Socio- Psycho- Religious Responses to Covid-19 in Bangladesh

Abstract

The emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic once again challenged the advancement of modern biological sciences. Man found himself utterly blinded by the nano-Lilliputian corona virus known as Covid-19. Against the background of daily death tolls all over the globe, scientists and researchers spent strenuous days and months to invent Covid-19 vaccines; governments adjusted and readjusted their combat policies, and WHO continued presiding over the conundrum with periodical situation studies and issuing warnings and updates. But a man is, after all, a man—a living symbiosis of social, psychological, moral, and a host of other values beyond the grasp of laboratories and offices. So one might be curious to know, how Bangladesh, in a far-flung corner of the globe, responded to Covid-19 in the early days of the onslaught, then in a one year span, and what the encounter might look like from the perspectives of sociology, psychology, and religion, besides economy. This paper, more theoretical and perceptual than scientific, will examine how the Covid-19 proliferation in Bangladesh affected the socio-psycho- religious equilibrium of her people like the people of the rest of the world. It will further explore how Bangladesh, till this date, managed   to bridle the rate of infection and death through strategic policies, and cruised a moderate path to curb down the nascent mass panic and defiant religious dogmatism, followed by a timely vaccination program.