Daily infection rate again comes down below 5%
On Friday, the daily infection rate was 5.57%
The daily infection rate in Bangladesh has again come down below 5%, with 578 more people testing positive for Covid-19 on Saturday.
The previous day 762 people tested positive for the novel coronavirus, putting the day's infection rate at 5.57%, which was an increase from Saturday's 4.73%.
On Thursday, the country recorded the lowest daily infection rate of 4.90% in the last nine months.
In the last 24 hours ending at 8 am on Saturday, 21 more people died from the novel coronavirus.
Professor Nazrul Islam, a noted virologist and a member of the national technical advisory committee on Covid-19, told The Business Standard, "Now our infection rate has come down below 5 which is good news.
"If the infection rate stands at 5% for three consecutive weeks, then coronavirus will become endemic in our country. But the death rate is still high. The hospital management needs to be improved further to reduce the number of deaths."
Bangladesh has passed the 10th months of the Covid-19 outbreak with 527,063 confirmed cases and 7,883 deaths so far, according to the Directorate General of Health Services.
The country's first Covid-19 cases were reported on 8 March this year while the first death from the virus was reported on 18 March.
Some 633 patients were declared free of Covid-19 during the same period, raising the total number of recoveries to 471,756 with an 89.51% recovery rate.
Among the latest day's victims, 13 were men and eight were women. Twenty of them died at different hospitals across the country while one at home.
Moreover, 13 of them hailed from the Dhaka division, six from Chattogram and two from Rangpur.
Meanwhile, 12,215 samples were tested in 199 labs across the country in the past 24 hours. A total of 34,44,007 samples have been tested in the country so far.