COUNTRY’S three public health experts have expressed concern over the government’s wrong outlook to testing and surveillance, including charging patients a fee, saying that it is hampering the response for Covid-19 pandemic tests. In June, the government decided to charge Tk 200 for a Corona testing at government facilities and Tk 500 for a sample collected from home, while the private sector charges Tk 3,500 per test, thereby creating barriers to effective control of the virus.
According to a report published on Saturday in the UK-based weekly medical journal — The Lancet — since the decision, testing rates have fallen drastically to around 0.8 tests per 1000 people a day, with a low of just 0.06 tests per 1000 people in August. Bangladesh is administering on average between 12,000 and 15,000 tests per day for a population of 168 million. Till Sunday, Bangladesh recorded 3,08,925 Covid-19 cases with 4,206 deaths.
Media reports said, the three health experts have told the global medical journal that the number of tests per day was not enough considering the density of population. With Bangladesh in the grip of the monsoon season and the dengue season approaching, they expressed concern about the spread of Coronavirus throughout the country. They also feared that the worst was yet to come. The pandemic had exposed the ‘vulnerable’ healthcare system in the country.
One of the experts also said that the death rate from virus was ‘four times higher’ than the recorded figure. The Ministry of Health, however, did not respond to The Lancet’s request for comment in this regard.
The experts said the country spends just 0.69 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on the health sector, which makes Bangladesh one of the lowest spenders on health globally. Already a number of people had died of Covid-19 but had not been tested, or had died before they had received their test results. Besides, there is a lack of confidence in the healthcare system, so people don’t want to get tested because they don’t want to get a result they don’t trust.
It is to be noted that the country had witnessed testing scams. Regent Hospital owner Mohammad Shahed, who was accused of issuing thousands of fake negative coronavirus test results to patients at his two clinics in the city, was arrested in July while trying to flee to India. Another well-known doctor Dr Sabrina Arif and her husband Arif Chowdhury of JKG Healthcare were also arrested for issuing thousands of fake virus certificates at their Dhaka laboratory.
It is a common knowledge that Bangladesh’s testing capacity is still extremely insufficient for its population. The country remains at the bottom among the South Asian countries in terms of the number of tests being conducted. Since the shortage of testing kits could be a major setback for containing the spread of the virus, the government should take every step necessary to ensure smooth supply of them to all the hospitals and labs, marked for Corona patients.
