Whether the border can remain sealed, if need be, until there is universal vaccination is another question altogether. And as if that was not enough, it shares an open border with India where cases are growing at an alarming rate despite the lockdown. With a dismal tradition of service delivery, poor sense of service and professionalism among some health care workers if one is to go by incidents of hospitals turning away the sick and ambulance drivers refusing to carry those with the coronavirus, 0.3 hospital beds per 1,000 population (one of the lowest in the world, according to WHO), Nepal's ability to face the long march of the pandemic is indeed daunting. The weaker the public health infrastructure in a country, the more vigilant it has to be. Countries will have to keep a strict check on people entering and quarantine them before being allowed to mix with the general population. Therefore, ways of moving forward must be envisioned. Two years is a long, long time to put life on hold. And, by the time it becomes available in Nepal, it could be two years as the whole world would be lining up. There also seems to be a consensus that a vaccine is the only solution. Even if the spread of the coronavirus can be checked for the moment, there are fears that there could be second or third waves. Without a proven treatment or a Covid-19 vaccine, the end of the pandemic is not imminent. There is weight behind this argument, but this government is what we have, and its modus operandi cannot be expected to change overnight. One can also argue that the government has not been efficient in efforts to contact trace, and there has been a lack of transparency in government activities. But that can be argued for every country in the world bar maybe a very few like South Korea and Germany which had its own testing kit manufacturing in place along with exemplary health services. One can argue that more tests could (or even would) detect more cases. In the absence of evidence otherwise, one has to accept the government's claim that contact tracing of the known cases (except the last detected 14 cases) has been done as far as it has been possible and no positive cases were not detected among those traced. There have been just two known cases of local transmission. Twelve cases, or 40 percent of the total, were in one district, or to be more precise, one building. Of the 77 districts, the virus has been seen in nine districts. The number of cases per million in Nepal is one of the lowest in the world, lower even than Bhutan's, which has just five cases.ĭespite a sense of fear among the general population, if the official figures are anything to go by, its spread has been relatively contained. Our total tally is nothing compared to what other countries have been experiencing. What's more, there are no deaths yet, and since getting infected, 5 of them have recovered. So far, Nepal has 42 cases of the coronavirus, but no patient is in intensive care.
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