Bangladesh recorded 40 more deaths from Covid-19 and 1,675 new cases in the 24 hours between 8am Monday and 8am Tuesday.
The latest figures took the death toll from the deadly disease to 12,441 and the total number of cases to 792,196 since the pandemic made landfall in Bangladesh in March last year, according to a daily Covid-19 update issued on Tuesday.
These latest data disclosed in the afternoon came several hours after the Birdem General Hospital in Dhaka confirmed that two of their Covid-19 patients had been found infected with the black fungus disease.
One of them is still undergoing treatment at the hospital, while the other, who had contracted Covid-19 a month back, died three days ago.
Black fungus, also known as mucormycosis, is normally a rare infection, which has a mortality rate of 50%.
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In recent months, thousands of cases involving recovered and recovering Covid-19 patients were recorded in India.
Health Minister Zahid Maleque urged all not to be panicked and afraid over it. Elderly persons and individuals with low-immunity needed to be careful over the issue, he added.
The detection of the fungal disease coincides with a surge in fatalities and infections in the country on Tuesday.
On Monday, the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) reported 25 deaths and 1,441 cases in the 24-hour span.
Of the fresh 40 deceased — 26 men and 14 women — 18 were from Chittagong division, eight from Dhaka, four from Rajshahi, three each from Khulna, Barisal, and Rangpur, and one from Sylhet division.
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Twenty-nine of them died at state-run hospitals and nine at private hospitals across the country while two died at home.
So far, 8,995 men (72.3%) and 3,446 women (27.7%) have died of Covid-19 in Bangladesh.
The mortality rate against the total number of cases detected currently stands at 1.57%.
The DGHS said that 16,643 samples were collected from suspected Covid-19 patients between Monday and Tuesday mornings.
A Covid-19 patient waits for her turn to get treatment at Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH) on Sunday, April 11, 2021. With the latest surge in Covid-19, Dhaka hospitals are struggling to provide medical help to the increasing number of patients | Mahmud Hossain Opu/Dhaka Tribune
As many as 16,624 samples were tested at 486 authorized labs — government and private — across the country.
The number of positive results took the daily infection rate to 10.08%.
To date, 5,854,919 tests have been conducted in the country, which left the overall test positivity rate at 13.53%.
The health authorities said 1,279 people recovered from the disease over the preceding 24 hours.
So far, 732,810 patients — 92.50% of all infected — have made full recovery across the country.
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On March 8 last year, the 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 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 3,489,057 lives and infected 168,059,040 people across the world till Tuesday afternoon, according to Worldometer, a reference website that provides counters and real-time statistics for diverse topics.
As many as 149,403,515 people have recovered from Covid-19, which has spread, to 220 countries and territories across the planet.
