As per media reports, the nationwide death toll from Covid-19 was 212 on Friday and every day it is rising and the situation is getting bleaker while the infection cases are also skyrocketing. Still, we have no comprehensive plan to roll out a nationwide vaccination programme. We lack enough hospital arrangements to admit patients to give them urgent treatment. We have already crossed the grim milestones of 1 million Covid-19 cases and 16,000 deaths and what concerns us most is the actual number of daily death which may be more than the official figure. We are in the dark because the authorities are feeding us with deaths apparently recorded only in government hospitals. Deaths in private clinics, hospitals and mostly at homes in the countryside are, it is feared, missing from the government figure.
As per some estimates we have only 2461 Covid treatment beds in government hospitals with 108 ICU units which are nowhere close to the huge requirement. So more people are dying without access to affordable treatment facilities. We have had enough time to develop a massive covid treatment infrastructure but we failed because the government failed to visualize it. There was no shortage of money but what we lacked was foresight and proper planning. We can’t understand why the government had spent Tk 36 crore for opening a 2000 bed hospital at International Convention Center at Bashundhara (ICCB) in April 2020 to close in September that year. It paid ICCB Tk 6 crore as rent but in our view, it was totally a wrong plan and flopped.
Covid treatment needs smaller facilities with better supplies and equipment so that transmission can be avoided from over-crowding. As per a disclosure, the health ministry is now planning to set up a makeshift hospital at Mohakhali Kitchen market but it may become a boomerang again. As we see the health ministry lacks any consistent plan and takes decisions whimsically avoiding expert opinion, although its corruption is routinely capturing headlines on procurement business. We are yet to fix a reliable vaccine supply source when the pandemic is heating up. But we don’t understand why the health ministry will not buy vaccines from Gonoshastaya Kendra which had reportedly a booking for 20 million dozes with Russia although the government is negotiating with Russia for the jab. We would say it is not time for politicking; we must save life buying vaccines from any source.
