Symptoms of COVID-19 like fever and cough are now noticed among the people in rural areas where testing facilities for highly contagious coronavirus are unavailable, sources said.
A large number of villagers have recently tested positive for coronavirus at their own upazila or districts, worsening the situations in the country, sources added.
Experts opined that the situation in villages deteriorated due to relaxation of the lockdown.
People from Dhaka and other cities travelled to village homes from time to time. None of them went on self-isolation or follow hygiene guidelines. They went on outings heedlessly, resulting in a sharp rise of virus infection.
People who travelled to villages on different occasions are responsible for the spread of Covid-19 in rural areas, said medicine specialist Prof Dr ABM Abdullah.
“Those people, who went to villages, have left the villagers at risk”, said Dr Abdullah adding no person who went home during Eid holidays practiced social distance or followed health guidelines.
“Family members contracted the virus at first before spearing it to the relatives and other people”, he added.
The eight-strong specialist committee formed by the health department echoed Dr Abdullah criticizing the government’s decision to relax lockdown and people’s movement without maintaining the health directives.
Sources said, number of people suffering from Covid-19 symptoms rose after the Eid holidays.
Since testing facilities for coronavirus in rural areas are unavailable, villagers needed to go to nearby upazila or district towns for the test with a large number of people being found to be positive.
However, uncertainty remains over the real number of virus infections since most of villagers avoided going under the coronavirus testing.
More than 6,916,000 people so far have been infected with coronavirus and over 400,000 died of it since the virus was first reported in China’s Wuhan late last year.
As of Sunday, Bangladesh so far has reported 65,769 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 888 deaths with an infection rate of 20.88 percent.
