By Deepak Gyawali

Butwal, June 23: Kapilvastu was relatively calm till the end of April. COVID-19 still didn’t seem like an immediate threat and the people and authorities had things under control. But all that changed from May 4.
Suddenly, hordes of people started arriving from India, stretching the district’s management capabilities. The number reached 703 in no time and before anybody could realise anything, the district had become a hotspot for the coronavirus.
But things are beginning to turn around. More than half of Kapilvastu’s corona patients i.e. 483 individuals have recovered and returned home. Many others are also in the process of recovering and will be discharged from hospitals soon. The signs are so encouraging that Chief District Officer (CDO) Dirgha Narayan Poudel felt confident enough to say, “We are winning the fight against COVID-19 at a rapid pace.”
The weapons that helped this district defeat the menace of SARS-CoV-2 are effective preparations for quarantine and isolation, rapid testing and attention to the care of infected people. According to CDO Poudel, quarantine facilities had been set up at all the local levels even before a single case had been seen in the district. The first few cases were immediately sent off to the COVID-19 special hospitals that had been established in Butwal and Dang. Later on, the cases started to be carefully treated in the isolation wards set up at the local levels.
Janu Pandey, a Kapilvastu journalist who returned home after beating the virus, had nothing but good words to describe his experience in isolation. “We were given good immunity-building food and the environment was very disciplined,” he described.
Indeed, the situation in Kapilvastu looked bad at one point, but there is one place that had it much worse, and that is Narainapur in Banke. The situation there appeared almost chaotic, 118 people seemingly got infected out
of nowhere, one person even died and the place’s apparent inability to cope with the crisis made news for many days.
So it is almost unbelievable that in a short span of just one month, this hotspot has become completely COVID-free. Banke CDO Ram Bahadur Kumbang credited the high morale of the people and quick action by all relevant parties for Narainapur’s success against the contagious disease. “Immediately sealing off the area, mobilising the army for conducting polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, effective contact tracing and proper treatment of patients all contributed to bringing the number of cases down to
zero,” he said.
The success of Narainapur is also spreading to other parts of Banke. According to State 5’s Ministry of Social Development, 195 cases have recovered out of the district’s total of 342. Encouragingly, a corona-infected woman in the district was also able to give birth to a healthy baby with medical intervention.
In fact, the whole of State 5 has achieved heartening success against the virus considering its 400 kilometres of open border with India and the high infection rate, as per Minister for Social Development Sudarshan Baral. The State has a 40 per cent recovery rate.
“Heightened vigilance, rapid and comprehensive testing, bravery of the health workers, confidence of the patients, public’s respect of the lockdown and border management are helping win over the illness,”
he said.
He acknowledged that the State had faced a lack of testing kits and a problem of people sneaking into the country from across the border. “But it has been solved now,” he said. “We quickly managed the kits and enforced the policy of operating only one border point per district.”