Whereabouts of over 10,000 infected people, who tested positive in Dhaka city, unknown.
There is one question for which you would expect a straight forward answer.
In the city which the World Health Organisation has consistently identified as the place in Bangladesh with the highest number of positive tests per population — the highest virus “attack rate” as the WHO calls is— where in the city did those people who tested positive live?
Those who have read our last few posts — which have discussed the gaps in, and contradiction within, the Bangladesh government Covid-19 statistics resulting in thousands of missing cases, and the lack of any official acknowledgement of the problem — may however not be too surprised that the government authorities do not know the location of nearly a half of all Dhaka City positive cases.
If you go to the IEDCR website, the graphic on the front page immediately opens up to a section titled, “District Wise Case Distribution”. At the very top, you have the data for Dhaka City (district). As of 4pm (Bangladesh time) today, this is stated to be 25,504. The website states that this information is, “As per received data on June 19, 2020 at 3:00 pm” This is shown in the image below.
Up to 16th June, the website also contained, above the graphic, a hyper link titled “Distribution of Confirmed Cases in Bangladesh” which linked to another document. Every day, the document detailed both district information on Covid-19 confirmed cases— including the total number for ‘Dhaka City district’ — and also, significantly, details of “Dhaka City Case Distribution” — that is the number of confirmed cases in 221 different areas of Dhaka City. See image below for June 16th.
When you add up the confirmed cases in each of the 224 areas of Dhaka City they don’t add up to the total number of Dhaka City cases. In fact nowhere near. On all 4 days, for which we have data, the number of positive cases whose location is not known is between 10,165 and 10,488, close to half of the total positive cases.
And this remains a continuing problem. Between June 14th and June 15th, there were a total of 410 new cases in Dhaka City — with the location of 126 not being known.
And as Infectious diseases specialist Prof Ridwanur Rahman told The Daily Star:
“If we do not know the location of the patients, how would we be able to control transmission through lockdowns?”
Lockdown, testing, tracing and isolating are the keys to controlling the outbreak. “Accurate data is the main tool for success here.”
Interestingly, in the last few days, the IEDCR website provides no data on Dhaka City distribution of positive cases — so we have no idea of how many Covid-19 cases in Dhaka City they know the location of.
// David Bergman
