ISLAMABAD: As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to grip Nepal, Pakistan’s ambassador in the country and his spouse and over a dozen members of the diplomatic staff have contracted the virus, informed sources told Dawn on Monday.

A source at Pakistan’s embassy in Kathmandu said that at least one of the embassy’s staffers was in the intensive care unit (ICU) of a hospital in Kathmandu.

Foreign Office spokesman Zahid Hafeez was not available to comment on the issue despite repeated attempts over the phone by Dawn, but another Foreign Office official said that only four officials of Pakistan’s embassy in Nepal had contracted coronavirus, one of whom had already recovered. He said the rest of the virus-infected staff would be provided the best medical care and treatment.

One employee is under treatment in ICU of a Kathmandu hospital

Until late May, Nepal was an outlier in South Asia and for its low number and slow rise of confirmed Covid-19 cases. The country went into relatively strict lockdown on March 24 and cases remained under 1,000 until May 28. However, the cases increased manifold since then as tens of thousands of migrant workers began returning home from India, after New Delhi eased internal travel restrictions on June 1 and Nepal began a phased reopening on June 15.

The cases started increasing after the Nepal government officially ended the nearly four-month-long lockdown on July 22, allowing most of the economic activities to resume.

Published in Dawn, October 6th, 2020