Is Nepal Manipulating Corona Stats?

                               

23rd January, 2020 first Corona case was confirmed in Nepal. He was a 31 years old student returned from Wuhan, China on 9th of January 2020. It took 4 and a half month to cross 100 cases of corona in Nepal. The country was abiding complete lockdown from 24th of March, 2020. The stats started to grow at a slow rate but started peaking and set new records everyday out of which 740 positive cases was the highest single day corona case recorded on 3rd July, 2020. By this time every other country was suffering badly in terms of positive cases. More testing means more cases which is good in a sense that the virus can be detected in people in early phase and others can be alerted so that it doesn’t spread further. Every other country was following the lockdown strictly but since every coin has two sides, escaping from virus by staying home decrease the resources for surviving and financial crisis hits really hard. Economy of country stopped, stock market was closed, earning sources of labor class was totally in disaster since in the name of aid, what Nepal government was providing is 1 kg rice for a family of 4 people. 

Corruption is still more deadly here than the virus itself. As soon as WHO released their statement that the virus might live up to 2 years among us and we can’t do anything until a vaccine is developed to cure the corona positive patients, Nepal had already started to plan on how to bring back people out of their houses and run the economy again. A country can’t be put on a lockdown for 2 years; people will die out of hunger. But, getting people out from home will make them more susceptible to virus attack. Government decided to choose other option   and announced a time limit to pay the taxes remained for 3 months. Government also decided to open the lockdown partially, and started to show less-tests and less corona positive cases. The strategy here was to make people believe that the cases are decreasing in Nepal and it is safer than before to get out home and start working as usual with proper safety and sanitization. 

The government chose to sacrifice lives of their own people for the shake of economy. It’s 19th of July 2020 when I am writing this blog and the cases are continuously decreasing to make us believe that we can come out of home. There are two possibilities in this theory, either the cases are really decreasing because of lesser tests and lesser actual corona patients, or the cases are being manipulated intentionally just to run the economy until ‘Dashain’ and just when the festival will be about to start, the Government will start showing more cases and again apply a complete lockdown for the second time. 

Yes, I know it is difficult to stay home for everyone since the expenses doesn’t stop like the earning does and sooner or later people run out of resources. Bank interests, house rent, financial distress and many other problems arises but, non-of-these are more important than a human life. It’s a situation where we cannot be in a win-win situation but, at least the Government should have made a strategy that gives least threat to citizen lives. Whatever I have written in the blog is just a possible theory that I think might be real.  No offence to anybody. Please try to stay home as much as possible and go out of your house only with proper safety and sanitization by maintain social distancing at every place. We will get out of this pandemic soon. Peace out!