Health Minister Zahid Maleque has said Covid-19 infections in the country have increased recently as people started travelling to different tourist spots like Cox’s Bazar, flouting health safety regulations.
He said: "The way people are going to Cox's Bazar, Sylhet and the way social events are going on without people wearing masks or maintaining social distancing, the infection rate was bound to rise. Recently, the number of patients in the hospital has increased too.”
The minister was speaking at the inauguration of a year-long tuberculosis awareness program at a hotel in the capital on Tuesday, reports Bangla Tribune.
"People should not think that they are immune to coronavirus after taking only the first dose of the vaccine. Vaccine is just protection. It will take time to be safe from the virus after taking the second dose of the vaccine,” he said.
Coronavirus had proved that without developing the health sector, the world could not progress, Zahid Maleque added.
“As coronavirus is now under control, we have managed to resume all kinds of health services again. We know that health services were disrupted due to Covid-19. We couldn't provide services everywhere. But now we have bounced back again. We have bounced back in every aspect,” he further said.
Mentioning that the country has been successful against tuberculosis, the minister said: "Once, 54 out of 100,000 people used to die from tuberculosis. Now it has come down to 24 people. The death of 36,000 people from the disease is not now desirable for us.”
“We still have 300,000 tuberculosis patients. One and a half lakh new patients are being added every year. Our recovery rate is very good. People are getting better after taking treatment. But the detection rate is still low. So, we need to increase the detection rate,” he said.
The health minister said: “We admit that we had some problems. But we have not abandoned our problem, but rather tried to solve it quickly and we have succeeded.
Stating that many countries were yet to start Covid-19 vaccination, he said: “We have already vaccinated about four million and more than five million have completed registration for vaccines. So we are doing well in this regard.”
Till Tuesday, altogether 4,013,963 people had been inoculated across the country.
