Adjusted dynamics of COVID-19 pandemic due to herd immunity in Bangladesh

Abstract

Amid growing debate between scientists and policymakers on the trade-off between public safety and reviving economy during the COVID-19 pandemic, the government of Bangladesh decided to relax the countrywide lockdown restrictions from the beginning of June 2020. Instead, the Ministry of Public Affairs officials have declared some parts of the capital city and a few other districts as red zones or high-risk areas based on the number of people infected in the late June 2020. Nonetheless, the COVID-19 infection rate had been increasing in almost every other part of the country. Ironically, rather than ensuring rapid tests and isolation of COVID-19 patients, from the beginning of July 2020, the Directorate General of Health Services restrained the maximum number of tests per laboratory. Thus, the health experts have raised the question of whether the government is heading toward achieving herd immunity instead of containing the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, the dynamics of the pandemic due to SARS-CoV-2 in Bangladesh is analyzed with integrated the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) in the SIRD model. We demonstrate that the herd immunity threshold can be reduced to 31% than that of 60% by considering age group cluster analysis resulting in a total of 53.0 million susceptible populations. With the data of COVID-19 cases till January, 2021, the time-varying reproduction numbers are used to explain the nature of the pandemic. Based on the estimations of active, severe and critical cases, we discuss a set of policy recommendations to improve the current pandemic control methods in Bangladesh.