Status of Social Distance Management in Bangladesh (10)
Status of Social Distance Management in Bangladesh
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Author:
Dr. Md. Jafar Ullah
Professor
Department of Agronomy
Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Email: jafarullahsau@gmail.com
(10)
In the previous section, I mentioned that social distance, social distance, and social distance is the only option for us to prevent the coronavirus from spreading because we do not have the facility for conducting massive tests to know whether the patient is corona positive or corona negative. If negative, he or she will be cured with the normal medicine of flu as our doctors say. But if the patient is corona positive, he or she must be separated (isolated) from his or her home or community so that he or she can not spread the virus from his body while roaming about.
Let us assume that a person is corona infected, but it is not expressed showing its symptoms as yet. That is, the person do not show any symptom(s) of the corona infection. But corona may be dormant in the person's body up to fourteen days or it may express its presence in the body of that person any time within fourteen days.
When this man in whose body, there is corona virus germs, roams about,he may spread this virus in the body of others, especially in the body of a person who has to have talks to him or her coming nearby. When they had talks to each other, the corona has passed from the body of the infected person to the person through spitting. And that’s why the social distance is enforced keeping both the person at least one meter away from one another, because spitting does not travel beyond one meter. But this distance if even above one meter, the non-infected may be infected by the spit if the air flow accelerated the speed of the spit.
Well normally, one meter distance has been advised by the doctors. To confirm the social distance the government attempt is to keep us away at least one meter distance from our adjacent person so that the corona virus can not pass from the vector person to a healthy person.
At this time, to prevent corona spread, social distance has been also being followed by the citizens of different countries of the world. To execute this social distance, many programmes are being manifested by the Bangladesh’s government, NGOs, volunteers and local leaders. To assure it, the government has taken a number of steps so as to avoid crowd in markets, office, tea stalls, hotels/restaurants and all other places.
To avoid mass gathering and assure social distance, Bangladesh government declared all the occasions of the Independence Day of Bangladesh. Later, government also declared all the occasions of ‘Baisakhi’ (the first day of the Bengali year) banned so that social distance could be maintained. Because to celebrate the ‘Baishakhi’, mass gathering in ‘Mongol Shova Jatra’, traditional heritage fairs, cultural occasion, etc. occurs during the celebration of ‘Pohela Baishakh’.
To avoid public gathering, the Bangladesh government has also declared ten days holydays for its employees starting from March 26, and later it was extended up to 11th April. Further this holiday was extended as in the meantime the corona spread in the community. The schools were shut down before since March 16 and after that the universities were also closed on from March 18. Public busses, trains, launch and other transports have been suspended.
Upazilla, district or any special localities has been locked down where returnees from abroad arrived and had symptoms of corona or died. Even local transport has been stopped for not allowing people travelling from one area to other in the same village. ‘Shibchar’ of Madaripur district was one of the examples where a good number of returnee arrived from different countries and had corona symptoms.
In Bangladesh, corona was first detected on March 8 and it trended since April 05. Experts say that if the social distance could be implemented from its detection, the situation would not have aggravated so much as it is at the present stage. This post is being made on April 14, 2020; and by this date in total detected patients are 1012 with the total casualties of 46.
The specialists say, we are at the fourth stage of its spreading in to the community level and the coming 15 days are critical for Bangladesh, although there is a different opinion of the experts that the critical days may extend for further 15 days. The first casualty was reported in Bangladesh on March 18 of 2020.
Well, I am not an expert-man on this discipline to say what may happen to Bangladesh in the coming days ahead. In the meantime the corona has spread in thirty out of sixty four districts; and twenty districts has already been lock-downed. 'Lock down' means, nobody is allowed to getting out of that district or nobody is allowed to get in to that district.
In support of the remarks made by the experts, we can cite the example of Thailand. Thailand do not have much ‘corona testing facility’ in the country. So, it tightened ‘social distance’ programme from the beginning of the detection. We can also remember the statement of WHO Director General saying that only test, test and test is the only option to save the community from corona. Like Thailand, we do not have ‘corona test’ facility so much. So, we have also the only option to manage the ongoing crisis by establishing ‘social distance’ strictly to save the nation from corona.
Initially, the problem of establishing the social distance was that if people are not allowed to come out of their home, how they would earn foods for their family? There are many persons who earn for the whole day, either by selling their physical toils, or selling low-priced products beside the road. At the end of the day, what they earn or make profit, they use this money to buy foods to feed their family members. So, implementing the social distance programme before they were not provided foods for these days, they will come out and as such the social distance programme will see its failure at least partially.
That means, if the government do not allow them to do their business/engagement in to work, they along with their family members would die of hunger. Considering the situation, since the beginning of the social distance implementation approaches in Bangladesh, civil administration, political parties, social activists, personal initiatives of the riches, corporate organizations, businessmen and many other organizations have been distributing foods among the low income groups. However, those distribution were not seen to be in proper discipline. In most of the cases, aid seekers gathered in long compacted cues touching closely each other’s body that broke the rule of social distance. This situation facilitated the possibilities of contamination and probable spread of corona from one person to another which may be congenial for aggravating the situation.
The main approach to prevent corona spread rapidly is the maintenance of ‘social distance’ which has been found one of the main measures taken by the Chinese government to control corona in China. This has also been adopted by other governments of the world and is executing in their own countries wherein the corona has infected. Some countries declared vacation in their educational institutions, some limited their office hours, some restricted the public crowding in the localities by manipulating shopping time, markets, entertaining businesses, transportation and meetings of state and societies.
(To be continued)
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