The daily Covid-19 test positivity rate in Bangladesh has remained above 10% mark for the second consecutive day.
The latest figures showed an infection rate of 10.04% in the 24 hours till Friday morning, according to a Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) press release.
The health authorities on Thursday recorded the highest daily infection rate in the last three months, as 10.45% of tests conducted in the previous 24 hours came back positive.
On Wednesday and Tuesday, the daily infection rate stood at 7.68% and 8.29% respectively.
On Monday, the infection rate increased to 9.48%, which was the highest since December 21, when the rate was 9.38%.
A total of 1,899 new infections were reported from 18,917 samples tested in the 24 hours till Friday morning.
At the same time, 18 people have died across the country from the infection, taking the number of total fatalities to 8,642.
The DGHS update said a total of 18,987 samples were collected from suspected Covid-19 patients in the last 24 hours for testing at 219 authorized labs across the country.
The overall infection rate in the country stands at 12.98% from 4,368,111 tests that have been conducted so far.
The total number of identified cases in the country stands at 566,838.
Meanwhile, a total of 1,618 patients have successfully recovered from the infection across the country, taking the total number of recovered case to 519,141.
The country's recovery rate now stands at 91.59%.
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Of the new deaths – 11 males and seven females – 13 were from Dhaka, three from Chittagong, and one each from Rangpur and Mymensingh divisions.
Sixteen of the victims died at different hospitals while two died at home.
So far, 6,532 men (75.58%) and 2,110 women (24.42%) have died from Covid-19 across the country.
The mortality rate against the total number of cases detected in the country stands at 1.52%.
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 named Sars-CoV-2.
The novel coronavirus broke out in China's Wuhan city in late December of 2019 and quickly spread throughout the world, becoming a pandemic in less than three months.
The fast spreading coronavirus had claimed 2,705,025 lives and infected 122,470,459 people across the world till Friday afternoon, according to Worldometer, a reference website that provides counters and real-time statistics for diverse topics.
As many as 98,727,735 people have recovered from Covid-19, which has spread to 219 countries and territories across the planet.