Dhaka may have as many as 750,000 cases. The official national tally is just 60,000
past week Bangladesh, India and Pakistan have largely lifted nationwide lockdowns intended to curb the spread of covid-19. The freeing of 1.7bn people—more than a fifth of humanity—from varied restrictions will bring relief to the region’s battered economies. Alas, it promises no relief from the pandemic itself. In luckier countries, stay-at-home rules reduced the number of new infections. In South Asia they managed only to moderate the disease’s acceleration, but not to halt it .
In harder-hit parts of the region, health services are under severe strain. Madhuri, a 46-year-old nurse in Thane, a suburb of Mumbai, had been working 12-hour shifts with no days off from April 1st until she herself caught covid-19 from a patient in May. The government hospital where she works does not treat the disease, passing positive cases to designated covid hospitals. But Madhuri says her colleagues must instead cope with the patients those places no longer treat.
In normal times, the region’s rich can largely insulate themselves from the implications of decades of puny public spending on health. “If they so much as sneeze they flee to Thailand, Singapore or India,” says a doctor at a private hospital in Dhaka. Now, she says, it is “almost impossible” to gain admission to Bangladesh’s elite hospitals, whether for covid-19 or other illnesses.
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