Some 48 employees of the Chittagong port and their dependents died of coronavirus disease since the deadly virus hit the country in March last year. On 4 August alone, four of them died.
Officials said during the last one and a half years of the pandemic period, port operation has not been suspended for a single day thus the labourers had to work taking risk of getting infected.
Every day, hundreds of labourers, truck drivers, shipping agents, representatives of clearing and forwarding agencies, and other people concerned enter the port area for export-import related works.
Moreover, the 7,000 port employees also come close to the foreign crews during loading and unloading of cargoes. This is how they got affected and died of the deadly virus.
Chief Medical Officer of the port authority Dr. Mosharraf Hossain said till now some 12,266 coronavirus samples were collected at the port hospital of which 1,788 were tested positive.
He said the employees get infected at the port area at workplace and also spread the virus among their family members raising the number of infected people and deaths.
Port authority secretary, Omar Faruk said as the number of death in the port area was rising, the shipping ministry on a special arrangement last month started providing vaccines to the port employees.
He added the heirs of the dead employees of the port will be given compensation as per the government law.
Faruk noted required safety measures were taken to protect the port employees from the virus but to no avail.
In Bangladesh, according to government data, so far 22,652 people died of the virus and nearly 1.35 million people got Covid infected. During the last couple of weeks over 200 people are dying and over 10,000 tested positive every day.
Sharar Nayel
Bangladesh Correspondent
