Sharjah24 – AFP: Empty oxygen cylinders are piling up almost as fast as bodies in the city of Khulna, which has become Bangladesh's coronavirus hotspot in a dire new surge.
The government has ordered a strict week-long nationwide lockdown in a bid to halt the spread of Covid-19, but Khulna's hospitals cannot cope.
Neither can relatives of the dead.
Mohammad Siddik leaned against empty cylinders under a hospital emergency porch, tearfully telling relatives in phone calls that his 50-year-old brother had died.
The southwestern district bordering India's West Bengal state has seen a sharp rise in coronavirus infections blamed on the more contagious Delta variant, which was first detected in India.
On Thursday, Khulna city recorded 46 virus deaths, according to an official count, while in earlier waves the daily death toll never went into double figures.
Most people in the city of 680,000 people say the real toll is much higher and, according to reports, graveyards cannot cope with the number of dead in nearby cities such as Satkhira.
The main state-run Khulna general hospital is one of four in the city treating coronavirus patients and has 400 beds but demand far outstrips supply.
Officially, Bangladesh has recorded just over 935,000 cases and 14,900 deaths in the past 15 months, but most people say the figures are drastically under-reported.
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