Revealed: New contradiction between WHO and Government Covid-19 data

Bangladesh’s Covid-19 statistics just became even more confusing and contradictory. If that was possible

A week ago, we published an article about how the World Health Organisation (WHO) noted in its June 14th Situation Report on Bangladesh’s Covid-19 epidemic, that it only had access to 57% of information about the geographical location of confirmed infections. That is to say, in only 51,271 out of the 90,619 confirmed cases, did it know to which Bangladesh district they came from.

WHO receives all its information from the Bangladesh government’s Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDRC) so we knew it was a Bangladesh government, rather than a WHO, problem. This was confirmed by looking at the IEDCR statistics webpage itself, which has list of the number of confirmed infections by district which at that time added up came to around 52,000.

So it comes as a bit of a surprise that this week’s WHO Situation Report, dated June 22nd, states that it now has information on the geographical distribution of 97% of the cases — 112,306 out of 115,786.

It seems somewhat remarkable that this information was not available a week ago — but now suddenly is. This would suggest that the Bangladesh government has identified the locations of an additional 61,035 cases in one week!

Let’s assume that somehow that this can all be explained by a bureaucratic or computer error — and the Bangladesh government always had this data which it could now supply to WHO.

If that was the case, then how does one explain that the district wise geographical data on the IEDCR website on the same date only added up to 69,863 out of the 115,786 cases. That is only 60% of the total. Where are the remaining 42,443 cases which WHO says it has information on, but the IEDCR — which provides the information to WHO — does not?*

It is in this situation legitimate to question the integrity of the Bangladesh’s government geographical data and whether WHO is doing enough to ensure that the data which it publishes in its Situation Reports is credible.

WHO declined to respond to questions about the contradiction and the integrity of the data.

* As of June 25th, the total infections are 126,606, but if one adds up the number of infections provided on the IEDCR website by district (53,385) and in different parts of Dhaka City (15,310) — a total of 68,695. This is 54% of the total infections throughout the country

//David Bergman