Another group of Bangladeshi nationals has been repatriated from the Maldives.

The country’s national airline, Maldivian revealed that a flight carrying 200 Bangladeshi nationals departed from Velana International Airport (VIA) on Tuesday afternoon. The flight is bound to Dhaka.

Maldives has been repatriating groups of Bangladeshi nationals in the country, under a special evacuation programme launched earlier in May. As such, the programme was announced by President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih during his address to the people, where he revealed that about 1,500 undocumented workers from Bangladesh will be repatriated.

Since then, over 1,000 Bangladeshi nationals have been sent back home in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The government of Bangladesh has been providing several assistance to the island nation’s Covid-19 response efforts, such as supplying essentials such as medicine and food.

This comes at a time a number of Bangladeshi nationals have tested positive for Covid-19 in the Maldives, the number having surpassed 1,000 on Monday.

As such, statistics show that the number of Bangladeshi nationals who contracted the virus currently sits at 1,003 which is 54.84% of the total case count.

The surging number of Bangladeshi nationals testing positive in the Maldives has been a rising concern, with authorities classifying them as vulnerable to the infection due to their lifestyles and the confined spaces they are forced to live in large groups.