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].