Home ›› 16 Jul 2021 ›› Front
Bangladesh on Thursday recorded over 200 coronavirus-related deaths for the fi ft h consecutive day and more than 12,000 fresh cases, sending panicked people queuing up outside vaccination centres across the country.The local death tally rose to 17,278 as the number of confi rmed cases now stands at 10,71,774. The country reported its fi rst cases on March 8 last year and the fi rst coronavirus-related death 10 days later. In the last 15 days, Bangladesh count-ed 2,775 deaths and 1,58,616 Covid posi-tive cases as the highly infectious Delta variant of coronavirus hit the country.Crowded vaccination centresMore people are turning up for vacci-nation in the villages and urban areas where people were initially reluctant to get inoculated in the beginning. The worsening virus situation seems to have reversed the tide.Tangail Civil Surgeon Dr Abul Fazal Md Shahabuddin Khan said that villag-ers crowded the 12 vaccination centres in the district that can inoculate 3,000 people a day.He told The Business Post that they are considering to increase the number of inoculation centres to accommodate the rise in the number of people willing to get the jab.According to the Directorate Gen-eral of Health Services (DGHS), more than 3 lakh people were registering for vaccine daily and nearly 25 lakh people have registered in last one week until Wednesday aft ernoon. The number has more than doubled. The Department of Information and Communication Technology said in a statement that 1,00,93,593 people had completed registration till 11:14pm on Wednesday.
Tackling disinformationMohammad Mushtuq Husain, advisor to the Institute of Epidemiology, Dis-ease Control and Research (IEDCR), said that disinformation discouraged many people from getting vaccine at the beginning.“But more people became interested to take vaccine as fatality and positive rate of coronavirus increased,” he said.Husain said the government should be conscious to stop further disinfor-mation and ensure an adequate supply of vaccine.Health Minister Zahid Maleque on Thursday said that the government was considering to bring down the age limit to 18 for vaccination to incorporate stu-dents in inoculation programme.He said that the National Working Committee on vaccination also made the same suggestion and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was informed about it.“We will soon take a fi nal decision on reducing the age limit to 18,” he said while speaking at Dhaka Medical College Hospital aft er launching Covid specialised beds there.Vaccination drive Bangladesh launched mass vaccination on Feb 7 this year. Registration for vac-cine started on January 26.But the country was forced to sus-pend the drive on May 5 for the lack of vaccine doses before resuming it on July 7 aft er 4.5 lakh jabs reached Bang-ladesh. The age limit has now been re-duced to 35.DGHS director and also member secretary of the Vaccine Deployment Committee Shamsul Haque said that so far Bangladesh has administered more than 107 lakh doses.So far, 42,98,332 people received double doses.Bangladesh plans to bring over 1.59 crore people under vaccine coverage by next month which is 9.38 per cent of its total population if all consignments of 1.60 crore jabs arrive.The country has received 1.59 crore doses of vaccine and another 1.60 crore doses are scheduled to arrive by next month, said offi cials.The total 3.19 crore doses could be used to vaccinate about 1.59 crore people.Shamsul Haque said that the gov-ernment has planned to vaccinate 80 per cent of its population which would cover 13.6 crore people and need 27.2 crore doses. Dhaka sees 74 deaths in 24hrIn the last 24 hours, 44,941 samples were tested at 627 laboratories and 27.23 per cent of them were found to be positive. In the meantime, 8,395 people recovered, raising the number of recov-eries to 9,05,807.Among the latest victims, 140 are male and the rest are female. Of them, 206 died in hospitals.
