Prevention and Diagnosis scheme of COVID-19 in Bangladesh
The government of Bangladesh announced the first lockdown on March 26
and extended it to May 16 [45]. On March 16, the government
announced to shut down all the educational institutions from March 17 to
31 and later declared to continue the closure up to September until the
infection rate has considerably decreased [46]. After that, the
government lifted the lockdown for a few days and saw a massive increase
in both infected and death numbers. The government has planned to impose
a zone-wise lockdown from the 9th of June under a
pilot project. According to the plan, infected areas will be divided
into 3 zones depending on COVID-19 severity; Red zones- strict lockdown
will be maintained to decrease the spreading of the disease and no
person is allowed to cross the zone, Yellow zones- limited restriction
will be imposed on the regular life and Green Zones- where virtually no
or very few COVID-19 patients exist [47]. The country suspended all
international travel on April 5, except for flights to and from China
[48]. The government could not impose strict social distancing
measures, especially in Dhaka where lives almost 1.1 million slum
dwellers who earn their day-to-day livelihood [49]. Moreover, the
majority of these slum dwellers have no knowledge of the threat posed by
COVID-19, and they live in an unhygienic condition with very little
supply of water and one bathroom for every 10–16 families that made
them more vulnerable to infectious disease [50].
Currently, 80 public and private laboratories (46 in Dhaka and 34 in
outside of Dhaka) including several public universities that have
Real-time PCR machines have been conducting COVID-19 tests [51, 52]
Total of 1,041,661 tests were conducted by 20 July 2020, with an overall
positivity rate of 20% and almost 61.3% (638,258/1,041,661) tests were
done in the laboratories of the Dhaka city [28]. Although the number
of testing has been elevating day by day, it is still too far from
reaching the target number required to test every possible suspected
case, and among the South-Asian countries, Bangladesh was placed only
above Afghanistan regarding COVID-19 testing. Only 6,322 per 1 million
testings have been done until 20 July 2020 (Figure 05) [10,
53].