in a bid to slow the coronavirus spread.
As the number of cases continued to increase even during those days of shutdown, the target of slowing the spread, much less of flattening the curve, remained unachieved. Now, amid a spike in coronavirus cases since May 31, when the government eased its lockdown, health experts and economists are calling for imposing a hard lockdown.
A hard lockdown is a must to avert large-scale coronavirus community transmission as well as flatten the curve, they say.
Last week, a former DGHS director, Ashish Kumar, said the country has not seen its coronavirus curve flatten like many other worst-affected countries, even after 90 days of infections.
A day after the government proposed a Tk 5.68-trillion budget in parliament for the next fiscal year, Unnayan Onneshan, a local think-tank, in a budget analysis on Friday, also opined that a lockdown be enforced for bending the curve for lives and livelihoods, advocating that savings lives could steer the cycle of the economy.
Globally, 7,756,806 people have caught coronavirus, 428,572 died and 3,974,373 as of 3:00pm on Saturday, with the US becoming the worst-hit country with 2,117,027 cases and 116,831 deaths, according to the worldometer.info.
