Bangladesh is now on the eighth position of the countries' list with most active Covid-19 cases as the health directorate reported 2,617 new cases yesterday. Link

Among all other Asian countries, only neighboring India is ahead of Bangladesh with 6,58,417 active cases, with the USA topping the list with 23,78,426 active cases, according to www.worldometers.info.

As of yesterday, the number of active Covid-19 cases in Bangladesh was 1,09,896. Against this backdrop, Health Minister Zahid Maleque said some Covid-19 dedicated hospitals will be reverted to non-COVID-19 hospitals at the end of August as the number of Covid-19 patients is decreasing.

"The severity of the Covid-19 outbreak is decreasing. Patients who are not infected with Covid-19 have not gotten treatment properly due to coronavirus. We are going to turn many hospitals back to non-COVID-19 hospitals at the end of this month," the health minister said yesterday while addressing a meeting on the progress of projects to build cancer hospitals in eight divisional cities.

On March 8, authorities reported the first three cases in the country. Since then, 2,69,115 people have tested positive for the highly transmissible virus. Of them, 1,54,871 -- more than 57 percent -- have recovered.

In 24 hours till 8:30 am yesterday, 44 Covid-19 patients died, taking the death toll to 3,557 -- around 1.32 percent of all confirmed cases.

According to The Daily Star, among the total deceased, just over 79 percent were male and around 21 percent were female. Age-wise, the incidence of death has been highest among those over 60, with that age group accounting for 47 percent of deaths, followed by 28 percent in the 51-60 group.