It has been almost three weeks since the government enforced a nationwide lockdown to stop the spread of Covid-19. Transport services have come to a grinding halt and local units in various districts have strictly banned the movement of people from one village to another.

But despite these stringent measures, people are still travelling from one place to another in Parbat and Baglung.
On Thursday, residents of Phalebas Municipality in Parbat found a man walking into the town from outside and sent him to a quarantine facility. 

“We have kept all new entrants to the municipality in quarantine,” said Mayor Padampani Sharma. 

According to him, six people who recently came to the town have also been quarantined in Limithana. 

“We suspect that around a dozen people might have entered the municipality from outside in the past week.”

People from outside the town have also been going into Kushma, the district headquarters of Parbat. 

Kushma Municipality has urged the local residents to report strangers to the authorities. 

“We should not just rely on security agencies. We have to track every person entering the town during the lockdown,” said Mayor Ramchandra Joshi.

The local administration says it has beefed up security in the district to implement the lockdown effectively. 

“We have deployed security personnel to check people’s movement. Locals should also cooperate with us to stop the entry of new people in the area,” said Deputy Superintendent Shyamu Aryal.

In Baglung, three local youths arrived in Galkot amid the lockdown on March 28. They said they walked all the way from Gorakhpur in India. 

“They had come all the way from India on foot. We had intercepted them on the way and kept in quarantine,” said Mayor Bharat Sharma. 

He said they would send them home after testing them for Covid-19.

Similarly, Bareng Rural Municipality has released four persons from quarantine after they tested negative for Covid-19. They had recently returned from India.

“We had kept them in quarantine for two weeks. They were released after the results were negative,” said Krishna Prasad Paudel, the chairman of the rural municipality. They had entered Nepal through the Gaurifanta border point in Dhangadhi, Kailali.

According to Suraj Gurau, chief at the District Health Office in Baglung, 646 people from India and 177 from other countries entered the district in the past month.