Nepal struggling hard to cope with COVID-19 as infection and fatalities surge

Nepal is witnessing new record highs of COVID-19 infections and deaths with each passing day, making it harder for the government and the patients to survive the pandemic.

Nepal reported on Thursday a new record of 9,070 coronavirus infections, with 54 patients losing their lives in the last 24 hours.

A day earlier, 58 people succumbed to the global pandemic and 8,605 new cases were reported. While on Tuesday, Nepal recorded 55 COVID-19-related fatalities and 7,587 new infections. On Monday, the figures were 37 and 7,388 respectively.

All were new highs at the time.

The first case of COVID-19 was detected in the country in January 2020, and now the outbreak of the second wave is leaving the country in a dire struggle to manage the pandemic.

"The surge in the new infections and deaths is worrying," Dr. Jageshwor Gautam, spokesperson of the Ministry of Health and Population, told Xinhua. "We are struggling hard to deal with the present situation."

On April 30, the ministry issued a statement saying the hospitals were running out of beds and there was not an adequate supply of oxygen.

Due to the lack of hospital beds, the patients are being treated in open spaces in different parts of the country, and there are reports of people losing their lives over the acute shortage of treatment facilities.

According to officials at the Health Ministry and public health experts, there are primarily three reasons behind the latest spike.

First, they referred to political rallies launched by different parties and social gatherings such as marriages and other occasions. Different parties, mainly the ruling Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist Leninist) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre), had been organizing mass rallies in different parts of the country until last month to show their political strength. Meanwhile, dozens of people gathered together across the country as April and May mark the marriage season.

Second, the porous border with India is a major factor for the COVID-19 spread in Nepal. Officials say Nepali citizens are returning home as the pandemic is crippling the southern neighbour.

Nepal shares a 1,800-km-long open border with India, where the COVID-19 tally surpassed 21 million on Thursday as 412,262 new cases were registered across the country in the past 24 hours.

Gautam said checking the entry of people from India has been a problem as they tend to enter from other places even when the control of official border points is tightened.

Lastly, a new variant of the coronavirus knowns as B117 spreads faster than the previous ones, and it is hurting Nepal as well.

Most parts of Nepal, which has a population of around 30 million, have been under a two-week prohibitory order since April 29 as part of the efforts to break the chain of the spread.

"The prohibitory orders alone don't control the spread," Dr. GD Thakur, former director-general at the Department of Health, told Xinhua. "The government should expand the tests and expedite contact tracing."

He said as around 40 percent of the tests have turned out to be positive, there are certainly hundreds of people at the community level who are infected.

Government officials say currently they are in dire need of ventilators, monitors, and oxygen cylinders. "The Chinese government has pledged to grant 20,000 oxygen cylinders. We are in the process to bring them," Gautam said. "We have requested other countries for support but no pledge has been made so far."

Under a work plan unveiled by the Prime Minister's Office on Thursday, the government plans to receive the cylinders gifted by the Chinese government by May 14.

In a video conference on April 27, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his counterparts from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka agreed to deepen cooperation as South Asian countries were facing a new wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.