Covid-19 claims 25 lives, daily cases drop below 1,000

Amid the declining trend in positivity rate of Covid-19 in Bangladesh, the health authorities detected 818 fresh cases of coronavirus in the last 24 hours till Saturday morning, lowest in last four months.

The deadly virus also claimed 25 lives in the same period, the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) said in a press statement this afternoon.

The fresh number of the country’s total deaths caused by the virus mounted to 27,393 while the caseload to 15,50,371, the DGHS said in the statement.

The new cases were detected after testing 17,818 samples at 815 government authorised laboratories in the country in the same period.

The positivity rate of the virus slight increased 4.59 percent from Friday’s 4.54.

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.

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 1,413 people were declared free from the infection taking the total number of recovery to 15,09,202 with the recovery rate 97.80 percent up from Thursday’s 97.38 percent and Wednesday’s 97.35 percent.

Meanwhile, the fatality rate of the virus remained static at 1.77 percent for three consecutive days.

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

Of them, 14 male and 11 were female and the deceased were aged between 21 and 90 years and majority of them were between 41 and 70 years, according to the DGHS daily chart.

Among the victims, 19 breathed their last while undergoing treatment at different public hospitals, six 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, 53, 195 deaths so far caused by the virus and 23, 19, 93, 398 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.