OP-ED: Covid-19, communication, and the unique Bangladeshi psyche

As the country falls increasingly under the pervasively ominous shadow of the Covid cloud, the rates of infection and death are thrashing the previous inexplicably low records from last year.

The country is facing this second Covid-19 wave without so much as a care for the new lockdowns the government is desperately trying to impose, because of what happened the first-time round.

What happened was that nothing happened. The dreaded virus had reportedly little to no real effect on the rate of infections or deaths in Bangladesh. This was most likely because the first time around the official communication did little to argue the severity of the virus as much as it did the economic urgency for a robust GDP. One could argue that either actual death tolls were severely underreported or Bangladesh had some miracle pass over it.