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Last week, the government claimed that it was better equipped for critical care than that of many developed countries.

Health Minister Zahid Maleque, while replying journalists’ queries, said many large countries did not have as many ventilators as Bangladesh had.

But when the figure was compared with other South Asian countries, including India, Pakistan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, the picture seemed very dismal as Bangladesh stood at the bottom in terms of the number of ICU beds.

In Bangladesh, there are 0.7 bed for every one lakh population while the number is 2.3 in neighbouring India.

The situation in developed countries is far better and a comparison seems absurd.

“I cannot say about other countries. What I can say is that the ICU beds for the normal patient and the ones for Corona patient are different. We are planning to install 1,000 ICU beds and working on it,” Abul Kalam Azad, Director General of DGHS, told The Daily Star yesterday.

He, however, did not mention by when these beds would be installed.

A report from Imperial College London estimates that 30 percent of patients who are hospitalised with Covid-19 are likely to require mechanical ventilation.

The UK government has recently announced that it aims to add some 1,200 ventilators in less than two weeks, and forecast it may need 30,000 at the peak of the outbreak, reports BBC.

According to a WHO-China joint mission report released last month, five percent of people diagnosed with Covid-19 require artificial respiration and another 15 percent need to breathe in highly concentrated oxygen, meaning that about 20 percent of the patients need ICU care.

There has been concern over treatment facilities for elderly patients in the country as all the six persons who died from the virus were aged between 60 and 75.

According to a 2018 report of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, the country has a population of 16.46 crore. Of them, 1.30 crore are above 60.