Bangladesh’s coronavirus cases have crossed 800,000 with the health authorities confirming 1,710 new cases in the 24 hours to Monday morning.
Another 36 deaths have been reported, taking the number of total fatalities to 12,619.
The number of confirmed cases in Bangladesh since the pandemic unfolded last year now stands at 800,540, according to the daily virus update released by the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).
The country reached the grim milestone of infections nearly 15 months after the health authorities detected the first cases in March 2020.
It took 47 days to cross the latest mark of 800,000 from 700,000 infections on April 14 while the caseload crossed 600,000 on March 29.
The country needed 103 days to reach 100,000 cases, but the 200,000 cases mark was reached just 30 days later (133 days into the pandemic). However, the country has steadily taken longer to reach each subsequent 100,000 case increment.
Bangladesh took 39 days to reach 300,000 cases from 200,000, before reaching 400,000 cases from 300,000 cases in 61 days. The country needed a slightly quicker 55 days to reach 500,000 cases from 400,000.
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The DGHS said 18,862 samples were collected from suspected Covid-19 patients between Sunday and Monday mornings.
As many as 18,178 samples were tested at 503 authorized labs — government and private — across the country.
The number of positive results took the daily infection rate to 9.41%.
To date, 5,947,513 tests have been conducted in the country, which left the overall test positivity rate at 13.46%.
Of the fresh 36 deceased — 25 men and 11 women — 12 were from Chittagong division, nine from Dhaka, eight from Rajshahi, six from Khulna, and one from Sylhet division.
Twenty-eight of them died at state-run hospitals and six at private hospitals across the country while two died at home.
So far, 9,113 men (72.22%) and 3,506 women (27.78%) have died of Covid-19 in Bangladesh.
The mortality rate against the total number of cases detected currently stands at 1.58%.
The health authorities said 1,567 people recovered from the disease over the preceding 24 hours.
So far, 740,372 patients — 92.48% of all infected — have made full recovery across the country.
On March 8, 2020, Bangladesh logged 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 country also witnessed its first fatality on March 18.
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 has claimed 3,558,112 lives and infected 171,089,193 people across the world till Monday afternoon, according to Worldometer, a reference website that provides counters and real-time statistics for diverse topics.
As many as 153,233,481 people have recovered from Covid-19 which has spread to 220 countries and territories across the planet.