Covid claims 24 more lives, lowest in 4 months

Bangladesh has witnessed a significant improvement in death and infection of coronavirus as the country’s health authorities counted 24 more deaths caused by the virus in the last 24 hours till Thursday morning, lowest in the last four months.

They also counted 1,144 new cases after testing 24,820 samples at 814 government authorised laboratories in the country in the same period, the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) said in a press statement this afternoon.

The country last recorded 22 single-day deaths on May 27 and 26 on September 20, this year.

The positivity rate of the virus slightly declined to 4.61 percent in the 24 hours which was 4.76 percent on Wednesday.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that the daily case positivity rate should remain at 5 percent or below for 14 days before mass unlocking.

On Tuesday, the country witnessed 4.69 percent infection rate which was the lowest in around six months.

The country last witnessed the upswing in fatalities reaching its peak on August 5 and 10 when 264 deaths were recorded.

Between May and June this year, there was a 273 percent rise in monthly caseloads and 162 percent in fatalities.

Some 1,653 people were declared free from the infection taking the total number of recovery to 15,07,789 with the recovery rate 97.38 percent up from Wednesday’s 97.35 percent and Tuesday’s 97.34 percent.

Meanwhile, the fatality rate of the virus increased to 1.77 percent after remaining static at 1.76 percent for the last few weeks.

Among the new victims, 11 died in Dhaka division, six in Chattogram, three each Khulna and Sylhet division, one in Rangpur while no casualty was reported in Rajshahi, Barishal and Mymensingh divisions during the period.

Of them, 10 male and 14 were female and the deceased were aged between 21 and 80 years and majority of them were between 51 and 80 years, according to the DGHS daily chart.

Among the victims, 19 breathed their last while undergoing treatment at different public hospitals, five died at different private hospitals in the 24 hours.

Meanwhile, Worldometer, a reference website that provides counters and real-time statistics for diverse topics, has recorded 47, 34, 567 deaths so far caused by the virus and 23, 09, 64, 399 cases worldwide.

Since the outbreak of the virus in China in 2019, the health authority in Bangladesh confirmed the first case on March 8, 2020 and recorded the first death on March 18 in the same year.

50 lakh Sinopharm doses arrive in Dhaka

Around 50 lakh more doses of the Sinopharm vaccine arrived in Dhaka from China in the early hours of Thursday.

A regular flight of Biman Bangladesh Airlines landed at Shahjalal International Airport with the vaccine consignment around 2am.

On September 18, Bangladesh received some 50 lakh doses of the Sinopharm vaccine. Besides, 54 lakh doses of the Chinese Covid vaccine arrived in Bangladesh on September 11.