India’s surge in coronavirus cases is having a dangerous effect on its neighbors. On Saturday, health officials said six cases of the coronavirus variant originally identified in India have been detected in Bangladesh.
Nasima Sultana, the additional director general of the health directorate, told reporters, “Two cases are confirmed to be of the Indian variant, and the others are quite close to it,” adding that they all recently returned from neighboring India and were in isolation.
“The Indian variant is highly contagious and people must be cautious and strictly follow health guidelines such as wearing masks, maintaining physical distances and washing hands.”
For weeks, the South African coronavirus variant has dominated the samples sequenced in Bangladesh, reports News10.com. But for reasons not understood, health experts say there has been a decline in coronavirus infections over the past two weeks, compared to March and early April.
“This is the time to vaccinate, keep infections low and make sure that new variants don’t emerge here,” said Senjuti Saha, a scientist at the Child Health Research Foundation in Bangladesh, who is also sequencing the virus.
But India has banned the export of vaccines as it tries to get its own crisis under control.. The country’s Serum Institute was supposed to supply 30 million vaccine doses – 5 million doses a month – to Bangladesh by June. But the institute has only supplied 7 million doses and has suspended further shipments since February.
In response to the shortage of vaccines from India, late last month, the government stopped allowing people to register for a first vaccine dose. This is tough on the country of 160 million people as the government desperately seeks a vaccine supply from other countries.
Since March of last year, when the first COVID-19 case was detected in Bangladesh, the country has reported 770,842 confirmed virus cases and 11,833 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
“We can’t rule out that the Indian variant would not make a new wave in Bangladesh. We have a porous border with India,” says Dr. ASM Alamgir, a scientist with the government’s Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control, and Research.
Even though a nationwide lockdown has been extended until at least May 16, many businesses, markets, and transportation hubs remain crowded. While travel between cities is banned, tens of thousands are expected to leave the capital city of Dhaka to return to their home villages to celebrate next week’s Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.
“If we fail to maintain safety procedures across the country, the virus will make its natural progression,” Alamgir says.
