News Desk :
The number of daily coronavirus cases in Bangladesh has dropped below 1,000 for the first time in more than four months on Saturday.
On the day, only 818 new cases have been reported.
The health authorities in the country earlier recorded 698 new infections on May 17.
As many as 17,818 samples were tested in the 24 hours to 8am on Saturday, yielding an infection rate of 4.59%. The overall infection rate in the country stands at 16.15%.
Besides, another 25 people died of Covid-19 during the same period.
At the same time, 965 more patients recovered from the disease, according to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).
The latest additions took the country’s death toll to 27,393, the total caseload to 1,550,371 and the total number of recoveries to 1,510,167.
The seven-day moving average of single-day deaths in Bangladesh stood at 30.14 on Saturday.
Dhaka counted 11 deaths, the highest among the eight divisions, followed by Chittagong with six fatalities.
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Four deaths were reported in Khulna, while Rangpur and Sylhet each reported two fatalities.
All 25 of them died at different hospitals across the country.
Of the new patients, Dhaka logged 514 cases, the highest among the divisions, followed by Chittagong with 155.
Meanwhile, the latest figures have put the recovery rate at 97.41% and the mortality rate at 1.77%.
Around 23.87 million people in the country have received their first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. Of them, some 15.78 million have taken both doses, the latest DGHS data show.
Bangladesh reported its first three cases of Covid-19, a severe acute respiratory illness caused by a strain of coronavirus later named Sars-CoV-2, on March 8 last year. The first death was reported 10 days later.
The fast-spreading coronavirus has so far claimed over 4.75 million lives and infected more than 231.99 million people throughout the world, according to Worldometer.
More than 208.61 million people have recovered from the disease, which has affected 223 countries and territories across the planet.
