Bangladesh has registered 1,018 new Covid-19 cases, the highest daily caseload in two months.
With the latest development, the tally of those testing positive for the deadly virus now stands at 553,105.
The death toll climbed to 8,496 after seven fatalities were recorded in a 24-hour time frame until Wednesday morning, the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) said in a press release.
It was on January 10, when DGHS recorded a higher single-day caseload of 1,071.
Since then, the number of daily cases remained below the 900 mark until Tuesday.
The month of March is seeing an upward trend of rising cases day by day. On March 1, 585 new Covid-19 cases were recorded, after almost a month of a lower rate of infections, and on Tuesday, 912 cases were detected.
With the number of people testing positive going up, the daily test positivity rate has also risen to 5.98%.
Earlier on Tuesday, addressing the sudden spike in Covid-19 cases across the country, Health Minister Zahid Maleque, said that Covid-19 infections in the country are on the up because people are travelling to different tourist spots like Cox’s Bazar, flouting health safety regulations.
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He said: "The way people are going to Cox's Bazar, Sylhet and the way social events are going on without people wearing masks or maintaining social distancing, the infection rate was bound to rise. Recently, the number of patients in the hospital has increased too.”
"People should not think that they are immune to coronavirus after taking only the first dose of the vaccine.
“Vaccine is just for protection. It will take time to be safe from the virus after taking the second dose of the vaccine,” the minister furthered.
Mortality rate
So far, 6,424 male Covid-19 patients (75.61%) and 2,072 female patients (24.39%) have died in Bangladesh.
The mortality rate against the total number of cases currently stands at 1.54%.
Of the seven deceased – four men and three women – four were from the Dhaka division, two from Chittagong, and one from Barisal divisions.
All of them died while undergoing treatment at different hospitals.
The DGHS said a total of 17,299 samples were collected from suspected Covid-19 patients in the 24-hour time frame.
As many as 17,032 samples, including some pending ones, were tested at the 219 authorized labs — government and private — across the country.
To date, 4,197,970 tests have been conducted in the country, leading to an overall test positivity rate of 13.18%.
On March 8, health authorities in Bangladesh reported the first three cases of Covid-19, a severe acute respiratory illness caused by a new coronavirus strain which was later named Sars-CoV-2.
The novel coronavirus broke out in China's Wuhan city in late December, 2019 and quickly spread throughout the world, becoming a pandemic in less than three months.
The fast-spreading coronavirus has claimed more than 2,624,000 lives and infected as many as 118,243,000 people across the world till Wednesday afternoon, according to worldometer, a reference website that provides counters and real-time statistics for diverse topics.
As many as 93,912,000 people have recovered from Covid-19 which has affected 219 countries and territories across the planet.