Bangladesh reported 35 COVID-19 deaths and 2,635 cases recorded in the 24 hours to 8:00am on Saturday, a day after emerging as a global hotspot for COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2.
This is the third highest number of such deaths, reported for the second time since Thursday, and fourth biggest number of cases that the country has recorded so far in a day.
The new bulk of COVID-19 infections and deaths came on the seventh day of easing lockdown by the government allowing resumption of public transports and offices since May 31.
With the latest, the number of deaths and cases from the deadly virus reached 846 and 63,626, according to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).
The new cases of COVID-19 were found after testing 12,486 samples across the country during the period of time under review, DGHS Additional Director General (administration) Prof Dr Nasima Sultana told Saturday’s virtual press conference on the latest update of the pandemic.
A total of 521 COVID-19 patients also recovered over the last 24 hours, she said, taking the number of such recovery count to 13,325 so far.
Bangladesh reported the first cases of COVID-19 on March 08 and the first death 10 days later on March 18.
In an effort to slow the COVID-19 spread, the government on March 26 enforced a countrywide shutdown and continued it for 66 days.
However, during those days of the shutdown, numbers of COVID-19 cases continued to increase rather than decrease.
A former DGHS director, Ashish Kumar on Friday said the country has not seen its COVID-19 curve flatten like many other worst-affected countries, even after 90 days of infections.
"It's because we did not implement lockdown and social distancing properly. We need to pay serious attention to it," he said.
In South Asia, Bangladesh is the third-most affected country after Pakistan and India while globally it is the 20th, India sixth and Pakistan 17th worst-hit country.
A day before, on Friday, Bangladesh became the world's 20th worst-affected countries, making it the latest global hotspot for COVID-19 pandemic.
In the 24 hours ending on Friday, the country overtook the European hotspot of Belgium because of rising COVID-19 infections and fatalities.
Globally, Bangladesh is just behind Qatar to reach China where the first COVID-19 case was reported in late last year.
In general, the 20 worst-affected countries are being globally treated as the hotspot with the dubious distinction of having more COVID-19 infections, according to healthcare experts.
To avert large-scale COVID-19 community transmission, officials and physicians suggest scrapping the decision on easing the shutdown and applying a hard lockdown across the country.
As of 2:46 pm (BST), the COVID-19 infected 6,866,120 people the world over, according to worldometers.info, a website that provides real-time updates.
Of them, 3,98,535 died, 3,3,62,308 recovered, the data show.
COVID-19 was first reported in China in December last year.
As COVID-19 began sweeping across the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the crisis caused by the disease a pandemic on March 11.
