Bangladesh on Friday reported 108 Covid-19 deaths, second highest in a single day since its first detection on March 8 last year.

The second-highest single-day Covid fatalities brought the national tally to 13,976. The country reported highest 112 deaths on April 19.

Also, 5,869 new cases pushed up the caseload to 878,804 in the country.

The positivity rate rose to 21.22% from 19.93% on Thursday and 20.27% on Wednesday, according to the Directorate General of Health Services. 

Meanwhile, the mortality rate remained static at 1.59% and the recovery rate dropped to 90.76% from Thursday's 91.05%.

Khulna division recorded the highest 27 deaths, Dhaka 25, Chattogram 23, Rajshahi 16, Rangpur 10, Mymensingh four, and Sylhet three.

Advisory committee suggests complete shutdown

The National Technical Advisory Committee on Covid-19 pandemic Thursday recommended imposing a "nationwide shutdown" for two weeks considering the worsening Covid-19 situation in the country.

Community transmission of the highly transmissible Delta variant of coronavirus might be the reason behind the worsening Covid-19 situation in the country, said the committee.

The committee used the example of India, as a reference, to emphasise that no step other than a "complete shutdown" might be enough to prevent the spread of the Delta variant of the virus.

Serum may resume vaccine export in July-August

India, depending on the scale of production of vaccines within the country, is aiming at the end of July or August to at least release those vaccines that have been bought by Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal and are now in pending status, according to Indian media reports.

Bangladesh entered into a deal with the Serum Institute of India (SII) to purchase 30 million doses of a potential vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca for Covid-19.

The country was supposed to get 5 million doses of vaccine per month as the SII and Bangladesh's Beximco Pharma signed the memorandum of understanding (MoU) for priority delivery of the vaccine doses.

Bangladesh sought at least 3 million doses of vaccine under the agreement to address the immediate demand in Bangladesh.

The country has so far received only 7 million of Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine doses produced by the SII through its contract and also got 3.3 million doses of vaccine as a bilateral partnership gift.

The government has so far approved the emergency use of Oxford-AstraZeneca, Sinopharm (China), Sputnik-V (Russia), Pfizer-BioNTech (USA/Germany) and Crona Vac (China) vaccines.

TH