Live Correspondent: The government is going to implement the action plan of dividing the whole country, including the capital, into three zones-- red, yellow and green. According a source at the Health Ministry, the government will put the worst coronavirus-hit areas in the city under cluster lockdown on Sunday by declaring them as red zones on a pilot basis.

Meanwhile, State Minister for Public Administration Farhad Hossain said though the level of coronavirus infection is growing, the government is not going to announce general holidays again. He said area-based lockdown will be enforced from Sunday by dividing the city into different zones.

However, experts wraned that the nation will have to pay a heavy price for the delay in implementing the zone-based lockdown.After sperate meetings at the Secretariat on Saturday, the state minister for public administration said the government has no plan to declare a holiday in the whole country further.

Considering the infection risks, he said they are moving towards dividing the capital into red, yellow and green zones. According to the Ministry of Health, the work on zoning Dhaka will start from Sunday with the help of IEDCR, DGHS and ICT Ministry.

Additional Health Secretary Habibur Rahman said they have taken a plan to divide different areas of the capital into three zones on Sunday. “Everything will be shut in the red zones.”Health experts think the work on zoning the capital should have started two more months ago.

Dr. Ridwan said he is not sure how much benefit the country would get now from the zoning system. “Had we done it two months ago, we would have got much better results”. Officials concerned at the Secretariat said the government will fully implement the zoning system from Wednesday or Thursday to deal with corona. An app has also been created for its implementation.

Earlier on June 1, Health Minister Zahid Maleque said the entire country will be divided into three zones--red, yellow and orange-- considering the rate of infection.The health minister said the affected areas would be temporarily locked down if necessary. Dhaka, Narayanganj, Gazipur and Chittagong are the worst infected areas.

He said they are now working with the experts for the zoning.Maleque said most of the districts and upazilas of Bangladesh are still in good position in terms of virus infection. “We want to keep those areas good."That’s why we held the meeting. I also met the Prime Minister with our expert team. There’s a detailed discussion with the Prime Minister about the zooning.”

The health minister said the prime minister had given some suggestions and they also discussed those elaborately at the meeting. ‘We’ll now make a plan and that has been discussed here. We’ll now come up with a specific plan. Then the mayor, health, home and local government ministries will try to implement the plan.”

According to the Ministry of Health, the most affected areas will be identified as red zones, the moderate affected areas as yellow zones and the least affected or open areas as green zones.The red zones will be locked down to slow the transmission in the in the yellow zones. There will have cautious monitoring in the green zones as well.

He said areas with 30 infections per 100,000 of population will be marked as ‘Red Zones’. “Outside the capital, areas with ten confirmed cases per 100,000 people will be categorised as Red Zone."For areas that have three to 19 cases per 100,000 of population will be categorised as ‘Yellow Zones’, he said, adding that areas with even fewer cases will be ‘Green Zones’.

The number of corona cases and deaths in the country have risen alarmingly in the last two weeks. Coronavirus cases continue to rise in Bangladesh as the tally of confirmed infections in the country exceeded 63,000 on Saturday.

Prof Nasima Sultana, additional director general of the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) said 2,635 more people tested positive for coronavirus in the last 24 hours as of Saturday afternoon.

Speaking at a press briefing, she said the total number of coronavirus cases in the country now increased to 63,026 with the fresh ones.Prof Nasima said 12,486 samples were tested in 50 labs across the country during the period. With this, a total of 384,851 samples have so far been tested in the country.

In comparison with the tests conducted in the last 24 hours, the infection rate is 21.10 percent, she said.The DGHS additional director general also said against the total number of detected cases, the recovery rate is 21.14 percent while the mortality rate is 1.34 percent in the country.

The first three corona cases were reported in Bangladesh on Mar 8. The government resumed offices and public transport services on May 31 after over two months of a shutdown from Mat 26 to contain the virus.

Meanwhile, Cox's Bazar municipal area was put under lockdown marking it as ‘red zone’ to prevent the coronavirus infection. Deputy Commissioner of Cox's Bazar, Kamal Hossain, made the announcement on Friday. The district administration also issued a notification saying the municipal area will remain under lockdown from June 6 to June 20.

It said the entire Cox’s Bazar municipality has been included in the red zone as per the decision of the coronavirus prevention committee in the district in order to control the Covid-19 infection effectively and more efficiently.

Dhaka, June-06 (campuslive24.com)//Ait