In a major report on Bangladesh and its handling of the Covid-19 crisis entitled “Defusing Bangladesh’s Covid-19 time-bomb,” the South Asia Center of Washington DC-based think tank the Atlantic Council points out these signs of encouragement with respect to Bangladesh’s handling of the crisis.
According to the report, while Bangladesh’s government was hardly alone in not tackling the pandemic early enough, fortunately, after a slow start, the government has begun to show signs of urgency.
Following the mass religious gathering in southern Bangladesh, the government started enforcing social distancing measures. Local administrations have been told to punish violators of the home-quarantine rules in line with Section 269 of the Penal Code.
Additionally, an emergency lockdown has been imposed in the sub-district of Shibchar since March 19 where many returnees from Italy are based.
The general secretary of the ruling party Awami League, Obaidul Quader, has said that in the future there may be a possibility of further lockdowns in other areas.
Most recently, the government declared a ten-day nationwide holiday from March 26 to April 4, wherein all government and private offices have been closed, and with the army mobilized to enforce social distancing across the nation. The PM has indicated that this may be extended to April 9.
Almost all international flights have been suspended until April 7 and the country’s March 26 Independence Day celebrations were subdued.
The government encouraged low-income people to return to their villages where they would be provided with government aid or to take refuge in Bhashanchar, an island in the Bay of Bengal originally built to house Rohingya refugees.
On March 20, the government authorized the Bangladesh Army to run two quarantine centers in Dhaka.
One quarantine facility remains the same Ashkona Hajj Camp that has proved inadequate before. The other is a new one at Rajuk Apartment Project near Diyabari in Uttara.
In the medical arena, there has been progress as well. Isolation wards to treat Covid-19 patients have been set up in district-level hospitals across the country.
Students and teachers of the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Dhaka have started making low-cost hand sanitizers due to market shortages in the wake of coronavirus fears. And, Gonoshasthaya Kendra, a public health center in Dhaka, received approval from the country’s Directorate of Drug Administration (DGDA) to mass-produce Covid-19 detection kits, each costing around $3.
The report that these points were drawn from was written by Irfan Nooruddin and Rudabeh Shahid for the New Atlanticist. The full text of the report is available here.