Bangladesh on Monday saw its daily Covid death record break again, the eighth time this month, with 247 new deaths officially confirmed in a day with health experts warning that the worst was yet to come.
A total of 15,192 fresh people contracted Covid-19, said the daily Covid situation update of the Directorate General of Health Services, also the largest number of people to get infected by the viral disease in a day.
The test positivity rate however remained unchanged, about 30 per cent, despite a record number of 50,952 tests conducted in the latest 24-hour reporting cycle that ended at 8:00am on Monday.
‘Impacts of the large-scale public mingling allowed for celebrating the Eid festival amid the high rate of infection is yet to emerge,’ warned Nazrul Islam, a member of the National Technical Advisory Committee on Covid-19.
Hundreds of thousands of people moved from Dhaka towards the countryside for celebrating Eid-ul-Azha after the government lifted the curbs after two weeks on July 15 going against the health ministry’s advice.
For eight days, people working in the cities mingled with family members at their village homes without following health guidelines in most cases, despite signs that the novel coronavirus had already reached the furthest corners of the country.
‘We must not forget that we are dealing with the Delta variant, the most infective kind of the novel coronavirus known so far,’ said Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research adviser Mushtuq Hussain.
He warned about a possible spike in the detection of daily cases from Friday as a direct fallout of people’s movement during Eid, followed by a further increase in daily death tolls in the second week of August.
Dedicated Covid hospitals in the country, including the largest ones in the capital, either ran out of ICU or general beds following weeks of high infection rate, largely about 30 per cent.
The divisions of Sylhet, Chattogram and Barishal found Covid infections in about 40 per cent of samples tested in the latest 24-hour reporting period.
The test positivity rate crossed 20 per cent in Rajshahi division again on Monday, about a week after the rate fell below the mark after remaining above 30 per cent for over a month.
