Staff Reporter :
The authorities are thinking to re-impose tough coronavirus restriction as the country grapples with rising infection, hospitalizations and deaths amid a second wave of the pandemic in the country.
As part of the move, the authorities concerned have been asked to force people to wear masks and conduct public awareness campaigns over wearing mask.
On Sunday, thousands of people were fined across the country for not wearing masks in public places.
“The fine for not wearing mask in public places can be hiked to Tk 5,000 from Tk 500, as the government is going to adopt stricter measures to contain the spread of Covid-19 infections in the country,” Cabinet Secretary Khandker Anwarul Islam saved during this in a media briefing in the Secretariat on Monday.
He said: “We would monitor the situation for one more week. If the strategy does not work then we will go for tougher action.”
The coronavirus cases keep growing again over the last few days in the country with over 2,000 infection cases getting registered each day after showing an erratic decline for nearly 70 days.
The Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) confirmed 2,419 new coronavirus cases in the last 24 hours until Monday, the highest daily count in the last 81 days, taking the tally of infections to 4,49,760.
The country also logged 28 more deaths from Covid-19 during the period, according the DGHS’s daily virus update report. Of the 28 deceased — 21 men and seven women — 21 were from Dhaka division, four from Chattogram, two from Rajshahi, and one from Sylhet division.
All the victims died at different hospitals in the country.
So far, 4,930 men (76.84%) and 1,486 women (23.16%) have died from Covid-19 across the country.
The mortality rate against the total number of cases detected so far stands at 1.43%.
The DGHS said 16,240 samples were collected from suspected Covid-19 patients in the last 24 hours.
As many as 16,059 samples were tested in the 117 authorized labs – government and private – across the country and 2,419 new patients were confirmed.
Till Monday, 2,665,131 tests have been conducted in the country, leading to an overall infection rate of 16.88% so far.
The health authorities said 2,183 people recovered from the disease over the preceding 24 hours.
So far, 364,611 patients – 81.07% of all infected – have made full recovery across the country.
Besides, the number of corona patients is also increasing at different hospitals over the last few days with the advent of winter, prompting the public health experts to urge the government to equip all the hospitals, including the upazila health complexes, with necessary equipment, including adequate oxygen facilities, to ensure proper healthcare services to the infected people.
They also urged the government to increase ICU facility at all the hospitals in Dhaka.
Currently, there are 309 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds for critical Covid-19 patients in Dhaka and 217 of them were occupied as of Monday morning.
In the last 24 hours till Monday morning, a total of 261 new coronavirus patients were admitted in the 19 designated Covid-19 hospitals in the capital while 271 patients discharged from these healthcare facilities, according to DGHS.
On March 8, health authorities in Bangladesh reported the first three cases of Covid-19, a severe acute respiratory illness caused by a new coronavirus strain which was later named Sars-CoV-2.
The novel coronavirus broke out in China’s Wuhan city in late December last year and quickly spread throughout the world, becoming a pandemic in less than three months.
The fast spreading coronavirus has claimed 1,394,833 lives and infected 59,060,168 people across the world till yesterday, according to Worldometer.
As many as 40,824,218 people have recovered from Covid-19 which has spread to 218 countries and territories across the planet.
