The Cabinet Division on Monday issued new guidelines and directives for implementing new zone-wise lockdown, but the DGHS and the Health Ministry are yet to specify the three zones. As soon as the authorities finalize it, the DNCC and DSCC authority will start implementing the decision.
In this situation, although the government was planning to start zone wise lockdown from Monday to contain transmission of the deadly virus dividing the Covid 19 infected areas into three zones - Red, Yellow and Green zones - the Dhaka City Corporation authorities could not start it due to non-demarcation of the areas by the DGHS.
Considering some problems to implement the zone based lockdown, Atiqul Islam, Mayor of Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC), said, "Still we didn't get any specific direction how to implement the zone based lockdown. As they only told us to implement lockdown some areas like Mirpur. But Mirpur is a huge area. Where will we start from? They should give us more specific direction like from which lane to which lane or which area to which area."
I have discussed with the Health Ministry and the Directorate General of Health Services over the issue and they assured me that they will provide more specific direction as soon as possible. After getting the direction we will implement the lockdown within 48 hours.
Besides, general holidays will continue in Red and Yellow zones and all offices-government, semi-government and non-government will remain closed.
However, the country has passed 100 days of detecting the first Covid- 19 patient with increasing trends and holding 18th position among the coronavirus infected countries in the world.
The DGHS on Monday detected 3,099 more persons infected with the deadly virus while the number of death was 38 on Monday.
With this the death toll from the pandemic rose to 1,209 while the tally of infections has also surged to 90,619 after 3,099 new Covid-19 cases were added.. On Monday, the total number of recovery of Covid-19 patients rose to 34,027, which is 37.55 per cent of total number of infections.
Highlighting observations on the situation, Prof Dr Nazrul Islam, Former Vice Chancellor of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University, said, "Even though the identification is increasing day by day, I have seen since May 25 that the identification rate is hovering around 20 to 21 per cent as compared to the test; Neither increasing nor decreasing. If this is correct, then we need to take more effective steps to bring this rate down. For this, the lockdown method should be strictly implemented."
Prof Be-Nazir Ahmed, former director of the Department of Health, said, "We were able to control people before Eid and as a result we had seen that the infection rate was slow at that time. After that, movement of people has increased as everything has been opened after Eid. In this case, it can be said again, even though its rate goes up but speed is slow here. There are still easy ways to control it, if followed, the peak may not be very high here."
Meanwhile, data analysis by Johns Hopkins University shows that seven countries, including the United States, Russia, Italy, India and France, among the top 20 countries the infection rates are rising in the last five days.
Of these countries, less than 50,000 are infected in four countries, 50,000 to 100,000 in four countries, including Bangladesh, and the remaining 12 countries are infected with more than 100,000.
On the other hand, the country ranks 18th among the top 20 countries in terms of infection, and Bangladesh ranks 17th among the same countries in terms of mortality (highest 15.20 in France and lowest 0.84 in Saudi Arabia, 1.34 in Bangladesh).
Some experts said that the upward infection rate in the country will not be as fast as in many other countries, but will gradually rise and fall again.
Mushtaq Hossain, adviser to the Institute of Epidemiology Disease Control and Research (IEDCR) said, "Infection rate in the country is on the rise now. It must come down from the top to the bottom again, but it is not likely to come down by itself, effective measures must be taken to bring down the infection. The sooner the control measures are implemented, the sooner we will be able to see a good day.
