Bangladesh is seeing a steep rise in confirmed Covid-19 cases as it has increased testing of suspected cases since early April. However, experts say it was still not enough to get a clear picture called for widespread testing.
According to them, testing lab facilities should be expanded outside the divisional cities to the district towns, otherwise many people with symptoms will be left out raising the risk of a community-level transmission.
Virologist Professor Nazrul Islam, a former vice-chancellor of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University, says it’s essential now to now to identify people with travel history and test people who came in contact with them if anyone shows symptoms.
“People with a travel history are most likely to transmit the disease to others. Those who live near them and came in contact with them need special attention,” he told the Dhaka Tribune.
Criticizing the authorities for not ensuring mandatory 14-day home quarantine for those who travelled from abroad, Islam said, “The media reported that they were asked to quarantine themselves, but many of them left homes and travelled to different parts of the country. Do we know what happened to them or people who came in contact with them?”
It’s not possible to set how many tests should be conducted each day, according to infectious disease specialist Farhad Uddin Hasan Chowdhury Maruf of the Dhaka Medical College Hospital.
Every patient with symptoms should be tested even if it requires the testing facilities to run more than 20,000 tests per day, he said
“Bangladesh is now in between cluster transmission and community level transmission and for that reason, expanding testing facilities to district level is important to reach as many suspected Covid-19 patients as possible,” Maruf told the Dhaka Tribune.
He, however, said tests have to be conducted at laboratories maintaining biosafety level 2 or more.
“Samples cannot be tested at any lab. Most of the districts in Bangladesh have medical colleges with virologists and it will be wise to set up labs there," he said.
Maruf also recommends setting up booths to collect samples in remote areas, to send to the nearest testing labs. He, however, warned that skilled and trained people should be given the job of collecting samples otherwise tests may come back incorrect.
Currently, the government is operating nine testing labs in capital Dhaka and only eight elsewhere.
Of the 1,184 samples tested in the 24 hours since 12pm Saturday, 701 were collected from Dhaka and 483 form outside the capital.
According to official figures, Bangladesh has some 92,000 testing kits, of which 21,000 have been distributed to different testing facilities. Another 71,000 were in stock as of yesterday.
The health authorities, however, maintain that there’s no shortage of testing kits in Bangladesh.
Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) Director General Abul Kalam Azad said told the media that the number of sample collection and testing will be increased significantly soon.
“We want to get a clear picture of all the unions and villages across the country. We have decided to train health workers from the community clinics to collect samples,” he said yesterday before adding some 13,000 to 14,000 healthcare workers will be trained within few days via community clinics.
Capital Dhaka has the highest rate of testing and this city ranks top in terms of the number of Covid-19 patients in Bangladesh.
Experts say decentralizing testing facilities was a good idea but it is still based on the cities.
“The testing labs are located in cities. People with symptoms might not want to travel a long way to test,” said Virologist Islam adding the number of labs should definitely be more than 28.
According to him, testing every suspected case was crucial to understand how the virus is spreading in Bangladesh. “And for that, we need to expand testing facilities to the remote areas.”
Health authorities in Bangladesh said on Saturday that three more people have died of Covid-19 in the last 24 hours, taking the number of deaths to 30 in the country and an additional 58 people tested positive, raising the total number of confirmed cases to 482.
Meanwhile, the United States, the country which has the highest number of Covid-19 patients as of today, is testing around 318 samples per one million. Italy, one of the hardest-hit countries, is testing around 3,421 samples per million.
