Bangladesh reopens even as hospitals buckle under caseloads

DHAKA • Madam Nasrin Jahan woke up gasping for air. Her daughter held her in the back of a rickshaw as they motored to a nearby clinic, where she was hooked up to an oxygen cylinder. From there, an ambulance took her to one hospital, then another, looking for a bed.

"Ammu, you will be fine," her 16-year-old daughter Tajrin Jahan Yousha tried to tell her, using an affectionate term for mother. "We are close to the hospital. They will take care of you."

Bangladesh's already strained healthcare system is buckling under the ferocity of the country's third, and by far deadliest, wave of coronavirus infections.

About 60 per cent of its 23,000 virus-related deaths and more than half of its total infections have been recorded since the beginning of April.

Its hospitals have been overrun. Only 4 per cent of the population has been fully vaccinated.

Yet, on Wednesday, Bangladesh, a country of 165 million people, lifted much of its lockdown.

Banks, shops and malls were allowed to reopen. Buses and trains will resume operating at half capacity. They follow the garment industry, a mainstay of the economy, which reopened two weeks ago.

Health experts fear that lifting restrictions will only worsen the outbreak. "If we reopen everything despite infections on the rise, we will suffer more terrible consequences," said Dr Benazir Ahmed, a public health researcher and a member of the government's advisory group on vaccines.

Bangladesh has keenly felt the pain of shutting down its economy. Despite the country's great strides in lifting hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty, at least 24.5 million people have been pushed into it by the pandemic, according to an April study.

Government advisers have said the country's leaders have no choice but to reopen. "It is not possible for the government to keep the country locked down forever," said Mr Mohammad Shahidullah, president of the government's Covid-19 committee.

Health experts say that by reopening the country after less than three weeks, officials are effectively shifting responsibility to individuals.

The government ignored their advice last month, they say, when it eased an earlier lockdown for the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha, leading to super-spreader events that caused a surge in infections. Millions of people packed into buses, cattle markets and shopping malls, and gathered for prayers and festivities.

"The infection rate was high when the easing was announced, defying experts' warning, and we are seeing the result now," Dr Ahmed said.

NYTIMES