Bangladesh prepared to enter into its harshest lockdown yet, with people only allowed to leave their homes in an emergency and soldiers set to patrol the streets, as a deadly resurgence of Covid-19 infections swept the country.
As the national Covid positivity rate exceeded 20% and the country on Monday recorded its highest single-day death toll of the pandemic so far, the government announced a set of tough measures to attempt to curb the spread, including the closure of public transport networks and confining the population to their homes for a week.
Cabinet secretary Khandker Anwarul Islam said troops would be deployed from Thursday to help enforce the lockdown. “The armed forces will be on patrol. If anyone ignores their orders, legal action will be available to them,” he told reporters late Monday.
Islam added that “if needed, it [lockdown] will be extended.”
Most of the south Asian nation’s 168 million population will be confined to their homes by Thursday as part of the restrictions. Only essential services and some larger garment factories supplying international markets will be allowed to operate.
The halting of buses and trains last week has already left tens of thousands of migrant workers living in the capital Dhaka stranded and unable to get home. In scenes reminiscent of India’s lockdown last year, many migrant workers began walking home along the roads in the sweltering summer heat while others crammed into ferries, with no social distancing possible.
Officials have linked the rise in infections to the deadly Covid-19 second wave that swept neighbouring India in April, fuelled in part by the transmissible Delta variant. India and Bangladesh share a long and porous border and thousands of migrant workers have crossed over from India in recent weeks.
More than two-thirds of new virus cases in Bangladesh’s capital are of the Delta variant, a recent study by the independent Dhaka-based International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research reported.
Authorities in Bangladesh feared a repeat of scenes in India, and more recently Nepal, where the deadly Covid-19 wave overwhelmed hospitals, led to oxygen shortages and brought the healthcare system to its knees.
