Zoning system a continuous process

Marking areas into red, yellow or green zones is a continuous process.

Prof Nasima Sultana, additional director general of the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), made the remark while attending the routine Covid-19 bulletin yesterday.

There had been a debate over the proposed zone-based lockdown system since the beginning of June.

Since the beginning of June, the authorities were planning to impose zone-based lockdown, and put four areas in Dhaka city, Narayanganj and Gazipur into complete lockdown.

Authorities, however, could not reach any conclusion for further steps on it as of yesterday.

"Implementation of this system has continued considering the rate of transmission. Red zoning is being implemented in some areas in the country," Prof Nasima Sultana said during the briefing.

She said a 13-member advisory committee under the leadership of DGHS is working behind the zoning programme.

Authorities yesterday confirmed 34 more deaths of Covid-19 patients and 3,504 new cases after testing 15,157 samples in the last 24 hours till 2:30pm yesterday.

With this, the death toll from the deadly virus rose to 1,695 and the number of total infections reached at 133,978.

"More 1,185 Covid-19 patients recovered and total number of recoveries now stands at 54,318," Prof Nasima said.

As of yesterday, the mortality rate was 1.27 percent while recovery rate was 40.54 in terms of all confirmed cases.

Based on yesterday's number of tests, the positive rate was 23.12 percent.

Bangladesh remains the 17th worst affected country in the world in terms of the number of cases. The position is one step ahead of that of South Africa and one step behind of France, according to worldometer.info.

Prof Nasima urged everybody to maintain physical distancing and health rules to stay safe from the novel coronavirus infection.

Among the yesterday's deceased, 32 were male and two were females while 13 were from Dhaka, 10 from Chattogram, four from Rajshahi, one from Khulna, four from Sylhet and two from Rangpur division.

One of them was aged between 21 and 30 years, one between 31 and 40, six between 41 and 50, six between 51 and 60, 13 between 61 and 70 and seven between 71 and 80 years old.

In those 24 hours, a total of 726 people were put under isolation across the country.