Bangladesh reports 17 deaths, 1318 cases

Bangladesh’s Covid-19 fatalities rose to 7,329 until early Tuesday with 17 more deaths in the past 24 hours.

The health authorities also reported 1,318 new Covid-19 cases during the period, taking the country’s total caseload to 503,501.

The death rate stood at 1.46%, the Directorate General of Health Services said.

So far, 441,929 patients – 87.77 % – have recovered with 2235 in the past 24 hours.

Bangladesh reported its first cases on March 8. The infection number reached the 500,000-mark on December 20.

The first death was reported on March 18 and the death toll exceeded 7,000 on December 12.

Until now, 3,106,494 tests have been carried out, including 15,145 new ones. And the overall infection rate stood at 16.21 percent.

Bangladesh is seeing 2,956.44 infections, 2,594.90 recoveries, and 43.03 deaths per million.

Bangladesh will get Covid-19 vaccines for some 4.5 crore people by May-June next year, Cabinet Secretary Khandker Anwarul Islam said Monday.

“We’ll get three crore doses of vaccine for 1.5 crore people at the end of January or early February next year and six more crore doses for three crore people by May-June,” he told reporters after the Cabinet meeting held at the Secretariat.

The Prime Minister directed to implement the 'No Mask No Service' policy strictly, said the Cabinet Secretary.

Global situation

More than 77 million people have been infected with coronavirus globally and over 1.7 million of them died since the first cases were reported in December last year, according to data compiled by the Johns Hopkins University (JHU).

The global caseload stood at 77,343,652 with 1,702,293 fatalities on Tuesday.

US Covid-19 infections have passed 18,034,214. Meanwhile, the US coronavirus death toll is 319,363 according to JHU.

California reported the most cases, standing at 1,907,483, followed by Texas with 1,602,988 cases and Florida with 1,212,581 cases. Illinois registered 905,069 cases and New York identified 857,049 cases.

U.S. COVID-19 cases hit 17 million on Dec. 17, and added 1 million in four days.

The past week witnessed record numbers of cases, deaths as well as hospitalizations across the states.

Despite a number of mutations so far of SARS-CoV-2 virus, the culprit behind the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, none of them, including the latest UK variant, has made a significant impact on the susceptibility of the virus to any of the currently used therapeutics, drugs or the vaccines under development, experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) have said.

According to WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, SARS-CoV-2 virus has mutated at a much slower rate than the influenza virus, the latter having required that its vaccine strains be reviewed and revised each year based on the circulating strains prevalent that year.

"So far, even though we've seen a number of changes, a number of mutations, none has made a significant impact on either the susceptibility of the virus to any of the currently used therapeutics, drugs or the vaccines under development," she said at a WHO press briefing on Monday.

The WHO chief scientist emphasized that it's important to continuously monitor what's happening to this virus, with the focus on bringing transmission down and getting it as low as possible.-UNB