Covid: Bangladesh records lowest daily deaths in nearly 7 months

Single-day deaths from coronavirus hit a 195-day low in Bangladesh with the health authorities reporting 17 fresh fatalities in the 24 hours to 8am on Wednesday.

The country earlier registered 16 deaths on March 18. The single-day death toll was 31 on Tuesday.

The caseload jumped by 1,178 in the 24 hours, according to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).

During the same period, 1,086 patients also recovered from the disease across the country.

The latest additions took the country’s official Covid-19 death toll to 27,487, the total caseload to 1,555,051 and the total number of recoveries to 1,514,962.

As many as 28,599 samples were tested at 821 labs across the country during the 24 hours, yielding a positivity rate of 4.12%. The overall infection rate in the country stands at 16.02%.

The seven-day moving average of single-day deaths in Bangladesh was 24.85 on Wednesday.

Dhaka counted 12 fatalities, the highest among the eight divisions.

Three deaths were reported in Chittagong, while Khulna and Rajshahi each registered one death.

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All 17 of them died at different hospitals across the country.

Of the new patients, Dhaka logged 865 cases, the highest among the divisions, followed by Chittagong with 106.

Meanwhile, the latest figures have put the recovery rate at 97.42% and the mortality rate at 1.77%.

Around 31.5 million people in the country have received their first dose of Covid-19 vaccine. Of them, some 16.63 million have taken both doses, according to DGHS data aggregated till Tuesday.

Bangladesh reported its first three cases of Covid-19, a severe acute respiratory illness caused by a strain of coronavirus later named Sars-CoV-2, on March 8 last year. The first death was reported 10 days later.

The fast-spreading coronavirus has so far claimed over 4.78 million lives and infected more than 233.64 million people throughout the world, according to Worldometer.

More than 210.46 million people have recovered from the disease, which has affected 223 countries and territories across the planet.