Health Minister Zahid Maleque has confirmed that one more person has died of Covid-19, a new strain of coronavirus, in Bangladesh in the last 24-hours.
He made the statement in the daily online press briefing in Dhaka on Wednesday.
The Bangladesh government has so far reported six deaths.
At the same time, three new cases of coronavirus infection have also been confirmed. As of now, 54 people have been infected across the country.
At least 26 Covid-19 patients have recovered till now, he added.
“We want more people, showing Covid-19 symptoms, to come to us for testing. The facilities are there to detect their disease.”
“Do come for testing, if there are symptoms” he added.
Measures taken by the government
Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) Director of Management Information System (MIS) Habibur Rahman said they have tested 157 samples in the last 24-hours.
“We also tested the samples of all those people who died with symptoms of Covid-19 and none of them were tested positive,” he added.
In the last 24-hours, 1,459 people have been quarantined and 5,130 people were released from the quarantine.
Currently, a total of 19,929 people are quarantined, he added.
Only one person has been taken to isolation in the last 24-hours, taking the total number of isolated people to 295.
He requested everyone not to humiliate or seclude the people who were released from the quarantine.
“People who have already been released from quarantine are completely healthy. Please, try to accept them as such,” he said.
A total of 313 passengers have arrived in Bangladesh in the last 24-hours and were screened at the entry.
In the last 24-hours, the health care centre number,16263, received 67,501 phone calls.
Institute of Epidemiology Disease Control and Research (IEDCR) hotlines numbers received 3,911 calls, among which, 2,659 were for Covid-19 related queries.
So far, IEDCR has received 802,337 calls in its hotline numbers.
He said a total of 339,450 personal protective equipment have been distributed to health workers across the country and more equipment are in stock.
He urged the private medical practitioners not to close their private chambers and attend patients who need medical care.
Institute of Public Health virologist Mahbuba Jamil said, coronavirus needs a living cell to survive, however, it can stay on a dead body for a while just like it stays on any other object.
“We cannot say for sure, but the virus can stay alive for two to four hours on a dead body. We try to collect samples from the dead body within two to four hours of death,” she said.
She said if they are unable to take samples within the standard hours, they can still run a Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) testing to get results.
She also said community transmission is happening, but in limited scale.
IEDCR confirmed there are five testing facilities, four in Dhaka and one in Chittagong to test the samples.
IEDCR, Institute of Public Health, icddr,b, and Dhaka Shishu Hospital are the ones functioning in Dhaka, whereas Bangladesh Institute of Tropical and Infectious Diseases (BITID) is functioning in Chittagong.
Bangladesh will soon run coronavirus tests in 28 other facilities, she added.
The fast spreading coronavirus, which was first reported in China's Wuhan, has infected 860,166 people and claimed 42,344 lives till date, according to Worldometer.
Globally, a total of 178,441 infected people have also recovered from Covid-19, a pandemic announced by the World Health Organization (WHO).