Authorities don’t know yet whether the new variant of coronavirus has entered the country

The government is yet to set up facilities for genome sequencing while it has refused to seek support from the private sector, thereby putting more people at risk, experts say.

When in the third week of January last year, a man who had returned from Wuhan, China, was suspected to have been infected with the coronavirus, Nepali authorities sent swab samples collected from him to Hong Kong.