Five Covid patients killed in fire at tent outside hospital

HOSPITALS ARE STRUGGLING TO DEAL WITH SPIKE IN CASES IN RECENT WEEKS IN B’DESH, WHICH HAS REPORTED 544 DEATHS

DHAKA: Five coronavirus patients died in a fire in a tent outside a hospital in the Bangladesh capital Dhaka on Wednesday, a fire service official said.

It was not immediately clear what caused the fire, said Zillur Rahman, a fire service director. Firefighters extinguished the flames in about an hour, Rahman said.

Five bodies were recovered from the makeshift isolation unit of the United Hospital treating Covid-19 patients, Rahman said. The dead included four men and a woman aged between 45 and 75, he said.

Hospitals are struggling to deal with a spike in coronavirus infections in recent weeks in Bangladesh, which has reported 38,292 cases and 544 deaths.

Some health experts are concerned that the real number of cases could be higher in a country of more than 160 million people where many have only limited access to healthcare.

Lax regulations and poor enforcement have often been blamed for large fires in the South Asian nation that have killed hundreds of people in recent years.

At least 25 people were killed in March last year when a fire broke out in a 22-storey commercial building in Dhaka’s upscale area of Banani.

In February last year, an inferno in a centuries-old neighbourhood of Dhaka killed 71 people and injured dozens.

The Bangladesh government, meanwhile, has decided not to extend the ongoing shutdown over the pandemic, allowing offices to reopen on May 31, media reports said.

Offices and other workplaces will be allowed to operate on a limited scale from June 15, subject to their compliance with several health and hygiene directives, bdnews24 quoted state minister for public administration Farhad Hossain as saying on Wednesday.

“The lockdown won’t be extended. Economic activities will resume on a limited scale. At the same time, people must follow all the health directives to ensure their safety,” he said.

“We are not opening everything, but on a limited scale,” he added.

The lockdown and a transport shutdown in the country had started on March 26.