Editorial
No time to lose
The government must immediately involve the private sector.Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation, said, ‘You cannot fight a fire blindfolded. And we cannot stop this pandemic if we don’t know who is infected.’ This seems to be 100 percent true in Nepal’s case. While Covid-19 has spread across 192 countries and territories, in Nepal, which borders China and India, the government has been maintaining that there has only been one case so far. The first coronavirus case was seen in Nepal in January. And on March 23rd, after two months, we now have a second case.
On Sunday, when three Nepalis who work for Huawei Technologies Nepal visited the Sukraraj Tropical and Infectious Disease Hospital in Teku to get themselves tested for Covid-19, the doctors there took their temperatures and then sent them home, saying they did not require tests. Taking the temperature is one of the ways of detecting the disease. But the authorities cannot get ahead of themselves and declare there are no cases of the coronavirus when testing has not been done in the first place.
Many people with mild or no symptoms remain undiagnosed, but could infect others.
In simple words, laboratory tests must be done to identify the virus, which clearly, the Nepal government has not been doing like it should have been doing. Perhaps the government is scared that if they truly begin testing people with symptoms and anyone who has come in contact with them, healthcare institutions will run out of capacity to conduct tests, once community transmission begins. And again, maybe the tests are not being conducted in as many people because the authorities do not have adequate testing kits. These are difficult times, and the last thing the government should be doing is jeopardising the lives of the citizens to mask its own incompetencies.
The National Public Health Laboratory, which operates under the Department of Health Services, has been providing numbers every day showing how many tests have been conducted. By Saturday, it had conducted 572 tests, of which only the one original case in January had tested positive. But as per Rajesh Kumar Gupta, spokesperson for the National Public Health Laboratory, the 572 tests do not suggest that 572 separate individuals were tested. Nasal and throat swabs from the 175 Nepalis evacuated from Hubei Province, the place of the Covid-19 outbreak, were tested twice—first when they arrived and again before they were released from quarantine. Also, tests were conducted twice on 20-odd crew members of the Nepal Airlines plane who were involved in the evacuation of Nepali students.
The government’s hesitation in adopting mass testing for the coronavirus has been self-defeating, to say the least. Granted, the government alone might not be able to handle it. But there is no dearth of private laboratories in the country. The government must immediately involve the private sector substantially to deal with the spread of the infectious virus. This is the biggest emergency in our living memory, and the government cannot be complacent any more. Testing, self-isolating and then stopping the chain of transmission. These are the three basic steps to be followed. The government must spring to action by taking the private sector in tandem if it is serious about saving the lives of the citizens.
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