WEB DESK
Local authorities in Bangladesh have put the Cox’s Bazar municipality under lockdown from Saturday declaring some areas near the Rohingya refugee camps as Coronavirus red zone. The lockdown will be in force for two weeks till June 20.
With lockdown in force the roads in the Cox Bazar city are empty as shops are closed and vehicles are banned from moving in the area. Only emergency service providers using official cars with special permission from DC are allowed to move. The local administration has ordered that during the lockdown period no public gathering will be allowed in the area. Public and private transport are not allowed to operate.
Grocery shops and kitchen markets, banks and financial institutions will open for eight hours on Thursday and Sundays only but they will have to maintain the norms of social distancing. No one from outside the district is allowed to enter the city during the period of the lock down. Hospitals, pharmacies, ambulances and other emergency services have been exempted from the lockdown order.
The Coronavirus infection in the district has been rising rapidly after the government lifted lockdown in the country from May 31. According to the latest data of the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR), Cox’s Bazar had 969 confirmed Coronavirus cases till Saturday. In the Rohingya camps 35 refugees have tested Corona positive till now.
Cox’s Bazar area houses close to one million Rohingya refugees who fled after the military crackdown in the Rakhine province of Myanmar in 2017. In the meanwhile, Bangladesh reported 35 deaths and 2635 new Corona positive cases in the country over the last 24 hours since Friday.
The death toll has now gone up to 846 and total cases have reached 63,026 which implies a fatality rate of 1.3 percent and recovery rate of 21.1 percent of the total cases. Bangladesh is now among the top 20 countries with the highest number of Corona positive cases in the world.
