At least 29 more dengue patients were hospitalised in Dhaka and elsewhere in Bangladesh the past 24 hours till Saturday morning, taking the number of total official hospitalisations to 1,225 since January this year.

In 24 hours till 8:00am, 23 were hospitalised in Dhaka city and six in other places outside the capital city, said a press release of the Directorate General of Health Services.

The mosquito-borne viral disease killed 12 people so far in the ongoing year.

Of them, six died in January, three in February, two in April and one in May.

Of the total hospitalisations this year, 566 were reported in January, 166 in February, 111 in March, 143 in April and 239 in 13 days of May.

DGHS officials and health experts termed this year’s dengue hospitalisation unusual and feared a bigger dengue outbreak compared with the past years.

Of the total dengue hospitalisations this year, a total of 706 were reported in Dhaka city and 519 in other places of the country.

On Saturday, at least 98 dengue patients, including 76 at 53 public and private hospitals in the capital, were undergoing treatment across the country, according to official data.

The DGHS post-monsoon Aedes Survey was conducted between January 26 and February 4 and it found 127 households positive out of 3,150 households under the Dhaka North City Corporation and the Dhaka South City Corporation.

The DGHS carried out surveys recently in about 20 districts outside the capital and found the primary dengue vector, Aedes Aegypti, which was not supposed to be there at that time.

At least 281 people died of dengue and 62,382 were hospitalised with the viral fever across Bangladesh in 2022.

The year 2022 saw the highest official deaths and the second-highest hospitalisation since 2000 when the government started keeping records of dengue data, according to the DGHS.

The highest number of dengue hospital admissions since 2000 was recorded officially at 1,01,354 in 2019.

Officially, the dengue outbreak was first reported in the country in 2000, when 5,551 people were hospitalised with the disease and 93 people died of it, according to the DGHS data.