Physicians at a Dhaka hospital claimed they have observed “cumulative efficacy” of ivermectin in Covid-19 patients while using the drug in combination with doxycycline.

Mohammed Nasim, a veteran Awami League leader and a frontline figure in almost all democratic movements in the country, died at a city hospital yesterday.

With numbers of reported new cases and deaths growing almost every day, Bangladesh has overtaken China in terms of confirmed coronavirus cases.

An increasing number of experienced doctors at the frontline in the fight against Covid-19 are falling victim to the virus, creating vacuum in the healthcare system that is already strained by the pandemic.

The Covid-19 situation is gradually going from bad to worse with the death toll and number of new patients rising every day.

Telecom companies and other stakeholders of the industry yesterday slammed the spike in supplementary duty on mobile data usage, calls and any service that requires a SIM card.

When many students are on the verge of dropping out due to the discontinuation of their academic activities during the coronavirus pandemic, the traditional allocation for education in the proposed budget with no specific plan to recover the learning loss has frustrated the country’s educationists.

The government’s designs to fund a large chunk of next fiscal year’s budget by borrowing heavily from the banking sector will leave the pandemic-stricken economy in a tight spot, said the Centre for Policy Dialogue yesterday.

The government has forgotten about the ongoing pandemic and subsequently failed to be innovative enough to frame fiscal measures to take the economy on to the path of recovery, said the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) yesterday.

Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal yesterday remained defiant that he would be able to save both lives and livelihoods and steer the economy on to the path to recovery along the way by way of the budget he has prepared for fiscal 2020-21.

“Good decisions come from experience, but experience comes from making bad decisions.”

A good number of central banks across the globe have started printing money to get a turnaround from the ongoing financial recession.

Protected and unprotected: an oblique line of the government’s preference separated the two.

Save for a slash in income tax, there is no respite in this year’s budget for the penny-pinching middle class. Their expenditures will continue going up even as the global pandemic and resulting recession hits their incomes and slashes their jobs.

The much-anticipated national budget for fiscal year 2020-21 turns out to be a document trying to run on the momentum.

Allocation of total government expenditure by sector FY 2020-21

There is hardly any precedence of preparing a national budget under such extraordinary hard times and with so much uncertainties and dilemmas.

There is no specific programme mentioned in the budget for the urban poor who have been hit the hardest during the shutdown of the economy for over two months.

Hands out for help

Any finance minister delivering a national budget wants, ideally, to project three qualities: calm, authority and very slight dullness.