Home ›› 06 Aug 2021 ›› Front
The upcoming mass inoculation smacks of a looming uncertainty as the government is yet to confirm adequate doses of vaccines and sufficient manpower to get the job done.
Earlier, the government declared to go on with the mega vaccination drive from Saturday to bring 1 crore people under jabbing.
The Director General of the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) Professor Abul Bashar Mohammad Khurshid Alam said the vaccination campaign would start on Saturday but it would not continue week-long.
He termed lack of enough vaccines and manpower crisis a bar to vaccination of the targeted number of people.
“We have changed our plan. Health Minister Zahid Maleque will disclose it in detail on Friday,” he suggested.
Bangladesh has nearly 1.5 crore doses of vaccines in storage. If 1 crore people get the first shot, another 1 crore would be required to get a second shot in the arm which the authorities do not have. The government okayed all the four double-dose vaccines —AstraZeneca, Moderna, Sinopharm and Pfizer.
Highest deaths ever
As the coronavirus continues to find new hosts, the country counted the highest ever 264 deaths from Covid-19 in the last 24 hours till 8am Thursday and identified 12,744 positive cases since the pandemic started in the country on March 8 last year.
Among the dead, 140 were male and 124 female.
In its regular press release, the DGHS said including the latest figure, death toll from the virus reached 21,902 with 13,22,654 total caseloads.
A total of 46,995 samples were tested across the country in 705 laboratories while positivity rate was 27.12 per cent.
In the past 24 hours, 15,786 patients recovered from the viral disease totaling the number of recovery to 11,56,943.
Delta variant in 98pc Covid patients
Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University in a research unveiled on Thursday found that 98 per cent Covid patients in the country are infected with the highly contagious delta variant.
During the period from June 29 to July 30, nasopharyngeal swab samples of 300 Covid-positive patients aged between nine months and 90 years across the country were examined by using the Next-Generation sequencing (NGS) technology.
BSMMU Vice Chancellor Md Sharfuddin Ahmed, also supervisor of BSMMU Genome Sequencing Research Project, said it was the first-phase result of an ongoing research.
The variant, also known as B.1.617.2, accounts for 98 per cent of all sequenced Covid-19 infections where 1 per cent each was the South African variant (B.1.351) and the newfound Nigerian variant (B.1.525).
Patients aged 60+ are more likely to fall victim to the deadly virus if infected with the virus a second time. Determining the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines is under investigation.
