Bangladesh recorded 39 deaths from Covid-19 in the last 24 hours - the highest single-day death toll reported in the country in the last three months.
It was December 15 last when the country had recorded more Covid-19 casualties – 40 deaths.
With the latest figure, the number of total fatalities now stands at 8,869 as of Saturday morning, the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) said in a press release.
The country also logged a total of 3,674 new Covid-19 cases in the past 24 hours, taking the total number of infections to 591,806.
Saturday was the fifth consecutive day that the daily tally of new cases crossed the 3,500-mark.
On July 2, 2020, the country recorded a higher single-day caseload of 4,019. Since then, the number of daily cases remained below the 3,500-mark (except July 15 – 3,533 cases), until March 23, when the number of daily infections stood at 3,554.
The latest figures show an infection rate of 14.90% while the overall infection rate in the country stands at 12.96%.
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 over a month of a lower rate of infections.
The DGHS said 24,726 samples were collected from suspected Covid-19 patients in the last 24 hours while a total of 24,664 samples were tested in government and private testing facilities.
To date, as many as 4,566,694 tests have been conducted in the country.
Of the 39 deceased – 24 men and 15 women – 28 were from Dhaka division, five from Chittagong, and two each from Rajshahi, Khulna, and one each from Sylhet and Rangpur divisions.
All the victims died while undergoing treatment at different hospitals across the country.
So far, 6,695 men (75.49%) and 2,174 women (24.51%) have died from Covid-19 across the country.
Since the beginning, 5,028 people have died in Dhaka division, 1,620 in Chittagong, 492 in Rajshahi, 573 in Khulna, 267 in Barisal, 317 in Sylhet, 372 in Rangpur, and 200 in Mymensingh.
The mortality rate against the total number of cases detected so far stands at 1.50%.
The health authorities said 1,971 people recovered from the disease over the preceding 24 hours.
So far, 533,922 patients – 90.22% – have made full recovery across the country.
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 first fatality was recorded in the country on March 18.
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 2,781,000 lives and infected as many as 126,825,000 people across the world till Saturday afternoon, according to worldometer.
As many as 102,248,000 people have recovered from Covid-19, which has affected 219 countries and territories across the planet.