After Bangladesh reported three coronavirus cases, on Monday Prime Minister Narendra Modi has cancelled his visit to Dhaka due to the deadly virus scare.
PM Modi was expected to travel to Dhaka on March 17 at the invitation of his Bangladeshi counterpart Sheikh Hasina to attend the centenary celebrations of Bangladesh founder Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. As per a report by PTI, during the visit, PM Modi was expected to assuage Bangladesh's concerns over the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the NRC.
Bangladesh Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen and Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan cancelled their visits to India in December over the situation following the passage of the citizenship bill by Parliament. Dhaka was also apparently upset following the rollout of the NRC in Assam even though India conveyed to it that the issue was an internal matter of the country.
On Sunday, Bangladesh reported its first three cases of coronavirus. The affected people--two men and one woman-- were aged between 20 and 35 and two of them had recently returned from Italy while the third is a relative of one of the returnees. The Bangladesh government has imposed strict restrictions to contain the spread of the deadly virus.
On Monday, China reported 22 new deaths from the deadly coronavirus, taking the death toll to 3,119. The overall confirmed cases in China reached 80,735. Meanwhile, China has begun dismantling a host of temporary hospitals built-in big public places like auditoriums and sports complexes in Wuhan set up during the massive surge of virus cases in January and February. China has built two makeshift hospitals with 2,300 beds capacity in just about 10 days in early February and later started converting public buildings into hospitals to meet the rush of patients.
(Inputs from Kanchan Srivastava and Agencies)