With the novel coronavirus spread across all six continents, including neighbouring India, the Gandaki Provincial Government has readied isolation wards in various hospitals around Pokhara to tackle the spread of the disease, Binod Bindu Sharma, director of the Provincial Health Directive, announced Tuesday.

The directive is currently searching for a space to build a quarantine facility, Sharma said.

“We are assessing whether the empty schools and public buildings in Lekhnath Municipality would come handy in building a quarantine facility,” Sharma said.

But despite these preparations, the directive is still ill-equipped when it comes to specifying the doctors on how to treat the infected.

“In coordination with the Ministry of Social Development and District Administration Office, we are discussing ways to equip the doctors who might have to deal with infected patients,” he said.

Meanwhile, the directive has set up help desks at the airports in Pokhara and Mustang, where health workers are examining incoming passengers. The directive has also deployed officials in the Myadi Hydropower Project in Lamjung, where dozens of Chinese nationals who recently returned from the country are currently working. Covid-19, which first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan in the tail-end of 2019, has spread to over 70 countries around the world, killing over 3,100 people and infecting nearly 100,000.

In the east, the Dhankuta-based regional health directive is preparing to designate isolation wards in hospitals around the region.

“We have already corresponded with the federal Ministry of Health to equip us with special gears, gloves and masks, and are currently providing orientation classes to health workers,” Chandradev Mehta, director of the regional health directive, told the Post.

Bikash Sah, assistant director at the BP Koirala Institute of Health Sciences, said the hospital has set up a 10-bed quarantine facility. “We have constantly been inspecting patients in the hospital for coronavirus and have plans to send patients suspected of having the disease to the capital for further test,” he said. “So far, no such cases have been detected.”

(Pradeep Menyangbo contributed reporting.)