On March 26, 2020, the Bangladesh government announced a "general holiday" — the country's euphemism for what was, in practice, a full national lockdown. By that evening, an estimated 10 million workers had begun leaving Dhaka, flooding highways on foot, by rickshaw, and by overloaded buses, heading to home villages they could no longer afford not to return to. Factory gates were shut. Orders from Western retailers had already begun arriving — not as purchase confirmations but as cancellation notices. Bangladesh's readymade garment (RMG) sector, which accounts for more than 80 percent of the country's total export earnings and employs approximately 4.2 million people, the majority of them women, was entering the sharpest contraction in its history. What followed was not just a public health emergency. It was a structural stress test of every economic arrangement Bangladeshi workers depend on — and most of those arrangements failed them.
The pandemic's global health toll provides the necessary context. COVID-19 infected more than 579 million people worldwide and killed more than 6.4 million according to official figures, with substantial evidence of undercounting in every country with inadequate civil registration infrastructure. Bangladesh officially recorded 1.6 million confirmed cases and approximately 29,000 deaths by early 2022. Researchers studying excess mortality in rural Bangladesh found 1.4 times higher mortality in 2020 compared to the 2018-2019 baseline, with cardiac disease, stroke, and acute respiratory infection as the leading causes — suggesting that deaths indirectly attributable to disrupted healthcare access during the pandemic substantially exceeded the official COVID-19 death count. The detection rate during the first wave was below 5 percent, exceeding 30 percent only after the more transmissible Delta variant arrived. Bangladesh's relatively young population moderated direct COVID-19 mortality; 65 percent of deaths were among those over 50. But the indirect consequences — through economic dislocation, food insecurity, and health system disruption — fell disproportionately on the working poor.
The Garment Sector: 35 Percent Pay Cut and $502 Million in Lost Wages
The arithmetic of what happened to Bangladesh's RMG workers in 2020 is documented with unusual precision thanks to surveys conducted during the crisis. Workers who were furloughed during the first lockdown — which ran from March 26 through late April 2020 — were legally entitled to receive 65 percent of their wages. But that legal entitlement itself represented a 35 percent pay cut from normal earnings. By the end of May 2020, Bangladeshi garment workers had collectively lost nearly 30 percent of their wages in the preceding months, an aggregate loss estimated at $502 million by researchers at the Institute for Human Rights and Business and the UC Berkeley-Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies.
The BGMEA — the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association — reported that 1,150 factories faced order cancellations worth $3.18 billion immediately following the COVID-19 outbreak, with total losses reaching $4.9 billion in the four months following the pandemic's onset. International brands cancelled orders for goods already in production and refused to pay for shipments already completed in some cases. The brands did not provide direct financial assistance to suppliers, though some negotiated on their behalf or provided health and safety guidance.
The human consequences were immediate and severe. A UC Berkeley-BRAC survey from mid-2020 found that 82 percent of workers interviewed reported lower income in April-May 2020 compared to February 2020. Seventy-seven percent said it was difficult to feed everyone in their household. Sixty-nine percent reported eating less protein-intensive food — meat, fish, eggs, milk — between February and May. A separate BRAC national survey conducted at the end of March 2020 among 2,675 low-income respondents found that 14 percent had no food reserves at home and 29 percent had only enough food for one to three days. The phrase recorded from one RMG worker in April 2020 and published in academic literature captures the lived experience precisely: "We will die by starving before being affected by coronavirus."
The Bangladesh government mobilised a stimulus package of approximately $600 million to support garment sector wages, delivered as subsidised loans to factories to cover three months of worker wages. The IMF approved emergency loans totalling around $732 million. These were significant interventions, but they reached formal sector workers through their employers — a mechanism that excluded the approximately 90 percent of Bangladesh's workforce employed in the informal sector.
The Informal Economy: Where the Safety Net Did Not Reach
A peer-reviewed study published in a medical journal based on surveys of 1,867 informal workers conducted across Bangladesh's eight divisions in July-August 2020 found that approximately 90 percent experienced income and food expenditure drops during the lockdown. A study by the Centre for Policy Dialogue and Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies identified informal sector workers as the most affected working group, with recovery significantly slower than in the formal sector. One survey of 244 low-income informal workers found that 50 percent experienced diminished income and 47 percent had their income reduced to zero during the lockdown period.
The economy-wide job loss estimate for the April-May 2020 lockdown period reached 11.1 million, with 1.08 million in the urban informal sector alone. For the poorest households — those with little or no savings, reliant on daily earnings — the lockdown did not present a choice between health and income. It eliminated income while creating health vulnerability simultaneously. The agricultural sector showed relative resilience: rural informal workers dependent on farming experienced less disruption than urban informal workers whose livelihoods depended on physical presence in city markets, transport networks, and service industries.
The gendered dimension was significant. Women disproportionately bore the shifts in food consumption and household management during the crisis. The pandemic closed educational institutions from March 2020 until September 2021 — eighteen months — adding childcare burdens to the economic pressures already borne by women workers. The published literature documented increased domestic violence and early marriages for rural girls during the period, with girls dropping out of education in disproportionate numbers. Women working in the garment sector faced the double exposure of potential infection in reopened factories and economic loss if they stayed home.
The Migrant Worker Crisis: 408,000 Returned, Remittances Stressed
Bangladesh's approximately 13 million overseas migrant workers — concentrated in Gulf Cooperation Council countries, which in 2019 sent 73 percent of the country's total remittance flow — represented a second major dimension of the pandemic's economic impact. In 2019, Bangladesh received $18.3 billion in remittances, equivalent to approximately 6 percent of GDP and roughly 30 percent of the national budget. The remittance system is also a personal lifeline at household level: research by the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit found that remittances account for 85 percent of daily expenditures for families of overseas migrants.
In March 2020, remittance inflows fell by 12 percent year-on-year to $1.27 billion. In April 2020, they fell by 25 percent to $1.09 billion. Around 408,000 migrant workers returned to Bangladesh in 2020 following job loss, arbitrary dismissal, and forced deportation from host countries. Around 666,000 had returned by the time detailed tracking was available, and approximately two million more faced potential deportation at the peak of uncertainty. Workers who had taken out loans — the standard mechanism for financing the cost of international migration — found themselves back in Bangladesh without income, with debts that had not disappeared.
The remittance story contains an important paradox. Despite the predicted collapse, Bangladesh's total remittance inflows in 2020 reached $21.7 billion — an 18.4 percent increase over 2019. This unexpected resilience reflects two factors: many migrants returning permanently sent their accumulated savings before departure, and migrants remaining abroad shifted from informal to formal banking channels because informal hundi networks had been disrupted, improving the recorded flow. Remittances from North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia — accounting for roughly 35 percent of the total — remained relatively stable. But the Gulf-sourced remittances that most rural families were specifically dependent on did decrease, meaning the aggregate figure concealed real hardship at household level for the communities most exposed.
Bangladesh's COVID-19 Health System Under Pressure
Bangladesh entered the pandemic with a health system structurally under-resourced for the scale of the population it serves. The country's GDP growth before the pandemic had been consistently above 7 percent for five consecutive years and 8.2 percent in 2019 — but health infrastructure investment had not kept pace with economic growth. When COVID-19 arrived, ICU capacity was concentrated in Dhaka and a small number of divisional hospitals. Primary healthcare services in districts and upazilas were disrupted by lockdown conditions and fear of infection among patients, producing the elevated non-COVID mortality from cardiac disease and stroke documented in community surveys.
Among frontline service providers, doctors had the highest mortality rate of any professional category. Emergency medical services were disrupted. A BRAC national survey in late March 2020 found that access to routine healthcare had already deteriorated sharply within days of the lockdown's announcement. The government's decision to reopen RMG factories before the first wave had clearly subsided drew sharp criticism from public health researchers, who characterised it as "protecting livelihood over lives." Delta variant infections in July 2021 drove daily deaths above 100 for the first time, leading to extended lockdowns that again forced partial factory closures.
The vaccine rollout from early 2021 provided the eventual pathway out. By January 2022, 129 million vaccine doses had been administered. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was the primary instrument in early phases, with Bangladesh's vaccine diplomacy — securing doses from India's Serum Institute and later from COVAX — allowing faster coverage than many comparable economies. The vaccination campaign's relative success was Bangladesh's most tangible public health achievement of the pandemic period.
Lessons and Preparedness for the Next Crisis
The pandemic exposed structural vulnerabilities in Bangladesh's economy that pre-existed COVID-19 but became impossible to ignore in 2020 and 2021. The concentration of export earnings in a single sector — garments — meant that a disruption to global demand created an immediate cascade through the entire economy. The absence of a meaningful social safety net for informal workers meant that job loss translated directly into food insecurity with no institutional buffer. The dependence on remittances from a single geographic region — the Gulf — created a vulnerability that materialised exactly as predicted.
The most important reform that COVID-19 made visible is the need for portable social protection systems that follow workers across employment types and geographic locations. Bangladesh's formal sector social protection mechanisms — provident funds, maternity benefits, workers compensation — are tied to formal employment registration in ways that exclude the 85 to 90 percent of workers in informal arrangements. The pandemic was a proof of concept for what a universal social protection floor could provide: in its absence, the government had to improvise a $600 million emergency package with two weeks' notice, delivered through factory owners rather than workers directly, with significant leakage and incomplete coverage.
The pandemic also demonstrated Bangladesh's resilience in ways that deserve acknowledgment. The economy contracted less than predicted — GDP growth held at around 5.2 percent in fiscal 2020, against forecasts of 2 to 4.5 percent at the pandemic's onset. Garment exports recovered faster than most competitors: Bangladesh's exports to the US decreased just 1.6 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2020, against 10.1 percent for India and 6.4 percent for Sri Lanka. Remittances exceeded projections. The vaccine rollout succeeded. These are not coincidences. They reflect real institutional capacity — in the garment industry's crisis management, in Bangladesh Bank's management of remittance channels, in the government's ability to deploy emergency financial support at scale.
What the pandemic's record shows, most of all, is the gap between that demonstrated capacity and the protection it extends to the most vulnerable. The garment worker who told a researcher she feared starvation more than the virus in April 2020 was not wrong about her priorities. She was describing an economic architecture in which she had no buffer, no savings, no institutional protection — and in which a global health emergency landed entirely on people who had the least capacity to absorb it. Closing that gap is the unfinished agenda that COVID-19 left behind.
WinTK covers public health, economic policy, and labour rights in Bangladesh. For more analysis and reporting, explore our news section.
