Coronavirus: Where are we heading towards?

While COVID-19, or simply coronavirus, cases are rising in Bangladesh, experts are clearly divided over when the deadly outbreak will show a downward trend in particular. 

On April 21, according to media reports, the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) presented two predictions in a virtual inter-ministerial meeting. One of them termed conservative projected some 48,000-50,000 cases and 800-1,000 deaths to occur by May 31. The second projection saw infected cases rising to 100,000 in the period.

Additionally, both the predictions saw the coronavirus curve peak in this period and then enter the plateau phase to reach a ‘tolerable level’ by the end of June.

However, observers that include many public health specialists think the real coronavirus infection scenario will be much worse in the days to come. As they argue, the real number of infected cases cannot surface because of ‘lack of adequate tests’. According to them, the country may need to wait till June, or even July, to see the peak of the curve.

It is important to note that the DGHS predictions based on several factors like the lockdown effective since March 26, awareness and social distancing measures were prepared before the reopening of apparel factories, shopping malls and some other businesses like restaurants.

With the reopening of the businesses, especially those in and around the capital where more than 80 percent of the country’s coronavirus cases occur and most of the virus hotspots are located, the ongoing lockdown has already become largely ineffective as public movement is increasing day by day. In this context, one has reasons to worry that the next few weeks may see a significant surge both in number of case and death.

But, does it necessarily mean that the present state of the lockdown may lead to a situation that the United States or European countries like Italy, Spain, United Kingdom etc had to face in the past two months in particular because of the pandemic? Since mid-March, Europe became the epicentre of the virus outbreak, while the US surpassed all other countries in terms of infection and loss of life due to the microbe.

As of May 19, the US had 1,508,598 confirmed cases of and 90,353 deaths from the virus and the figures stood respectively 225,886 and 32,007 in Italy, 231,606 and 27,709 in Spain and 246,406 and 34,796 in UK. One can recall here that, apparently to terrify non-compliant people during the lockdown, there was a flurry of social media post, even followed by many mainstream media, until early May with the coronavirus situation in Bangladesh compared with that in these countries. During the period, the former crossed 53rd day or so of the deadly virus outbreak and was way ahead of the latter in terms of confirmed cases in particular.

Interestingly, however, such kind of posts have no longer been available since May 8 as Bangladesh crossed the second month of the spread of the disease on the day, a period when both US and Europe entered the most serious phase of the pandemic that Bangladesh is yet to see.

Meanwhile, new cases and deaths have already started to fall in US and Europe as three and a half months have passed since they found their first confirmed coronavirus cases in late January. The facts might have provided a reason for the DGHS expert panel to predict for the coronavirus peak to be seen in late May as Bangladesh crosses the fourteenth week of the virus outbreak then.

It is pertinent to mention here that China, where the invisible enemy of the human civilisation originated, confirmed their first case in late December 2019 and slowed the spread of the virus in the third week of February 2020. In other words, the first epicenter of the pandemic took just less than two months to put brakes on the virus spread.

One can argue that how Bangladesh has so far addressed the pandemic is anything but the Chinese path with the latter taking aggressive steps to test and isolate coronavirus cases in particular. Nor do its healthcare system and public awareness level match that in US and Europe. But it is also true that Bangladesh has so far been able to find some ways to avoid the hundreds of thousands of coronavirus deaths reportedly predicted by the World Health Organisation in late March.

According to a leaked memo of the UN organisation, the country could face up to two million deaths from coronavirus given its ‘extraordinary human densities’ and lack of ‘interventions’. It is to be noted here that many talkshow commentators referred to the appalling prediction clearly based on mere assumptions when some nine million people moved out of the capital - an area of more than two crore residents - before the lockdown first enforced on March 26 only to prove futile later.

Also was there a prediction that apparel workers might be super-spreaders of the virus, when they moved to and from their factories in and around Dhaka in responses to their employers’ wrong decisions first to open the establishments crucial for smooth operation of the economy and then to shut them apparently to avoid growing public criticism in the first week of April.

But the ground reality is that, till today, more than 80 percent of the confirmed cases are in Dhaka and its adjacent areas mostly populated by the middle-income people. Not only that, when, caring little about social distancing essential for stopping coronavirus spread, around one lakh people attended the namaz-e-janaza of a religious leader in an area of Brahmanbaria in mid April, almost similar predictions were made by different quarters. But, apparently for steps taken by the local administration to tackle the adverse situation in the following days in particular, the district is still on the list of the areas with lowest coronavirus cases.

Anyway, all this is not to say that we are going to stop the coronavirus onslaught on our life and livelihood soon. It is rather to say that we still have the potential to contain the virus by the DGHS predicted time if the hotspots of Dhaka and its adjacent areas can, in not time, effectively be sealed as people fleeing the areas to different districts and villages are virtually responsible for the virus to spread to the country’s rest areas.

Hopefully, we will be able to do so as the administration, coupled with law enforcing agencies, have already taken a hard stance on implementing the ban on travel to and from Dhaka during the forthcoming Eid.

The writer is a journalist