Reza Mahmud :
Indecision and lack of coordination among the government agencies about the measures and its implementation policy to stop spreading of coronavirus are liable for the massive spreading of the disease, public health experts alleged.
“There are enormous indecision and lack of coordination are observed among the government offices about which plans to be taken and how to implement those. But the spreading of the virus are increased in the meantime,” Professor Dr. M. Muzaherul Huq, former Advisor of World Health Organisation (WHO) told The New Nation on Wednesday.
He said the government is always found suffering from hesitation to take the right decision, but there is no lack of experts in the country.
“During the 66 days shutdown started from March 26 and ended on May 31, we found the government holidays were only extended for several times, but had not taken any exit plan with suitable strategy,” Professor Muzaherul Huq said.
He said everyone has a liability to get rid of the pandemic. The people should follow all the health directives strictly.
The government should take wise, and sharp actions on an emergency basis to restrain the virus in this time of serious spreading.
Other experts also pointed similarly to the government’s mismanagement of coronavirus controlling policies.
“The Cabinet Division has announced general holidays for government, autonomous, semi-government and private offices and all of its staffers on June 14 marking red, yellow and green zones in the country based on the virus contamination rate. But the health ministry has not announced any lockdown yet. As a result the dividing efforts of the three zones bring no fruitful result so far. It is clearly a scenario of lack of coordination,” Dr. Shahed Rafi Pavel, the Chairman of Bangladesh Doctors Foundation (BDF) told The New Nation.
He said, the government should find out all the weakness, for which the lack of coordination and mismanagement have became a common phenomenon. Sources said that the health ministry is yet to take a decision to impose further lockdown in the capital’s several areas which are already marked as red zones, because it has not prepared any detail plan about those zones.
Besides, the government has also hesitated to take preventive measures about the possible bad impact of the national economy in case of announcing further lockdown.
Public health experts said that the government had enough time and scopes to stop coronavirus outbreak in our country in the early days when some expatriates entered the country from China, Singapore and Italy which firstly experienced the virus spreading.
They said, firstly, the government had to cancel air connectivity with those countries just before detecting any patient in our land.
Secondly and the very important matter was that the government had to send all migrant workers and new comer foreigners to institutional quarantines strictly. The experts has suggested to do that but government ignored that.
The experts marked it as a grave mistake.
They said if the government had taken any strict and well planned measure during those early days, the outbreak of the virus may be contained. The health of the economy would also be sound in this time.
