Each morning, the Directorate General of Health Services posts a single national figure for dengue admissions. By 11 a.m. it is on the wires; by noon, every front page has it. But that single number is doing too much work, and it is hiding more than it reveals.
If you are a parent in Mirpur trying to decide whether to send a child to school in the rain, the national admissions figure tells you nothing. You need ward-level case counts, larval-density readings for your block, and an honest map of where the city corporation has and has not fogged. Almost none of that is published in real time.
The DGHS knows this. Their entomologists know it. So why is the country still being asked to interpret an outbreak through a single rolling-average number?
Part of the reason is institutional. The DGHS is comfortable releasing data that has been cleaned and reconciled across reporting hospitals — a process that takes 24 to 48 hours. Ward-level data sits with the city corporations, where reporting standards are uneven and politically sensitive. The result is a vacuum that rumour fills, every season.
BHRF has argued in its 2025 transparency brief that the country needs a single, public ward-level dashboard updated daily. Several of our members will continue to push for it. In the meantime, parents will keep guessing — and the cost of that guessing is not abstract.
