An Extensive Review of Health and Economy of Bangladesh Amid Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

COVID-19 has affected 213 countries around the world, killing around 390,000 and infecting close to 6.6 million by June 04, 2020 (worldometer.info). Bangladesh, a South Asian low-middle-income economy, has experienced a demographic and epidemiological transition with rapid urbanization and a gradual increase in life expectancy. It is the seventh most populous country in the world and population of the country is expected to be nearly double by 2050. The increasing burden of communicable diseases in Bangladesh can be attributable to rapid urbanization and nearly 50% of all slum dwellers of the country live in Dhaka division. In 2017, National Rapid Response Team of IEDCR investigated 26 incidents of disease outbreak. The joint survey of the Power and Participation Research Centre and BRAC Institute of Governance and Development reveals that per capita daily income of urban slum and rural poor drops by 80% due to present countrywide shutdown enforced by the government to halt the spread of Covid-19. 40%-50% of these population took loans to meet the daily expenses. However, the country has just 127,000 hospital beds, 91,000 of them in government-run hospitals. Researchers say, the country’s economy is losing BDT 33 billion every day from its service and agriculture sectors during the nationwide shutdown.

Deciphering the COVID-19 Health Economic Dilemma (HED): A Scoping Review

“…Substantial amounts of literature acknowledge the detrimental and vast impact of the outbreak on economic activities [33,34,44,45,[48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65]. While it is well accepted that the economic perils of a pandemic are not trivial, less agreement in the literature exists with regard to whether the consequences of various NPIs, such as social distancing, are appropriate.…”

“…The literature presents various additional policies, (e.g., direct wage or income support measures, tax deferrals, reduced interest rates, injecting liquidity, etc.) which have been implemented by national authorities and multilateral entities [36,46,51,53].…”

“…• Some suggest that economic decline itself has an adverse effect on health, while others suggest that non-containment of the virus will naturally have a substantial economic toll.•Several modeling studies have found that costs of social distancing far outweigh the benefits. [33,34,44,45,[48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67]…”